Businessman Elon Musk has threatened to sue a group whose reports were often cited by the Biden administration as government officials pressured Big Tech companies to crack down on users over alleged disinformation.
The group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), has made “troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter,” Alex Spiro, one of Mr. Musk’s lawyers, said in a warning letter to the center dated July 20 and made public on July 31.
After Mr. Musk bought Twitter, now known as X, the London-based center has repeatedly criticized moves he’s made, including restoring accounts that had been banned and loosening moderation.
“By reinstating misogynists, racists, and violence-inciters … Twitter is enabling a wave of hatred to spread on the platform – especially towards minoritized communities,” it said in one statement.
In a recent article, the center claimed that Twitter had failed to act on 99 percent of verified accounts that were posting “hate.” But the claim was based on reporting a single post from 100 verified users and tracking whether those posts had been removed or otherwise subject to moderation four days later.
“CCDH’s claims in this article are false, misleading, or both, and they are not supported by anything that could credibly be called research,” Mr. Spiro said. “The article provides no methodology for its selection or testing of tweets, no baseline for Twitter’s enforcement time frame, and no explanation as to why the 100 chosen tweets represent an appropriate sample of the nearly 500 million tweets sent per day from which to generalize about the platform’s content moderation practices.”
The article “leaves no doubt that CCDH intends to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims,” Mr. Spiro added, noting that CCDH said that advertisers were giving their “tacit approval” for Mr. Musk “allowing hate to prosper” on Twitter.
He said Mr. Musk’s lawyers are investigating whether to sue over the “false and misleading claims” under the Lanham Act, which prohibits false and misleading descriptions of businesses and people’s business activities.
By Zachary Stieber
