Elon Musk’s social media parent company, X finds itself battling against a nonprofit organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), who it sued in August. On Thursday, the CCDH retaliated by challenging the lawsuit in an attempt to quash it. The lawsuit accuses CCDH of publishing detrimental reports about X Corp’s response to alleged hateful content on the platform.
These drives from CCDH have allegedly resulted in the alienation of X Corp’s advertising partners, the lawsuit alleges.
X maintains that the CCDH breached the platform’s terms and federal hacking laws through the collection and publication of data from the platform, as well as claiming that the CCDH pushed someone to gather information inappropriately about the platform from a brand monitoring provider. X contends that pressure from the organization caused advertisers to stop advertising on the platform.
According to CCDH’s counter legal action submitted on Thursday to the California Northern District Court, the claims put forth by X are flawed and unjustly aim to impede on the nonprofit’s right to free speech, protected by the First Amendment.
We obtained a copy of the filing for you here.
“At its core, X Corp.’s grievance is not that the CCDH Defendants gathered public data in violation of obscure (and largely imagined) contract terms, but that they criticized X Corp. (forcefully) to the public,” the filing states.
Critical reports about the management of allegedly hate-filled speech on the platform under Musk’s leadership were released by the CCDH and other online safety groups following his purchase of the platform a year ago.
For the decline in its advertising profits, Musk has blamed the CCDH and similar watchdog groups. In light of new brand protection measures, Musk also publicly criticized the Anti-Defamation League for the company’s ad revenue remaining down by 60% and claimed that X had lost tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue due to CCDH.
