A lawyer for the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has told a US court that a lawsuit filed by X against the group is an attempt to punish it for its speech.
The case is X’s attempt to revive its July 2023 lawsuit that was dismissed in March 2024 by a lower instance court. X accuses CCDH of breaking its terms of service by scraping public posts and publishing reports based on this data, which X says cost it millions of dollars in lost ad revenue as brands were pressured to abandon the platform.
CCDH’s reports are based on what it considers to be “harmful content” and “disinformation” on social media platforms. It then uses this data to pressure those platforms to deplatform the speakers, and in addition, the group works to defund these platforms by getting advertisers to pull their ads.
CCDH’s model, in other words, is to get people punished for their speech, and yet its lawyer Dennis Brandon Trice is now playing the free speech card to protect CCDH from being punished for its own speech.
Trice told the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that the case should be dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP law, which is designed to protect against meritless lawsuits that are aimed at silencing speech.
“As Judge Breyer recognized below, this case is about punishing defendants for their speech,” Trice said.
CCDH’s activities are a textbook example of third party censorship, and the group’s own internal documents show that “killing Musk’s Twitter” was a priority, while CCDH was also behind the “Disinformation Dozen” report, used by social media sites to ban users.
One of the judges, Eric Miller, asked X’s lawyer Peter Patterson to explain why the case was not simply a matter of people reacting to speech (CCDH’s reports) and deciding not to do business with X.
“The issue is not whether third parties reacted to speech; it’s whether we’re talking about specific economic harms versus reputational damages,” said Patterson.
Patterson also said that CCDH had “conspired” with a Dutch non-profit to get into X’s non-public data. “We say these companies conspired together. So ECF conspired with a U.S. company, CCDH U.S., to target an American company’s data in the United States … to harm that American company in the United States,” he said.
The judges, however, seemed unconvinced by the argument, with Judge Miller saying that the claim of economic harm seemed “very attenuated,” while Judge Andrew Hurwitz remarked that all the data CCDH had access to was available to anyone who logged on to X.
Trice, CCDH’s lawyer, also suggested that the court should not allow X to amend its complaint, accusing X owner Elon Musk of using amendments to shut down his adversaries.
However, Judge Miller replied, “Even rich plaintiffs are entitled to liberal amendment, aren’t they?”
It is more than a little rich for CCDH to be hiding behind the free speech banner when it is itself a leading proponent and enabler of censorship, and when the lawsuit is in fact aimed at it. But CCDH is not the first and will not be the last group of its kind to try to use laws designed to protect free speech for their own, decidedly anti-free speech purposes.
