Elon Musk, owner of the company formerly called Twitter and an avowed crusader for free speech, this week followed through on a threat and sued a nonprofit over its statements criticizing his firm, now called X.
The lawsuit targets allegations by the Center for Countering Digital Hate that hate speech spiked at X in the week after Musk bought it in October, with users tweeting tens of thousands of anti-Black, anti-trans, anti-gay and antisemitic slurs, increases of 23% to 300% over 2022 averages. The lawsuit accused the nonprofit of “a scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the X platform.”
The nonprofit used “flawed methodology” by focusing only on the number of tweets and retweets of the slurs and not on how many times they were viewed, X’s lawsuit filed late Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco alleged.
During the week after Musk’s takeover, he claimed in a tweet, “we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press.” Shortly after that first week ended, the company’s head of trust and safety Yoel Roth claimed in a tweet that X had “mitigated the recent surge in harmful behavior” and cut the views of such content by around 95%. Roth’s tweet included a chart showing a purported sharp decline in views of slur-containing tweets within a few days of Musk buying the firm.
The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit claimed the statements from Musk and Roth did not match the data.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate is not the only entity to identify purported increases in hate speech at X after Musk took over. The day after Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of the company on October 27, the Associated Press reported that “dozens of extremist profiles — some newly created — circulated racial slurs and Nazi imagery while expressing gratitude to Musk for his new leadership.”
In April, researchers from the University of Southern California, UCLA and other universities published a paper that concluded, based on tweets from around a month before Musk bought the company to a month after, that “hateful users employed more hate speech following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter,” and, “the overall presence of hateful tweets increased.” The paper warned that hate speech could lead to “offline victimization of targeted groups.”
The USC business school recently published a “Social Media Index” based on survey results, which showed that between March 2 and May 7, Twitter led all U.S.-based social media in adult users who saw content “bad for the world.”
Musk has touted X as a haven for free speech, and referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist.” Under his ownership, the social media site has relaxed moderation standards and drawn fire over a number of controversies including reinstating an account last week that had posted images of sexual abuse of a child, and over the past weekend reinstating the account of Kanye West, who was banned in December for tweeting a Nazi swastika inside a Jewish Star of David. The platform has also reinstated far-right influencer Andrew Tate — awaiting trial in Romania on charges that he denies of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women — and Andrew Anglin, neo-Nazi founder of the Daily Stormer website.
Advertisers have fled the platform, with Musk saying in March that ad revenue had dropped 50%. In May, Fidelity Investments marked down its stake in the company, valuing X at a third of what Musk paid for it.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate followed up on the November report with several more. In June, the nonprofit claimed that Twitter failed to act on tweets from subscribers — whose tweets are prioritized for viewing, according to Musk — that contained racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi and antisemitic content. “Our society has benefited from decades of progress on tolerance, but Elon Musk is undoing those norms at an ever-accelerating rate … with the tacit approval of the advertisers who remain on his platform,” the nonprofit claimed. In March, the group alleged that since Musk took over, tweets and retweets linking the LGBTQ+ community to pedophilia jumped 119%.
Last month, a lawyer for X in a letter to the nonprofit attacked its allegations about subscribers’ tweets as “little more than a series of inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims based on a cursory review of random tweets.” The attorney, Alex Spiro, accused the group of trying “to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away” and said his office was looking into a possible lawsuit.
Lawyers for the nonprofit responded in a letter to Spiro calling his missive “a disturbing effort to intimidate those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech and harmful content online.”
The lawsuit by X claimed that the Center for Countering Digital Hate engaged in “underhanded” and illegal conduct by scraping data from the X platform and persuading “an unknown third party” to share login credentials to a secured database. The nonprofit “selectively quoted data it obtained via those methods,” the lawsuit alleged, “to make it appear as if X is overwhelmed by harmful content, and then used that contrived narrative to call for companies to stop advertising on X.”
The Center for Countering Digital Hate on Tuesday called the lawsuit “straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” and said Musk was “showing he will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions.”