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(LifeSiteNews) – U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer dismissed Monday a lawsuit by Twitter/X owner Elon Musk against the far-left Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), accusing Musk of attempting to “punish” the self-styled “hate watchdog” for its protected speech against the platform, which the company denies.
Last year, Musk filed a lawsuit against the organization following its campaign to brand X, which Musk purchased in 2022 with the express purpose of making it more open and politically-neutral, as a “toxic” platform where “hate” is insufficiently suppressed. Musk accused the CCDH of “actively working to prevent free expression” and perpetuating “troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally, and its digital advertising business specifically.”
Specifically, the suit contends that CCDH committed a “series of unlawful acts designed to improperly gain access to protected X Corp. data,” including login credentials, in order to pressure advertisers into leaving the platform via a “scare campaign” comprised of “false” and/or “misleading” claims derived from cherry-picking “from the hundreds of millions of posts made each day on X” to “falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content.”
On Monday, however, Judge Breyer granted CCDH’s motion to dismiss the case, opening his ruling with a declaration that while “[s]ometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose,” in “[o]ther times” a “complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.”
Breyer, who previously slammed aspects of Musk’s argument as “vapid” in hearings and questioned why his attorneys did not file a simple defamation claim, rejected the notion that the suit was strictly about data collection, adding that it was “impossible to read the complaint and not conclude that X Corp. is far more concerned about CCDH’s speech than it is its data collection methods.”
If the ruling stands, Musk will be obligated to pay CCDH’s legal fees under California law. But the company says it “disagrees” with the decision and intends to appeal it.
Today a federal court in San Francisco issued a decision in the case X brought against the Center for Countering Digital Hate for illegally obtaining platform data to create misleading research. X disagrees with the court's decision and plans to appeal.
— News (@XNews) March 25, 2024
Musk has previously called the CCDH, which has also attacked COVID-19 vaccine critics and pro-life pregnancy centers, an “evil organization.”
Wow, this is interesting. CCDH is a truly evil organization that just wants to destroy the first amendment under the guise of doing good!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 20, 2024
The setback comes while Musk and X are also facing a similar attack from far-left “watchdog” group Media Matters for America (MMFA), which Musk is suing as well. As recently covered by LifeSiteNews, MMFA is currently under investigation in Missouri and Texas for allegedly engaging in deceptive business practices to solicit donations and pressure advertisers to leave X.
Musk purchased Twitter (which he renamed X) in October 2022 and set to work making it more open and politically neutral. To that end, he has instituted a number of reforms to the platform and other actions that have overjoyed conservatives, such as replacing so-called fact-checkers with a far more accurate, user-driven Community Notes feature, releasing troves of information about the previous management’s censorship activities, and reinstating numerous high-profile accounts banned by the old regime.
However, there have also been some setbacks and causes for concern as to how thoroughly the platform will change, such as Musk hiring former World Economic Forum executive chair Linda Yaccarino to take over day-to-day business operations as CEO and giving lip service to the notion that “outrageous” content should be subject to reduced “freedom of reach.”
On top of his reforms to X, Musk has used his platform to personally highlight stories and information at odds with prevailing left-wing narratives, and pledged to financially support legal challenges by various individuals who were subjected to reprisals for expressing themselves online.
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