On Monday, X Corp. (formerly known as Twitter) took legal action in Northern California federal court against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).The company alleges that the British nonprofit unlawfully obtained data from Twitter in order to falsely allege that the platform contained an abundance of damaging content.The CCDH's June research focused on the surge of antisemitic and anti-Muslim bigotry on Twitter following Elon Musk's purchase of the company.
X, formerly known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit in federal court this Monday against the British nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). They allege that the CCDH unlawfully accessed data and used it to falsely implicate that the platform had a spike in hate speech after Elon Musk acquired the company last year. The suit focuses on research the CCDH published in June which suggested that Twitter failed to act on 99% of hate posted by users and questioned if the platform's algorithm boosts "toxic tweets". In addition, they found that Twitter failed to act on 89% of anti-Jewish hate speech and 97% of anti-Muslim hate speech on the platform.
X is also accusing the CCDH of using data that they did not legally possess and demanding a jury trial for unspecified monetary damages. Furthermore, they are blocking the CCDH and anyone related to it from accessing data from the Twitter-owned Brandwatch. This lawsuit follows a letter from X to the CCDH in July which argued that the organization was wrongfully attempting to "drive advertisers off Twitter by smearing the company and its owner".
This is not the first time that Twitter and Musk have gone the legal route. In May, the company sent a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella over the software company allegedly abusing access to Twitter data. In July, they threatened to sue Facebook parent Meta over the new Threads app and their data scraping efforts. Moreover, they recently filed a lawsuit against Israel-based Bright Data because users and data were being pulled from the platform without permission. However, data scraping in the U.S. is widely considered legal when it involves publicly accessible data, according to the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals.
Read the full complaint here:
CNBC's Lora Kolodny reported on Elon Musk's vision to transform Twitter into an "everything app".
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