UNITED KINGDOM – The Guardian reports this past week on a UK-founded anti-hate speech campaign group being “dragged” into the “Labour US election” interference row allegations, after Elon Musk has declared “war” against The Center for Countering Digital Hate.
According to the article, Musk alleges the organization has violated laws against foreign interference in US elections.
Founder and CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed responds in the Guardian, “Our work is centered on stopping the spread of hate and disinformation. We are not going to stop working. We are tirelessly going to continue to work towards that mission through our advocacy and our research.”
The Guardian said Musk’s claims derive from perceived ties between CCDH, the Labour Together think tank, which was previously led by Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and the Labour Party.
Posts on X by Musk saying CCDH, which fights against online hate speech, is a “criminal organization,” and he would be “going after” all of their donors, partnered with failed attempts to sue the organization.
As reported in the article, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign filed a complaint against the Labour Party this week, accusing it of interfering in the election by sending members to campaign for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.
Starmer said party officials volunteering to help the Harris campaign before the US presidential election were “doing it in their spare time.” Accusations also apply to McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street’s director of communications, after their presence at the DNC in Chicago and meeting the Harris team.
In the Guardian, Ahmed refers to a previous lawsuit brought by X against CCDH, dismissed by a judge, after another attempt by Musk to restrict the organization’s free speech.
Ahmed, also a former Labour Party aide, said, “Elon Musk has a pattern of attacking non-profit, non-partisan organizations that point out hate speech and disinformation running rampant on his platform. He did it to CCDH. This is not the first time we’ve been targeted by Elon Musk – he tried to intimidate us through a baseless lawsuit that was quickly thrown out of court.”
As detailed in the Guardian article, Ahmed runs CCDH from Washington and has acknowledged McSweeney helped him found the organization and is the founding director, providing “a shell company to house the organization.” Ahmed clarifies that McSweeney has no operational role.
According to the Guardian, Musk’s latest stunt against the CCDH included a recent report into the organization from the Disinformation Chronicle newsletter, publishing the CCDH’s main goal and strategy is to “kill Musk’s Twitter.”
Ahmed responds, “We have used internally the concept of ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ as shorthand for taking on the business model that Musk brought to Twitter when he turned it into X, which says that social media companies should be able to spread hate without accountability, responsibility or transparency. Everything that we’ve done since then shows that’s precisely our strategy.”
He added: “One of the challenges of dealing with conspiracy theorists is that the battlefield is asymmetric. I operate in the world of facts, demonstrable truth. He operates in the realm of fantasy, the latest conspiracy theories.”
