Pro Free Speech? Elon Musk Threatens to Sue Nonprofit for Criticizing Twitter

Despite his pro-free speech stance, Elon Musk is threatening to sue a nonprofit that says Twitter has experienced a surge in hate speech since he took over the company.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) says(Opens in a new window) it received the legal threat from Alex Spiro, a lawyer representing Musk, on July 20, days after the nonprofit published research(Opens in a new window) arguing Twitter is failing to stop hate speech on the platform.

Spiro says the CCDH’s research is baseless and could open the nonprofit to a lawsuit for promoting “false and misleading claims” against Twitter. “This article leaves no doubt that CCDH intends to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims,” Spiro writes in a letter(Opens in a new window). 

However, the CCDH is blasting Musk for trying to suppress criticism of Twitter. In its own letter(Opens in a new window) to Spiro, the nonprofit calls the legal threat “ridiculous” and a “disturbing effort to intimidate those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech and harmful content online.

“Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research in the desperate hope that he can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers,” the CCDH adds. 

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Spiro threatens to sue the nonprofit for violating the Lanham Act, a trademark law that also prohibits false advertising. However, the CCDH calls the justification for the legal threat “bogus,” since the nonprofit isn’t a commercial entity. 

“Moreover, as a nonprofit working to stop online hate, CCDH is obviously not in competition with Twitter, which makes your allegations of a Lanham Act injury even more fanciful,” the nonprofit says, later adding: “Your effort to wield that threat anyway, on a law firm’s letterhead, is a transparent attempt to silence honest criticism.” 

The legal threat comes after Bloomberg published an article that ties Twitter’s plummeting advertising revenue to a surge of harmful content that’s been allowed to proliferate on Musk’s watch, citing CCDH’s research. Indeed, you can easily search for tweets and accounts that promote the statements such as “Hitler was right,” and “jews need to be gassed,” along with other inflammatory remarks directed at all kinds of people, including “Elon Musk is a pedophile.”

In response, Twitter went all out to try and push back against the narrative, boldly claiming that over 99% of the content on the social media platform is actually “healthy.” The company also says it’s been restricting the reach of tweets that violate its policies, rather than resorting to full account bans, in an effort to preserve free speech.

In his letter, Musk’s lawyer also argues the CCDH has been engaging in incomplete and flawed research into Twitter’s efforts to stop hate speech. The CCDH’s research specifically involved looking at tweets promoting hate from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers and how the company had allegedly failed to take action on 99% of the flagged tweets. 

Spiro argues: “The article provides no methodology for its selection or testing of tweets, no baseline for Twitter’s enforcement time frame, and no explanation as to why the 100 chosen tweets represent an appropriate sample of the nearly 500 million tweets sent per day.”

But the CCDH says it never claimed its research was trying to examine all the tweets on the platform. The nonprofit also notes Musk has closed off free access to Twitter’s API to enable such research. “To criticize CCDH for being too limited in its research while simultaneously taking steps to close the platform off to independent research and analysis is the very height of hypocrisy,” the nonprofit says.