• Twitter is suing a non-profit organisation after it found the platform failed to remove content that violated its rules.
• Twitter claims that the Center for Countering Digital Hate improperly accessed its data and scrapped the platform.
• The non-profit highlighted that Twitter has criticised it for both not scrapping enough data and for scraping data altogether.

The social media platform that is at present known as both Twitter and X has decided to take legal action against a non-profit organisation whose goal is to fight hate and misinformation online.

On Monday the social platform penned a blog titled “Protecting the public’s right to free expression” in which it announced that it was suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

“Recently Brandwatch made X aware that the CCDH gained access to X’s data without Brandwatch’s authorization, and that the purported CCDH ‘research’ cited in a Bloomberg article ‘contained metrics used out of context to make unsubstantiated assertions about X (formerly Twitter).’ Additionally, the CCDH has recently scraped X’s platform, which is a violation of our terms of service,” wrote Twitter.

“That’s why X has filed a legal claim against the CCDH and its backers. X not only rejects all claims made by the CCDH, but, through our own investigation, we have identified several ways in which the CCDH is actively working to prevent free expression,” the platform added. You can read Alex Spiro’s letter to CCDH here.

So what did the CCDH research entail?

The non-profit organisation looked at 100 tweets containing racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi, antisemitic, and conspiracy content. Importantly this content violates Twitter’s own policies. All 100 of these tweets were reported, but four days later 99 were still visible on the platform.

While 100 tweets is a small sample size, the point of the research was to determine whether Twitter acts on reports of hateful content with any sort of speed. We highly recommend you read the piece published by CCDH here and decide for yourself. The non-profit includes examples and links to the content, much of which is still visible on Twitter, showcasing the very point of the report.

Twitter reportedly criticised CCDH for not assessing all 500 million tweets published per day, a fact the non-profit highlighted was hypocritical.

“While it is true that CCDH did not undertake a review of the ‘500 million tweets’ that you claim are posted on Twitter each day, CCDH never claimed to have done so. In fact, under Mr. Musk’s leadership, Twitter has taken steps to curtail research on the platform. 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,” CCDH’s legal representation wrote in a letter.

The CCDH’s legal representation also points out that rather than focusing its efforts on the problem raised by the non-profit organisation, Twitter has chosen to pursue legal action instead.

In fact, Musk exclaimed in glee that he couldn’t wait to get CCDH’s “donors under deposition” after alleging that this may be “foreign government interference”.

Twitter alleges that CCDH is violating the Lanham Act, something the organisation refutes and says Twitter will have a hard time proving.

It is curious that Musk and Twitter at large is working so hard to point to everything but its own actions as the reason for advertisers leaving rather than listening to users and the issues they encounter, blue tick or otherwise.