LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) – A nonprofit organization that combats hate speech and disinformation has reportedly been sued on Monday by social media network X, previously known as Twitter, on the grounds that it had made misleading claims and urged advertisers to stop spending money on the site.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) received a letter from X, owned by Elon Musk, threatening legal action for an undisclosed amount of damages, according to US media reports.
In response to that letter, the CCDH’s attorneys charged X of “intimidating those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech, and harmful content online.” They said that X’s claims lacked any substance in reality.
The complaint is a result of a media article from July that indicated research results from CCDH that showed a surge in hate speech directed towards minority populations on the platform.
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However, the article was deemed fake by X and its CEO Linda Yaccarino, who added that it was based on “a collection of incorrect, misleading, and outdated metrics, mostly from the period shortly after Twitter’s acquisition.”
In a blog post published on Monday, X claimed that the CCDH had accessed its data without its consent and that this breached the terms of service by data-scraping from its platform.
It emphasized that X was the subject of unsupported claims based on measurements taken out of context from the research.
A request for comment made outside of usual business hours received no response from the CCDH.
X has filed lawsuits in Texas and Israel against Israel’s Bright Data and four unidentified businesses for data scraping.