A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's social media platform X against a digital hate speech watchdog, saying the suit constituted an attempt to stifle its free speech rights. File Photo by Ismael Mohamad/ UPI |
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March 25 (UPI) -- A federal judge in California on Monday dismissed a complaint filed by Elon Musk, owner of the X social media platform, against a nonprofit group dedicated to tracking hate speech on site.
The tech billionaire filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate in July, alleging it engaged in "a scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the X platform" after revealing the company had failed to act on 99% of hateful content on the site since Musk took control of the former Twitter in October 2022.
But in a ruling issued in the Northern District of California, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer agreed with the CCDH and tossed out Musk's suit as a violation of the state's law banning "SLAPPs," or "strategic lawsuits against public participation," defined as meritless lawsuits arising from exercising the rights of petition and free speech.
"Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff's true purpose," Breyer wrote in his 52-page ruling.
"Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech," he asserted.
The nonprofit's reports were not in fact false or defamatory, the judge said, noting that X declined to bring a defamation suit against the group as it could have had the reports contained untrue information.
X said in a post it "disagrees with the court's decision and plans to appeal."
Musk's company has drawn controversy for filing suits against CCDH and Media Matters, another online watchdog dedicated to publicly tracking hate speech, misinformation and other harmful online content, which in November published a report alleging that Nazi posts had run on X next to ads from Apple, Disney, IBM, and other corporate giants.
They responded by yanking their advertising dollars.
In his ruling Monday, Breyer found that CCDH had met its burden in showing the suit was a meritless attempt to stifle its free speech rights under the anti-SLAPP statute and that X "has not established that there is a probability that it will prevail on those claims."
If CCDH's publications were defamatory, "that would be one thing, but X Corp. has carefully avoided saying that they are," the judge found.
The nonprofit "has won dismissal on all counts against [Musk's] outrageous and hypocritical SLAPP suit to silence our research," CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed said in a statement. "This ruling sends a strong message to those who aim at intimidating and silencing independent research."
The group said the suit was brought "in order to punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp. -- and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism."
