A British-founded anti-hate speech campaign group drawn into the US Labor election campaign has vowed to continue its work following Elon Musk’s latest “declaration of war” against the organisation.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate hit back at the world’s richest person this week after Musk alleged it violated laws against foreign interference in US elections.
CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed said: “Our work is centered on stopping the spread of hate and disinformation. We will not stop working. We will tirelessly continue to work towards that mission through our advocacy and our research.”
The basis for Musk’s claims was a report which claimed strong links between the CCDH, the Labor Together think tank – once led by Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney – and the Labor Party.
Musk posted a link to the report on X, the social media platform he owns, and described CCDH, which campaigns against online hate speech, as a “criminal organization,” adding that he was “going after” CCDH and its donors. Musk has already failed this year with an attempt to sue CCDH.
In another post, he added: “This is war.”
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign filed a complaint against the Labor Party this week, accusing it of meddling in the election by sending members to campaign for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Starmer said party officials who volunteered to help the Harris campaign ahead of the November 5 US presidential election were “doing it in their spare time”.
The complaint also notes that McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street’s communications director, attended the Democratic convention in Chicago and met with Harris’ campaign team.
Referring to a previous lawsuit filed by X against CCDH, which a judge dismissed as an attempt to punish the organization for exercising its right to free speech, Ahmed said: “Elon Musk has a pattern of attacking non-profit, non-partisan organizations pointing out hate speech and misinformation running rampant on his platform. This isn’t the first time we’ve been hit by Elon Musk – he tried to scare us through a baseless lawsuit that was quickly thrown out. out of court.”
Ahmed, a former Labor Party aide, now heads the CCDH from Washington. He acknowledged that McSweeney helped him found CCDH by providing a shell company to house the organization – making McSweeney a founding director – and they remain friends.
However, Ahmed said McSweeney had no operational role in CCDH and its board members include former Conservative MP Damian Collins.
“Morgan McSweeney will always be a really dear friend of mine. But it’s Damian Collins again,” Ahmed said, adding that he had worked closely with successive Conservative governments on Britain’s online safety law.
Musk’s latest salvo against CCDH followed the publication of a report into the organization by the Disinformation Chronicle newsletter, which published excerpts from what it claims are internal CCDH documents showing that “Kill Musk’s Twitter” has been declared a strategic priority in the organization.
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Ahmed said he would not comment “directly on proprietary information” but said the phrase had been used as “shorthand” to address X’s business model under Musk, who rebranded the platform from Twitter last year.
“We have internally used the concept of ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ as shorthand to take 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 , what we have done since then shows that this is precisely our strategy.”
He added: “One of the challenges of dealing with conspiracy theorists is that the battlefield is asymmetrical. I operate in the world of facts, demonstrable truth. He operates in the realm of fantasy, the latest conspiracy theories.”
Ahmed worked for Labor as an aide to Angela Eagle MP, the current immigration minister, who was then a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Eagle left the shadow cabinet after the Brexit vote and challenged Corbyn for the leadership, a campaign run by Ahmed, but the campaign was unsuccessful.
Ahmed launched the CCDH in 2018 to combat left-wing anti-Semitism and in response to the murder of Labor MP Jo Cox by Thomas Mair, a far-right extremist.
X has been contacted for comment.