An anti-hate speech campaign group founded in the UK and drawn into the row over Labor interference in the US election has vowed to continue its work after Elon Musk’s latest declaration of “war” against the organisation.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate returned to the crosshairs of the world’s richest person this week after Musk alleged he was violating laws against foreign interference in US elections.
CCDH Founder and CEO Imran Ahmed said: “Our work is focused on stopping the spread of hate and misinformation. We are not going to stop working. “We will continue to work tirelessly to achieve that mission through our advocacy and research.”
The basis for Musk’s claims was a report claiming strong links between 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 the CCDH and its donors. Musk already failed this year in his attempt to sue the CCDH.
In another post he added: “This is war.”
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign filed a complaint this week against the Labor Party, accusing it of interfering in the election by sending members to campaign for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Starmer said party officials who volunteered to help Harris’ campaign ahead of the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election were “doing it in their spare time.”
The complaint also refers to McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street communications director, attending the Democratic convention in Chicago and meeting with Harris’ campaign team.
Referring to a previous lawsuit filed by and non-partisan organizations that point out the hate speech and misinformation that proliferates on their platform. He did it to the CCDH. “This is not the first time Elon Musk has attacked us: he tried to intimidate us through a baseless lawsuit that was quickly dismissed by the courts.”
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 at CCDH and that its board members included former Conservative MP Damian Collins.
“Morgan McSweeney will always be a very dear friend of mine. But Damian Collins is too,” Ahmed said, adding that he had worked closely with successive Conservative governments on the UK’s online safety law.
Musk’s latest salvo against the CCDH came after the publication of a report on the organization by the Chronicle of Disinformation Bulletinwhich published excerpts from what it claims to be internal CCDH documents showing that “killing 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 as Twitter last year.
“We have internally used the concept of ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ as shorthand to address the business model that Musk brought to Twitter when he turned it into X, which says social media companies should be able to spread hate without accountability, without responsibility or transparency. Everything 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. “It operates in the realm of fantasy, the latest conspiracy theories.”
Ahmed worked for the Labor Party as an assistant to Angela Eagle MP, the current Immigration Minister, who was then a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Eagle resigned from the shadow cabinet after the Brexit vote and challenged Corbyn for the leadership, a campaign led by Ahmed, but the campaign was unsuccessful.
Ahmed launched CCDH in 2018 to combat left-wing antisemitism and in response to the murder of Labor MP Jo Cox by Thomas Mair, a far-right extremist.
X has been contacted for comment.