In a searing ruling Monday, a federal judge called Elon Musk’s bluff and dismissed a lawsuit brought by his social media company X Corp. against an anti-hate speech nonprofit, arguing that it it was actually about punishing the organization for its work and revenue. X lost when advertisers abandoned the platform.
The judge overseeing the case, Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, struck down the lawsuit filed against the Center for Countering Digital Hate under California’s anti-SLAPP provision, which seeks to protect against frivolous and costly lawsuits. It also barred the company from amending its lawsuit.
“Sometimes it is not clear what lies at the basis of a dispute and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to hypothesize the complainant’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so blatant and loud about one thing that there is no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech,” Breyer wrote in Monday’s dismissal.
In a declaration posted on its official X account, the company said it “does not agree with the court’s decision and intends to appeal.”
X, the company previously known as Twitter owned by the self -entified “Absoluteist of freedom of speech” Musk, fought a cause last summer claiming that the center to counter digital hatred had cost her “tens of millions of dollars in missed revenues”. The company said advertisers have been discouraged and kept away by several reports the CCDH has published in recent years regarding hate speech, vaccine misinformation and the return of banned users such as neo-Nazis and white supremacists to the platform.
X’s lawyers said these reports used “flawed methodologies” and cherry-picked data that X then labeled “hate speech” if they didn’t conform to his own views. However, Justice Breyer noted that, despite his claims to the contrary, X was careful not to attack the veracity of CCDH’s claims in the lawsuit and did not file a defamation claim.
Instead, X attacked the nonprofit for its data collection methods, which included scraping, which journalists and researchers commonly use to extract data from a website. X also sued the nonprofit for “breach of contract.”
Rather than condemn the contents of the CCDH reports, which Breyer said are at the heart of the case, he asked for millions of dollars in damages taking an easier route to getting the best of both worlds, he wrote.
“It is clear to the Court that
If the lawsuit was truly about data collection, X would likely pursue it even if the CCDH discarded the collected data, CCDH lawyers said. Breyer agrees with the CCDH that this is probably not the case.
“It is impossible to read the complaint and not conclude that X Corp. is far more concerned about CCDH’s speech than its data collection methods,” Breyer wrote in Monday’s dismissal.
Breyer added that’s evident from Musk tweet and other lawsuits that X has filed (including a similar lawsuit against Media Matters in November) that allege the social media company aims to attack those who criticize it and silence others.
“X Corp. brought this case to punish CCDH for CCDH publications criticizing X Corp. and perhaps to dissuade others who may wish to engage in such criticism,” he wrote.