The Center for Countering Digital Hate [CCDH] is a censorship advocacy group that operates out of Washington, DC, and London. Historically, they have advocated for the censorship of criticism of Islam on social media. More recently, the CCDH has heavily focused on advocating for the censorship of criticism of Covid-19 vaccines.
In 2020, the CCDH was widely credited with compelling Twitter to ban political commentator Katie Hopkins. Despite a public pledge by Elon Musk to “amnesty” all non-violent banned accounts, she remains banned on the platform.
Imran Ahmed runs the CCDH.
Twitter, now known as X Corp, has just filed a lawsuit against the CCDH in the Northern District of California. The suit covers both the US and UK entities.
The lawsuit says that the CCDH is trying to silence public debate by causing economic harm to X Corp with “faulty narratives” sent to advertisers.
15. CCDH has a history of advocating for censorship on the internet. One of CCDH’s tactics in this regard is to prepare and publish what it refers to as “research” reports and articles. Those reports and articles openly target organizations and individuals — including publishers, current and former politicians, and political commentators — who express viewpoints via social media platforms that differ from CCDH’s own views on widely debated topics, including COVID-19 vaccinations, reproductive healthcare, and climate change. CCDH makes these materials publicly available and free.
16. CCDH prepares its “research” reports and articles using flawed methodologies to advance incorrect, misleading narratives. CCDH’s methodologies use, for example, inappropriately small and cherry-picked, non-randomized data samples that focus on only the social media accounts of organizations and people expressing viewpoints contrary to CCDH’s own views. They also use rudimentary tactics like labeling as “hate speech” content that merely does not conform to CCDH’s ideological views, and counting the number of mentions of selectively chosen keywords on a platform while ignoring the context in which those words were mentioned. CCDH’s reports and articles do not include meaningful discussion or analysis of the billions of posts that comport with CCDH’s viewpoints. As such, they fail to include context that shows the true breadth and totality of viewpoints that participate in open discussion on social media platforms regarding topics covered in CCDH’s reports and articles. And in measuring the reach of certain content, CCDH’s reports and articles ignore an industry-standard metric referred to as “impressions,” which reflects the total number of times a piece of content has been seen, and represents the total exposure it has received. CCDH’s methodologies thus would assign the same weight to a post viewed by only one user as to a post seen by hundreds of millions of users.
