A UK-founded anti-hate speech campaign group dragged into the Labour US election interference row has vowed to carry on 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 that it was violating laws against foreign interference in US elections.
CCDH’s founder and CEO, Imran Ahmed, said: “Our work is centred on stopping the spread of hate and disinformation. We are not going to stop working. We are tirelessly going to continue to work towards that mission through our advocacy and our research.”
The basis of Musk’s claims was a report claiming strong links between CCDH, the Labour Together thinktank – once led by Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney – and the Labour party.
Musk published 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 Labour party this week accusing it of interfering in the election by sending members to campaign for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Starmer said party officials volunteering to help the Harris campaign before the US presidential election on 5 November were “doing it in their spare time”.
The complaint also refers to McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street’s director of communications, attending the Democratic convention in Chicago and meeting the Harris campaign team.
Referring to a previous lawsuit brought by X against CCDH, which a judge dismissed as an attempt to punish the organisation for exercising its right to free speech, Ahmed said: “Elon Musk has a pattern of attacking non-profit, non-partisan organisations that point out hate speech and disinformation running rampant on his platform. He did it to CCDH. This is not the first time we’ve been targeted by Elon Musk – he tried to intimidate us through a baseless lawsuit that was quickly thrown out of court.”
Ahmed, a former Labour party aide, now runs CCDH from Washington. He acknowledged that McSweeney helped him found CCDH by providing a shell company to house the organisation – making McSweeney a founding director – and they remain friends.
However, Ahmed said McSweeney had no operational role at CCDH and that its board members include the former Conservative MP Damian Collins.
“Morgan McSweeney will always be a really dear friend of mine. But then again so is Damian Collins,” said Ahmed, adding that he had worked closely with successive Conservative governments on the UK’s online safety act.
Musk’s latest salvo against CCDH followed the publication of a report into the organisation from the Disinformation Chronicle newsletter, which published excerpts from what it claims to be internal documents at CCDH showing that “Kill Musk’s Twitter” has been declared a strategic priority at the organisation.
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Ahmed said he would not comment “directly on proprietary information” but said the phrase had been used as “shorthand” for tackling X’s business model under Musk, who rebranded the platform from Twitter last year.
“We have used internally the concept of ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ as shorthand for taking on 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 that we’ve done since then shows that’s precisely our strategy.”
He added: “One of the challenges of dealing with conspiracy theorists is that the battlefield is asymmetric. I operate in the world of facts, demonstrable truth. He operates in the realm of fantasy, the latest conspiracy theories.”
Ahmed worked for Labour as an aide to Angela Eagle MP, the current immigration minister, who was then a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Eagle quit 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 CCDH in 2018 to combat leftwing antisemitism and in response to the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by Thomas Mair, a far-right extremist .
X has been approached for comment.