Elon Musk threatened to sue an anti-hate speech group. Its CEO is still blasting Musk’s bigotry.

Transphobic billionaire and owner of X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk threatened to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) last year for allegedly scaring away prospective advertisers with its allegedly “misleading claims” about Twitter’s failure to curb hate speech among the social network’s subscribers.

LGBTQ Nation spoke with CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed about why Musk is welcoming hate speech back onto the site, whether X’s approach to hate speech is really any worse than any other social media platform’s, and what users can do to combat the hate and misinformation proliferating online. (The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Related:

Elon Musk’s antisemitism is scaring away huge advertisers from X

The notorious transphobe and MAGA supporter is targeting the Jewish community now, too.

LGBTQ NATION: So my theory is this. The only reason that Elon Musk would buy Twitter and then allow a bunch of white supremacists, misinformers, and Donald Trump back on there would essentially be so that he could be a major media player in the 2024 presidential elections and help facilitate a hostile takeover if Trump and the right want to claim again that it was stolen. Am I bonkers for thinking this?

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IMRAN AHMED: This is not me giving a politician’s answer: I don’t really care why he did it, but I know what the effect is. The effect is that he’s normalizing the idea that hatred against Muslims, Jews, Black people, LGBTQ+ people is acceptable, normal, and tolerable in society.

He’s the world’s richest man in a world that venerates money. People think, “Well, there must be some substance behind him. This is a man to whom people should listen — a role model.” I think that the purchase of Twitter is another symptom of his grandiosity and indifference to other people’s lives, stories, and opinions sometimes.

This is unsurprising for a man like him, which is precisely why CCDH exists. There needs to be rules in the game, because you can’t just let our information ecosystem be controlled by one or two individuals — and in the case of Elon Musk, very damaged individuals, so hurt people who are hurting people.

There’s a worry that if he continues to allow right-wingers back on the site and he continues to endorse antisemitic posts and then tell advertisers, “F**ck off,” enough advertisers may leave, the site itself will crumble, or he’ll be forced out. Do you think that’s possible?

It’s just not just right-wingers he’s letting back on and it’s not just right-wingers that hate LGBTQ+ people, Jews, or Black people. I’m a veteran of the British political left and the labor movement in the U.K., the trade unions weren’t very friendly to gay people or Black people or Jews, until relatively recently in their history. So this is about empowering, amplifying, and endorsing the most intolerable views in our society — views that we thought that we’d expunged to history.

But, yeah, 2024 will test the republic as few other events in its history have tested it, because you are going to have an unparalleled spread of hateful rhetoric amplified where the gatekeeper isn’t a gatekeeper — he’s actually a champion of hate.

It seems like he’s almost daring advertisers to get on board with this kind of speech. His CEO Linda Yaccarino said, after Musk’s “Go f**k yourself” comment, something along the lines of, “We really appreciate brands that stick with us, that are behind our kind of brave vision of free speech.” [Note: her exact wording was “X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street — and the X community is powerful and is here to welcome you. To our partners who believe in our meaningful work — Thank You.“]

And so it seems like there’s almost kind of a game of chicken. At first, Musk was saying, “We’re going to name and shame advertisers who pull out of our site,” and then he backed away from that. And now he’s saying, “We don’t really need your money.”

But considering the Media Matters report regarding advertisers’ posts appearing next to antisemitic and neo-Nazi content, it almost seems like there’s maybe an effort on Musk’s part to see if he can get companies comfortable with appearing next to hate speech. Do you think that’s accurate?

He is now an advertising merchant. And he put up the bat signal to hate actors saying, “You’re welcome back on the platform.” But he also went to the advertisers and said, “Look, I’m not going to let this descend into where hate is completely tolerated, because that would be a hellscape.” And so he’s been trying to play both sides.

The truth is that he knows the customer will always have considerable power in any market relationship. And so advertisers who have been flexing their muscles recently [by leaving the site] have been really frustrating him. I’ve never seen a CEO of any company resent their customers as much as Elon Musk resents his customers, and he tests them.

And it’s like, “Well, no, I don’t want to pay you to spread hate and disinformation all over the world. What’s wrong with you? Why would I want to do that?” You’re seeing now how soft the underbelly of Musk’s public persona is, because when it comes to advertisers, when it comes to regulators – the European Union [recently] announced that it is launching a formal investigation into [X] – he has a very soft underbelly, Elon Musk, which we also saw from the pics of him on the back of a yacht as well.

Today @elonmusk gave a wide ranging and candid interview at @dealbook 2023. He also offered an apology, an explanation and an explicit point of view about our position. X is enabling an information independence that's uncomfortable for some people. We're a platform that allows… https://t.co/PSmSKRkJSq

— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) November 30, 2023

Other “free speech” social media platforms such as Parler, Truth Social, and Gab really originated because right-wingers felt that Twitter and other social media sites were mistreating, silencing, banning their voices — especially after the January 6 insurrection and the attempt to overturn the 2020 elections. And yet, it seems like Musk sort of beat those right-wing websites at their own game, saying, “I’m not going to start a new right-wing site; I’m just going to turn the one we already have into this sort of place.” Do you think that’s right, or do you think that these sites have continued to thrive even though Elon Musk has made X more right-leaning and more of a hate site?

It’s really interesting because those platforms are tiny in comparison to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. And so to copy their business models seems like a really dumb thing to do, because they’re really small, and advertisers don’t want to advertise there. And their user base is limited to a few obsessives.

Yes, you can capture the obsessive market, but the obsessives will use multiple platforms because they will come up with what they think is an ingenious way to slur Black people or Jews or LGBTQ+ people, and then they will want to go and share their wisdom on as many platforms as possible. And now that they have these platforms available to them, like Gab, they send them there to people who then approve of them and say, “This is brilliant,” because they’re all fellow travelers. And now they have Twitter as well.

The thing is, though, that most of the rest of us are sitting there going, “This isn’t what I want, not why I go online. I don’t go online to s some weirdos spouting hate,” and [so] that business model has limits — there’s actually a tiny market. What’s been so powerful about this is that it’s been reaffirming, that there is a tiny market for hate. That it’s a small number of obsessives, and no company wants to be anywhere near it. Which is why, you know, right now, Twitter’s been reduced to carrying [no-name] adverts… It’s just it’s a really limited business model and he claims to be a great businessman — turns out he’s pretty crappy at it.

That’s probably the understatement of the year. Some optimists think that if there ends up being a proliferation of misinformation on X during the 2024 election cycle, perhaps the “Community Notes” feature will be really instructive or helpful for fact-checking and correcting misinformation.

During the 2020 election, Trump would commonly rail against Twitter’s flags and fact-checks that used to appear on his false claims about voter fraud and things like that. Considering the way that the Community Notes feature works, do you think there’s any hope that people staying on the site can provide any sort of worthwhile response or counter-speech to the proliferation of misinformation and hate speech on the site?

Really, this is about the company asking people to do the job that they were meant to be doing, which is enforcing the rules that they have in place to ensure that they have healthy communities in which discourse can occur.

By devolving that to individuals, exposing them to hate on a regular basis, what they’re actually doing is asking users to voluntarily damage their own mental health and making our societies feel more fractious, bitter, polarized, and brittle. That is why platforms have moderators, because they do really, really specialized work. My team [at CCDH] does this on a regular basis, and I think it’s incredibly unfair to ask people to bear a burden that companies themselves are no longer willing to bear.

There’s a somewhat relativistic idea that, before Elon Musk took over Twitter, it was already a dumpster fire of hatred, racism, antisemitic views, and queerphobia. Yes, he slashed its security and safety team, but this sort of content continues to proliferate on all social media platforms, whether it’s YouTube or Facebook or whatnot — their content moderation policies generally haven’t been very evenly enforced or successful.

In fact, there’s very little incentive for other websites to contain this content because it gets such high engagement. Do you think that that’s a fair assessment?

One of the things I’m asked quite frequently is whether one platform is better than another. And I always say that judging who’s best at dealing with hate on social media platforms is like judging hairstyling for bald men — they’re all pretty bad. I don’t think that any of us understood the depth to which a platform could descend until Elon Musk. First of all, got rid of the moderation staff. Second, he signaled that his platform would tolerate hate speech. And third, he himself, as the owner of the platform, started amplifying hate and conspiracy theories.

I appreciate CCDH’s role as a watchdog, keeping people informed about hate speech on the site. There’s this constant debate among progressives between, “I’m going to leave Twitter. It doesn’t deserve my participation in this corrupt system,” and those who are like, “No, we need sensible people really to stay here to push against it, to help amplify counter speech.” What are the things that average people, and maybe policymakers, need to do to really help X keep a cleaner shop?

We’re not a watchdog. We are advocates who provide research that’s taken by advertisers and used as the basis on which they make decisions. We can work with lawmakers to ensure they pass good laws that provide transparency and meaningful account accountability for these sites…. We speak to legislators on the left and the right in the U.S. all the time, trying to encourage them to create transparency. It’s been amazingly one of the few issues that has bipartisan support. [Senators] Lindsey Graham (R-NC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have joined a bill on creating a [Federal Communications Commission] on social media — that’s a great idea.

What I’m not asking people to do is say, “Leave it to us!” When it came to, for example, the fight for safety standards in cars, asking the average driver what they should be doing to ensure that safety standards are brought into place for cars — there’s not much that they can do. But what they could do was support the efforts of those amazing people like [consumer advocate and former presidential candidate] Ralph Nader, who were campaigning, shouting, and creating the strategic architecture required for change.

What people need to do is they need to realize that change is possible is only possible if we stand up and we demand it. And asking for transparency, accountability of companies to have to take responsibility legally if they released negligent, defective products, or if they’re negligent in the way that they operate their platforms — that is perfectly legitimate, that’s perfectly within American legal standards.

It has nothing to do with the First Amendment, nothing to do with demanding they moderate X content or Y content. It’s just saying that when you are negligent or there’s bad product design concept, all those things will be put into place tomorrow if we wanted to. And that would create safety by design in which people are able to enjoy safe and constructive platforms in which we can have a vivid public discourse, a real marketplace of ideas. But that will only happen if people stand up and ask for it.

Something we often hear from the right wing is, “If I want to exterminate all Jews, or get rid of all queer people or all Black people, there are governments that have done that, it’s a legitimate government policy and political viewpoint. And to label it as racist or whatnot, simply to silence something that has been seen as viable by other cultures, and governments throughout history, why shouldn’t we have this ‘competition of ideas?'”

People have the right to hold those opinions, no matter how abhorrent they are. And we have a First Amendment-protected right to call them scumbags and say that anyone that does business with them is a scumbag. And I think that’s what so that’s what’s so easy about this. Like, you don’t really need to take it any further than that.

Someone that empowers fascists is a fascist-enabling scumbag. Companies that advertise on those platforms should be ashamed of themselves. And these are not technical issues. They’re not legal issues. These are really simple, fundamental moral issues — we have the right to hold opinions about others’ opinions.

We’ve overcomplicated this issue. Like, yeah, there’s always been abhorrent views in society. And they’ve always faced the consequences of being resigned to irrelevance. These are not people that we respect or venerate in society. The problem is that we now have a situation where people like Elon Musk see them as a meal ticket by monetizing the controversy that they create, and that’s why we are in this special modern-day hellscape.

We’ve already established predicated that this isn’t necessarily great for business. It makes me just wonder if Musk is merely looking to raise his public profile so that he’ll be influential elsewhere in other circles… or is something else is afoot?

There is a kind of deeply psychological aspect of what’s going on here. There’s a guy who was bullied relentlessly as a child, you know, who suffered tremendously at home and, and I have great sympathy for that. You know, I honestly, I know how that feels. But his answer to it is to own the playground and to actually be best friends with the bullies. And I think that I think that that is a deeply flawed solution to the problem. And it’s just regrettable that that’s how someone who should know better and has the resources to know better has ended up in this place.

It’s actually deeply, distressingly sad to see what’s happened. That someone who started off — ironically in one respect, you know, he is himself a victim of Twitter brain, that condition where you think that what trends online is what’s genuinely popular. The reality is that most people have looked at what’s been happening on Twitter and just thought “What was a load of absolute weirdos.” That’s what’s doubly sad about all this. It’s all been quite dispiriting.