Elon Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist.”

But a judge just threw out X Corp’s lawsuit against the @CCDHate because it was about “punishing the defendants for their speech.”

It’s a big win for CCDH — and a big ol’ embarrassment for Musk.

Here’s what happened: pic.twitter.com/aJB4rppNLP

— Rachel Gilmore (@atRachelGilmore) March 25, 2024

This lawsuit was always problematic.

A suit against the ADL would have made more sense. He threatened that and then sued this other much smaller group instead. The ADL actually has all of these connections to advertisers and openly threatens to defame them as “supporters of Nazis” if they don’t stop ads. It’s clearly a type of extortion.

But I suppose a suit against the ADL probably would have been thrown out as well.

Reuters:

A U.S. judge on Monday threw out Elon Musk’s lawsuit against a nonprofit group that faulted him for allowing a rise in hate speech on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco said it was “evident” that Musk’s X Corp sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) because he didn’t like its criticism, and thought its research would hurt X’s image and scare advertisers away.

“X Corp has brought this case in order to punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp–and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism,” Breyer wrote.

“It is impossible to read the complaint and not conclude that X Corp is far more concerned about CCDH’s speech than it is its data collection methods,” he added.

…

X accused the center of breaching its 2019 user contract by scraping and cherry-picking data to create false and misleading reports that Musk turned X into a haven for hate speech, extremism and misinformation.

According to X’s complaint filed last July, the nonprofit designed its “scare campaign” to drive away advertisers, and caused tens of millions of dollars in damages.

X had argued that the nonprofit was bound by Musk’s policy changes, and could have left Twitter if it didn’t like them.

…

Musk’s own speech has often also drawn complaints.

In November 2023, Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on X that said members of the Jewish community were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user spoke “the actual truth.”

Musk has denied being antisemitic and sought to make amends, including in a January visit to the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz in southern Poland.

The visit to Auschwitz was just symbolic, a signal that he would begin censoring more, which he has done.

The whole thing is schizophrenic. There was no way he was going to institute free speech on Twitter and that not result in:

• More criticism of the Jews, and


• The ADL and other Jewish groups throwing fits

It was very obvious this would happen. He even made the purchase in the midst of the initial Kanye West debacle.

It’s inexplicable that Elon would claim he didn’t know this was going to happen.

Everyone just assumed that the only way he would do it in the first place was if he was ready to push back on the ADL, then he totally crumbled.

He’s a yipper. Everyone knows this now.

Tossing out Elon Musk's lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate for noting the rise of hate speech on Twitter, the judge says "this complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about… punishing the Defendants for their speech."https://t.co/BytbWk64GM pic.twitter.com/ZjNSBQOXhr

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 25, 2024

Elvis Dunderhoff contributed to this article.