A federal judge in San Francisco is about to dismiss a lawsuit that Elon Musk’s X filed against a nonprofit organization, claiming that the platform permitted hate speech to circulate on the website that used to be known as Twitter.
Attorneys for X filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate the previous year, arguing that the organization had unlawfully taken down X in order to compile damaging reports regarding the spread of hate speech on the website.
However, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer looked quite doubtful of the case during a hearing via Zoom on Thursday. He spent most of the hearing questioning Musk’s attorney about why the action was filed in the first place.
According to X’s attorney Jon Hawk, the main goal of the lawsuit is to have the platform’s users’ data protection agreements upheld.
Breyer remained skeptical.
“You put it in regard to safety, and I’m here to inform you, I suppose you are entitled to use that term, but I cannot think of something really more contrary to the First Amendment then the method of banning individuals from publicly dispersed information once it has been published,” remarked Breyer.
“You’re attempting to shoehorn this idea by putting these words within a viable loss of contract claim,” the court stated.
Judge labels Musk’s attorney’s argument as “vapid”
X claims that by employing a third-party program called Brandwatch to look at posts on the website and create reports that are important of X, the CCDH broke the rules of service of the platform.
The social media business claimed that CCDH obtained illegal access to private information as a result of the procedure.
The main topics of discussion at Thursday’s session were whether gathering information for reports by the center actually violated X’s terms of service and what technically qualifies as scraping.
X is suing the center for harm, claiming that the platform suffered losses of tens of millions of dollars due to advertisers abandoning the site following the nonprofit’s conclusions.
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