Nonprofit online watchdog the Center for Countering Digital Hate on Thursday hit back at Elon Musk’s X in a motion to dismiss the social media company’s August lawsuit.
X Corp., the parent company of the platform formerly known as Twitter, accused the Center for Countering Digital Hate of deliberately trying to drive away X’s advertisers by publishing reports critical of the platform’s response to hateful content. X’s lawsuit specifically claims that CCDH violated Twitter’s terms of service, and federal hacking laws, by scraping data from the company’s platform and by encouraging an unnamed individual to improperly collect information about Twitter that it had provided to a third-party brand monitoring provider.
CCDH claims that X’s lawsuit is “riddled with legal deficiencies” and attempts to punish the nonprofit for its First Amendment protected speech, according to its Thursday filing in the Northern District Court of California.
“At its core, X Corp.’s grievance is not that the CCDH Defendants gathered public data in violation of obscure (and largely imagined) contract terms, but that they criticized X Corp. (forcefully) to the public,” the filing states.
X and a lawyer representing the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on CCDH’s Thursday filing.