Elon Musk’s X, formerly called Twitter, is one of the few outlets attempting to foster free speech, and a well-connected foreign leftist group has designated it a top target.
“Kill Musk’s Twitter” has been the top item written on the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s (CCDH’s) meeting agendas for months, according to internal documents publicly reported this week by reporters Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi at The Disinformation Chronicle.
CCDH is a tax-exempt part of the global censorship-industrial complex that works to quell free speech, primarily through hiding facts that are inconvenient for leftists, such as that men and women are different and pharmaceuticals have side effects. It also has connections to the Kamala Harris campaign.
Not one to sit quietly, Musk responded Tuesday with a three-word post: “This is war.”
CCDH was founded by Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney, both British Labour Party political strategists. In 2020, CCDH sought to strip Google ad revenue from The Federalist over editor John Daniel Davidson’s article, “The Media Are Lying To You About Everything, Including The Riots,” which calls out dishonest coverage of the 2020 George Floyd riots from legacy media including the New York Times and CNN.
McSweeney attended the Democrat National Convention and has been advising the Harris campaign. Imran has worked with U.S. media to create a narrative about Harris as a victim of mean social media posts, and his stories are picked up by friendly reporters.
McSweeney also founded Labour Together, a leftist U.K. think tank that pushes Labour Party messaging for Prime Minister Keir Starmer. McSweeney was recently named Starmer’s chief of staff.
The Thacker and Taibbi report details how propaganda media have been calling the Labour and Democrat parties “sister parties,” with both leaning on McSweeney’s advice.
CCDH, McSweeney’s brainchild, is registered as a nonprofit in the United States too, with a mission of combating “hate and disinformation.” They define this as “identity-based hate,” or noticing that men and women are different; any information that reduces demand for totalitarian climate change policies; questioning government- and pharma industry-sponsored health claims; “antisemitism”; and “child safety,” according to its U.S. 990 tax form and its website.
Already there is synergy between the Democrat and Labour parties. The U.K.’s Labour Party is reportedly providing around 100 former and current members to travel to the U.S. and do door-knocking for the Harris campaign.
The center’s agenda also shows it is pushing European-style government control of online conversations in the United States. A bullet point on its list of annual priorities targets, “Progress towards change in USA and support for STAR.”
“[The Center for Countering Digital Hate] held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for ‘change in USA’ toward a censorious proposal it calls the STAR framework, which would create an ‘independent digital regulator’ that could ‘impose consequences for harmful content,’” Thacker and Taibbi reported. “STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.”