Dismisses

San Francisco judge dismisses Elon Musk's 'vapid' lawsuit

By Stephen Council

On Monday in San Francisco, U.S. District Court judge Charles Breyer dismissed a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk’s X against a nonprofit that researches hate speech online. 

The social media company formerly known as Twitter, which Musk has controlled since October 2022, sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate in July after the nonprofit published a series of reports showing that the company seemed not to be taking down hateful and bigoted posts. X’s suit alleged that the organization cherry-picked posts and scraped data from the site, pushing advertisers off the platform with a “scare campaign” meant to “stifle freedom of speech.”

But Breyer, in his dismissal of Musk’s suit, made his profound skepticism about the litigation very clear. Taking the side of CCDH’s First Amendment freedoms, he began by plainly excoriating the billionaire’s motivations.

“Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purposes,” Breyer wrote. “Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.”

When it brought the lawsuit, X accused the nonprofit of breaking the platform’s rules by using a third-party data scraping tool to pull content from the site. Musk’s company sought damages, arguing that the “unlawful” scraping had been used to push millions of dollars in advertising revenues away from X.

But Breyer’s ruling was hardly a surprise: He openly criticized an X lawyer’s arguments during a February hearing, NPR reported. Per the outlet, Breyer was confused by the lawyer’s version of “foreseeability” — the idea that CCDH broke the company’s terms of service agreement knowing it would lead to millions of dollars lost ad revenue. Breyer called the lawyer’s viewpoint “one of the most vapid extensions of law I've ever heard,” per NPR.

In his dismissal, Breyer called X’s failure to better explain its foreseeability point a “fatal flaw” in the company’s case.

CCDH cited California’s “anti-SLAPP” law in its defense, a rule meant to protect people from frivolous, targeted lawsuits meant to suppress free speech. The law allowed CCDH to quickly ask Breyer to toss out the breach of contract claims. He also dismissed a Computer Fraud and Abuse claim, writing that X failed to persuade him that CCDH’s alleged data scraping had harmed the company’s tech.

It’s a huge win for CCDH. In a statement published Monday to the group’s website, CEO Imran Ahmed wrote, “The courts today have affirmed our fundamental right to research, to speak, to advocate, and to hold accountable social media companies for decisions they make behind closed doors that affect our kids, our democracy, and our fundamental human rights and civil liberties.”

Since September, Musk has taken to X to call the organization “bronze tier psy ops,” an “evil propaganda machine” and “a truly evil organization that just wants to destroy the first amendment under the guise of doing good.”

The billionaire is also sparring in court with left-leaning watchdog Media Matters, which published a report in November about X placing ads from major companies alongside pro-Nazi posts. That litigation is ongoing in a U.S. District Court in Texas.