Leaked documents from a group linked to the British Labour Party contain a plan to take down the social media platform X.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an Anglo-U.S. non-governmental organisation, set out its main “annual priorities” from March to October 2024 in bullet-pointed lists. It aims to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” a goal backed by an “advertising focus”—i.e., a campaign to deter advertisers from using the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Screenshots from a CCDH monthly planner, obtained by Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi, outline this censorious phrase. More detailed suggestions include reminders to lobby for U.S. and European Union regulation to be tightened, or at least deployed, against ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate’—suitably loosely defined to mean things that the campaigners disagree with. “Social media companies erode basic human rights and civil liberties by enabling the spread of online hate and disinformation,” asserts the CCDH website.
“This is war,” replied Elon Musk, following the publication of the leaked documents. He later added, “This violates U.S. criminal statutes against foreign interference in elections. We are going after CCDH and their donors. AND their donors.”
CCDH also appears to be working with U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), promoting legislation targeting so-called misinformation. Its campaigning tactics around advertising boycotts owe much to the similar UK group Stop Funding Hate, which attempted to close down GB News prior to its launch and went on to claim that there is now so much hate around that it needed a completely new corporate structure.
Like Stop Funding Hate, CCDH claims to be politically non-partisan. Whereas its previous targets did include George Galloway and the crank David Icke, it now tends to focus on what it considers to be far-right political voices and views. In the age of the EU’s Digital Services Act, CCDH’s orientation towards official censorship might find itself pushing at an open door.
Some commentators now suggest that the presence of UK Labour Party activists at the founding of the NGO in 2018 helps to explain how CCDH now acts as one of several links between Keir Starmer’s Labour and Kamala Harris’s US Democrats, to the extent that Brussels house journal Politico now treats the two as sister parties. In contrast, relations between Starmer and Donald Trump’s team have deteriorated, not least as a result of Labour plans to campaign for Harris and a subsequent complaint from one of the GOP presidential candidate’s lawyers.
