The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is having a really bad month.

Written By: Sayer Ji, Founder | July 31, 2023 | GreenMedInfo
 

After enjoying a few years of virtually unchallenged malign political influence over the American people, with a focus on suppressing protected speech, and even creating a digital hit list in order to target, defame, and deplatform 12 individuals, myself included, in collusion with political operatives within the US government itself, a growing number of organizations and individuals are now both waking and standing up to this foreign, dark money, influence operation, making it clear that their particularly nasty brand of astroturfing will no longer be tolerated.

Today, for instance, it was widely reported that Elon Musk sent a warning letter to Imram Ahmed, CEO of CCDH concerning their “False and Misleading Claims About Twitter,” putting them on notice that his legal team is investigating the following behavior:

“CCDH regularly posts articles making inflammatory, outrageous, and false or misleading assertions about Twitter and its operations, which CCDH holds out to the general public as supported by “research.” 

The letter drafted by Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro goes into detail as to how egregiously non-rigorous CCDH’s “research” was:

“CCDH’s claims in this article are false, misleading, or both, and they are not supported by anything that could credibly be called research. The article provides no methodology for its selection or testing of tweets, no baseline for Twitter’s enforcement time frame, and no explanation as to why the 100 chosen tweets represent an appropriate sample of the nearly 500 million tweets sent per day from which to generalize about the platform’s content moderation practices. And despite purporting to conclude that Twitter favors Twitter Blue subscribers by allowing them to “break its rules with impunity,” the article provides no evidence of differing treatment in content moderation actions against Twitter Blue subscribers and non-subscribers, and indeed reflects no effort to conduct any testing to support this claim, which appears under its headline. The article cites no sources other than different, similarly threadbare posts on CCDH’s own website, and fails to identify the qualifications of any of the researchers who worked on the article.4 In other words, the article is little more than a series of inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims based on a cursory review of random tweets.

This case is reminiscent of the hatchet job Imram’s gang did with the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” report it put out in 2021, also based on their notoriously fraudulent “research.” In that widely disseminated and referenced report (3,400 news articles written referencing it), CCDH claimed that up to 65% of all “anti-vaccine” content online is produced by 12 individuals, and up to 73% of the “anti-vaccine” content on Facebook. This report turned out to be so obscenely false – Facebook released an official statement describing the report as a “faulty narrative,” “without evidence,” and said that only .05% of the content they investigated in relation to those 12 accounts related to vaccines at all, and it was not exclusively “anti-vaccine.” The margin of error here is astronomical, indicating how extreme and hateful rhetoric and not rigorous research is the modus operandi for CCDH.

The mainstream media outlets are reporting on Musk’s move in a negative light, as to be expected (given how they’ve worked in lock-step collusion with CCDH during previous campaigns, either attacking or defending on their behalf, without fail). Notably, the BBC spun the story with the following inverted headline: “Twitter accused of bullying anti-hate campaigners.” Yet, one of CCDH’s primary funders is an organization with extremely close ties to the BBC: 

​​#1 Paul Hamlyn Foundation

A UK charity, founded in 1972, it describes itself as “an independent grant-making foundation, making grants to individuals and organisations in the UK to help people overcome disadvantage.” The foundation’s trustees include the former General-Director of the BBC Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, and Sir Anthony Saltz, former Board of Governer of the BBC. On Oct. 4th, 2021, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation gave CCDH a £100,000 grant earmarked for “Growing the digital presence and impact of Center for Countering Digital Hate.” [Source]

Musk’s latest warning letter to CCDH is not the first sign that he has Imram’s number. On July 18th, Musk called Imram out publicly, both calling him a “rat,” and describing his organization as “evil.” He also asked a question, which a growing chorus of concerned citizens, lawyers, elected officials, and even RFK Jr., a presidential candidate have been asking: who is funding CCDH? 

In order to answer that question, I wrote the following article:  9 ‘Dark Money’ Sources Funding CCDH: A Foreign ‘Digital Hate’ Group Which Used the White House to Quash Free Speech. One of the more astounding discoveries I document in this article is that the UK government itself is providing grant money to several of the UK-based charities who provided the “seed capital” to prop CCDH up. In other words, even though Imram states publicly that “we don’t take government money,” it is clear that he is a political operative, his organization a front group, and that there are open source, publicly available data points linking CCDH to a political campaign to meddle in the US political affairs, including contributing to the suppression of our most basic First Amendment rights. 

Adding to CCDH’s growing headache, is the recent Facebook Files disclosures precipitated by Mark Zuckerberg being held in contempt if he did not produce internal files and communications showing who was really pulling the strings at Facebook when it came to their now notoriously draconian censorship policies. Once again, CCDH rears its ugly head as being part of the steer behind who got targeted for deletion, with the “disinformation dozen” top of the list. 

Perhaps even more concerning for Imram and his cronies is the announcement by America First legal (AFL) that they are actively investigating CCDH:

AFL, a non-profit often described as “an alternative to ACLU,” is starting the probe into CCDH – which it refers to as a pro-censorship group that is a party to anti-free speech collusion with the government – by filing several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.”

“They are addressed to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of State, and the goal is to obtain any communications they may have had with CCDH, headed by Imran Ahmed.”

You can take a look at an example of one of the FOIAs here

If you would like more background on the way in which CCDH has violated our collective rights, and likely the laws of the land, read my latest reports and updates from other platforms we’ve republished here: 

Calls to Action

  • If you are concerned about the role of foreign influence operations like CCDH in the US, and wish to support those whose protected speech has been quashed, please consider taking part in our More Than 12 campaign on Stand for Health Freedom (501c4). 
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  • Familiarize yourself with RFK Jr’s presidential campaign and his commitment to hold accountable CCDH, the government, pharmaceutical companies, and the media at www.Kennedy24.com
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