Elon Musk gets SLAPPed - by Lisa Needham - Public Notice
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Normally, 52-page federal court decisions are not a blast to read. However, when it is California federal district court judge Charles Breyer slapping down Elon Musk for one of his predatory lawsuits, it’s an actual delight.
Breyer threw out X’s lawsuit against a nonprofit that tracks hate on the internet, and he didn’t mince words when doing it.
Back in July 2023, X filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) over their report, Toxic Twitter, which detailed how Musk’s “amnesty” policy, introduced shortly after he bought Twitter, returned some of the worst people to the platform. CCDH looked at 10 of the highest-profile accounts, including such luminaries as Andrew Tate, an online influencer currently facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, Andrew Anglin, an actual neo-Nazi who founded the Daily Stormer, and Gateway Pundit aka Jim Hoft, a hard-right blogger who is an enthusiastic proponent of the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election.
Bringing back Tate, Anglin, Hoft, and seven other previously-banned high-profile purveyors of hate and disinformation resulted in those ten accounts alone racking up 2.5 billion tweet impressions from December 2022 to February 2023. The CCDH report extrapolated that, at that rate, those ten accounts would have close to 20 billion impressions in a year. CCDH then looked at how much Twitter ads cost and how often they are shown and determined those ten hate-fueled accounts alone could result in up to $19 million in ad revenue for X.
