Legal group files complaint against UK nonprofit for interfering in American election
By isabelle // 2024-11-05
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A legal group has filed a formal complaint with the Department of Justice against a U.K.-based organization for carrying out a foreign influence campaign to interfere with the election and censor Americans. The group, America First Legal, recently shared new evidence demonstrating how the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has been carrying out a coordinated effort to stop Americans from exercising their right to free speech. They’ve also asked the DoJ to look into whether their operations and leaders are “agents of a foreign principal,” which would mean they are obligated to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). According to America First Legal, CCDH has long been promoting “unconstitutional censorship on social media platforms” and is based out of the same location as the UK Labour Party think tank Labour Together, which has met with the Kamala Harris campaign. They note that while the CCDH’s stated mission is protecting “human rights and civil liberties online,” the reality is that they are a “cut-out engaged in brazen smearing, attacking of dissenting views, deplatforming, censoring and pro-active shrinkage of the Overton window [by] strategically conflating serious voices with the fringes, mixing them together to isolate genuine actors and squash dissent.” The legal foundation singled out the CEO of CCDH’s operations in both the U.K. and the U.S., Imran Ahmed, noting his founding role in the “defund racism” campaign linked to Black Lives Matter. They describe him as an “authority on social and psychological malignancies on social media, such as identity-based hate, extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on social media for years.” Ahmed’s “defund racism” campaign worked to force Google to remove ads from right-leaning outlets such as Zero Hedge and The Federalist. The CCDH was behind the infamous “Disinformation Dozen” report that singled out 12 highly influential individuals and websites that dared to question the COVID-19 lockdowns, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Joseph Mercola and Sherri Tenpenny. At the time, they called for those involved to be deplatformed, gaining support from several Democrat attorneys general. This prompted America First Freedom to file a slew of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Their investigation revealed that the Counselor to the Connecticut Attorney General circulated a draft of the letter calling for the deplatforming that quoted the CCDH report well before it was published and asked other state attorneys general to confirm sign-on by the day before the report was published. This would indicate that the CCDH shared their report with these officials before it was published and may have coordinated with them in drafting it. CCDH also set up meetings with Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) to discuss “US policy engagement,” with their “annual priorities” including a campaign known as “Kill Musk’s Twitter” and one about the nonprofit’s “Global Standard for Regulating Social Media” that they were lobbying the government to adopt. America First Legal Executive Director Gene Hamilton said: “Our investigation has uncovered shocking details about a foreign organization’s influence over the Biden-Harris Administration and numerous state governments. But not just any influence—their aim and stated goals appear to be to stop Americans from exercising a fundamental right guaranteed against governmental interference by the First Amendment.”

CCDH accuses X of “failing to counter false claims”

CCDH has made no secret of its disdain for Elon Musk, with documents showing their plans to “kill” X by pressuring advertisers to pull their support and financially destabilize it. This aligns with CCDH founder and British political operative Morgan McSweeney’s playbook. McSweeney is considered partly responsible for helping the Labour Party’s Keir Starmer take power in Britain and is now advising the Harris-Walz campaign. In addition to their “Kill Musk’s Twitter” campaign, the CCDH recently released a report claiming that X’s crowd-sourced fact check feature known as Community Notes is “failing to counter false claims” about the election, another deceptive attempt to smear the platform that allows conservative voices. Sources for this article include: AFLegal.org NYPost.com
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