Leaked internal documents from a UK-established activist group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), have revealed its number one priority this year has been to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.” CCDH often collaborates with America’s bureaucratic progressives to seek and silence online “disinformation,” with British allies canvassing US neighborhoods on behalf of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Yes, it does sound a lot like election interference. A spokesperson for Donald Trump’s campaign has announced that CCDH will be “investigated from all angles,” according to journalists Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi, who obtained the leaked documents. After Elon Musk learned about the group’s plot against him, he posted on X, “This is war.”

Musk has clashed before with CCDH. He filed a lawsuit against it in July 2023 because he’d lost “tens of millions of dollars” in advertising, for which he believed the hate-speech watchdog was responsible. A judge dismissed the suit in March, claiming, “X Corp. has brought this case in order to punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp.” Yet these leaked documents might prove Musk was right all along. Only the plot is likely bigger than he’d expected and involves a full cast of characters. But what do these progressives bent on regulating online speech want with Musk? How would they benefit from shutting down his platform?

The Global Plot to Take Down Musk’s Twitter

The second recurring priority on CCDH’s monthly agenda, just below “kill Musk’s Twitter,” is “advertising focus,” which might seem innocent at first but has an entire playbook hidden in the subtext. Here’s an example: “In the U.S., a now-defunct CCDH offshoot called Stop Funding Fake News led multiple successful boycotts of media figures across the spectrum, from Zero Hedge during the BLM riots to The Federalist,” wrote Thacker and Taibbi in The DisInformation Chronicle (Thacker’s Substack newsletter). “The formula often involved collaborating with a mainstream media outlet to level an accusation of bigotry, followed by a pressure campaign against advertisers to shut off revenue to the target … a tactic first perfected in London against The Canary,” a left-leaning news site that had published pro-Palestinian opinions deemed antisemitic by CCDH.

British political operative Morgan McSweeney founded CCDH. He is also behind a “neoliberal think tank” called Labour Together, a “messaging vehicle” for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. McSweeney is “credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street, much as Karl Rove is credited with guiding George W. Bush to the White House,” wrote Thacker and Taibbi. McSweeney is now Starmer’s chief of staff, and for several years his Labour Together has worked in the United States through CCDH.

But it’s Imran Ahmed – a colleague of McSweeney and a former Labour Party aide – who opened the CCDH office in Washington, DC, three years ago and collaborated with American journalists to stifle differing opinions and shape Democratic-friendly narratives, especially when advantageous to the Biden-Harris administration. Ahmed claims McSweeney has no operational role in the company. But CCDH, Labour Together, and Starmer’s Labour Party appear to be one unit, a package deal led by McSweeney, who has been advising the Harris campaign since she swiped the Democratic nomination from President Joe Biden. In fact, several of Starmer’s “closest and most trusted Downing Street aides” went to the Democratic National Convention in August. Though the Atlantic Ocean separates the countries where these two political parties govern, they are close enough for Politico to call them “sister parties,” which may sound cute but might terrify some people.

When The Guardian asked Ahmed about the recently leaked documents, he wouldn’t get into specifics but answered, “We have used internally the concept of ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ as shorthand for taking on the business model that Musk brought to Twitter when he turned it into X, which says that social media companies should be able to spread hate without accountability, responsibility or transparency. Everything that we’ve done since then shows that’s precisely our strategy.” Oh, it’s just shorthand. Okay, nothing to see here.

‘Regulation’ and Censorship

A few months ago, Starmer and Musk butted heads on X after the billionaire responded to a video showing people aiming fireworks at police during the unrest over the summer in the UK. Musk responded to the video, saying, “Civil war is inevitable.” The two continued to exchange words, catching the attention of media outlets on both sides of the pond. Combine this online altercation with CCDH’s history of allegedly attacking Musk’s advertising, and one might think the anti-disinformation group and its political allies had a vendetta against the tech gamechanger.

“Boycott all advertisers on Twitter,” said Canadian Member of Parliament Peter Julian in a recent X post. Julian and several liberal groups held an “invitation-only conference” in Washington during the summer to discuss organizing against Musk. According to Thacker and Taibbi, some attendees included “a senior advisor at the White House, a Democratic Party staffer in the office of Congressman Adam Schiff, Biden/Harris State Department officials,” and Media Matters America, a company currently “locked in a lawsuit with Musk.” Part of CCDH’s monthly agenda from earlier this year mentions “60 meetings on the hill,” followed by a note about a meeting with 16 congressional offices to “give updates on the Elon lawsuit,” the one mentioned at the beginning of this article.

If you put all this together, Musk’s accusation against CCDH last year doesn’t seem so frivolous. But what is the end goal here? It appears CCDH and its progressive cohorts have conspired not only to “kill Musk’s Twitter” but also to “push for change in [the] USA,” as noted in the leaked documents. How would it do this? It would likely use its STAR model, similar to Britain’s Online Safety Act and Europe’s Digital Services Act. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), whose team has met with CCDH, has proposed several such bills to regulate online speech. A core part of the STAR model is using an “independent digital regulator” to investigate and fine platforms for “harmful content.”

Censorship seems inevitable. Many Democratic officials, including the Biden-Harris administration, have already practiced controlling online speech, as shown in the Twitter files. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that the current administration had “pressured Facebook to censor certain views and information” on the platform. Few people seemed to notice much less care. Musk might be the intended target here, but it is the speech of all online users that groups like CCDH want to regulate. Americans should not get complacent. If too many people shrug and consider “regulated” speech the new norm, it will probably be easier for these progressive regimes to censor more online content. Then, people might gradually forget what an opinion is.