But in a recent and thus far unpublished conversation with me, Imran Ahmed, a former Parliamentary aide who also co-founded the CCDH and serves as its chief executive, said a number of things that free speech advocates less radical than Elon Musk may find worrying.

He spoke of his “five-year plan” to make social media platforms “accountable” for their content, and to make it impossible for anyone to generate revenue from what the CCDH classes as “hate speech”. By this term, Ahmed doesn’t just mean overt expressions of racism or other prejudices, but rather what he calls “lies” and “disinformation”. In his view, “lies and hate are inextricably linked.”

What’s more, a glance at the CCDH website will confirm that its definition of lies is unusually expansive. It includes, for example, “the new climate denial” — not denial per se of the proposition that human beings and the greenhouse gases we emit cause global warming, but challenges to Government policies that are supposedly going to fix it.

According to Ahmed and the CCDH, these “lies” are “welcomed, enabled, and often funded by oil and gas tycoons”, and thus undermine “the politicians doing the hard work to green our economic models and incentives”.

McSweeney may have left, but the CCDH — which now has bases in both London and Washington, DC — is close to the new UK government. After the August riots, it was invited to an emergency meeting with senior officials from the Home Office, Ofcom, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism unit. Here, it recommended the Government create new “emergency powers” allowing the state to order social media platforms to remove content deemed to endanger national security or public safety.

Thacker and Taibbi’s smoking gun was a set of leaked CCDH documents suggesting that “killing” Twitter/X really is high on its agenda, and has been for months. In April, a US federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Musk brought against the CCDH for supposedly costing it tens of millions of dollars in revenue after it exposed alleged “lies and misinformation” on X. This — with no irony intended — Ahmed portrayed as a famous victory for free speech.

When the CCDH was founded, Ahmed told me, few people took social media content seriously. Speaking of the spread of antisemitism, especially since the Hamas attack on Israel in October last year, he said it was now evident we had entered a “nuclear age of disinformation and hate”.

If that could be likened to the development of the first atomic weapons based on nuclear fission, Ahmed said the arrival of easily accessible AI tools and apps that create fake videos and imagery was triggering a much more powerful “digital hatred fusion bomb, a system where there’s zero marginal cost for creating the message itself”.

He also spoke of the spread of online channels that “normalised” self-harm and suicide, pointing out that the algorithms platforms use create online “bubbles” where people are fed a constant diet of a particular flavour of hatred, but not material that might undermine it. Ahmed also claimed that X had become “an absolute sewer of antisemitic disinformation and hate” under Musk’s ownership, but was equally critical of other platforms, especially YouTube, which, he said, remained the most influential of all.

Considered along with the CCDH’s definition of hate speech, it is Ahmed’s suggested legislative changes that may arouse concern for free speech. He said he wants to strengthen the Online Safety Act so platforms are forced to disclose full details of their algorithms, which is in itself a significant extension of state-led policing of the internet.

More fundamental is his “five-year plan” to invigilate and regulate social media advertising. Ahmed cited channels that had made money from false claims about George Floyd’s death, which he described as “racist disinformation merchants”, as well as campaigns against Net Zero and “conspiracy theories” about Covid-19.

McSweeney isn’t Ahmed’s only friend close to Starmer: another is former Labour Together director Josh Simons, the new MP for Makerfield. At the end of August, Simons wrote an article for the Jewish Chronicle that echoed some of Ahmed’s proposals for change and cited the CCDH’s work.

The CCDH is not about to play a decisive role in the outcome of the US election, and it didn’t much affect the British one. It probably won’t kill X, but it may still be on course to effect profound change.

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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