Trump Camp: British Censorship Group to be "Investigated From All Angles"
Britain's Center for Countering Digital Hate will be at the "top of the list" of Trump investigatory targets, sources say after Disinformation Chronicle/Racket story.
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The Center for Countering Digital Hate will be “investigated from all angles,” a source from the campaign of Donald Trump says, in response to documents obtained by the Disinformation Chronicle in conjunction with Racket showing “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as the top annual priority on CCDH’s monthly agenda notes for 2024.
The Trump campaign is furious that a group tied to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new government is targeting its political allies while parent organization Labour Together openly advises Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Such blatant foreign influence frustrates Trump operatives, since they faced years of relentless and ultimately fruitless probes over allegations of similar foreign assistance.
“Everything is going to be investigated,” a Trump camp spokesperson said. “This will be at the top of the list.”
The news comes as the Trump campaign sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FEC) accusing the Labour Party and Kamala Harris of “making and accepting illegal foreign national contributions.” Trump allies cited a since-deleted LinkedIn post in which Labour Head of Operations Sofia Patel boasted of sending “nearly 100 Labour Party staff” to “North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Virginia” to help the Harris campaign. Patel noted she had “10 spots available for the battleground state of North Carolina” and “we will sort your housing.”
Such assistance is reportedly legal if volunteers are not compensated.
Deputy General Counsel of the Trump campaign Gary Lawkowski started his FEC complaint by noting that the British surrendered at Yorktown 243 years ago this past week, but “it appears that the Labour Party and the Harris for President campaign have forgotten the message.”
Despite recent electoral success, Prime Minister Starmer appears to be one of earth’s most humor-deprived humans and seems at times to speak first and cogitate later. On a flight to Samoa, Starmer said that the Labour staffers are “volunteers” doing work “in their spare time… they’re staying I think with other volunteers.” The Spectator, reacted to Starmer’s statement and the Disinformation Chronicle/Racket piece by describing Labour as a “comedy of errors.”
We noted in yesterday’s Disinformation Chronicle/Racket article that “both the CCDH and Labour Together were founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street.” We added that the CCDH documents “carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” with Politico dubbing Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.”
Today, Taibbi appeared on Times UK evening edition with host Kait Borsay, who relayed a statement from Labour Together, which says it has “nothing to do” with CCDH. This was surprising for a number of reasons. McSweeney not only founded both groups, he was director of CCDH for a three-year period that overlapped with Starmer’s campaign to defeat Jeremy Corbyn and lead Labour.
According to his own LinkedIn account, McSweeney resigned from CCDH to become Starmer’s Chief of Staff.
Musk responded to our story by tweeting, “This is war.”
The CCDH documents are the latest development in a high-stakes battle between the American billionaire and the British advocacy group. The story began virtually from the moment Musk took over Twitter, in November of 2022, when CCDH led an effort to castigate Musk in a group letter to 20 of Twitter’s biggest advertisers complaining Musk “threatened to drastically reduce employee headcount,” opening “a new opportunity to post the most abusive, harassing, and racist language and imagery.”
That following summer, CCDH issued a report claiming Twitter failed to act on “99% of blue accounts tweeting hate.”
The CCDH group called for an advertiser boycott, claiming X/Twitter “doesn’t care about hate speech” and permits “accounts of homophobes, misogynists, self-professed neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists” just for profit. Musk responded by suing, claiming CCDH improperly “scraped” Twitter platform data to exaggerate the prevelance of hate on the platform. In a decision much clucked about by mainstream press and censorship proponents, a judge earlier this year threw out the suit.
Ahmed’s lawyers then boasted in a statement that Musk failed to “weaponize the courts to censor good-faith research and reporting.”
“Kill Musk’s Twitter” would seem to belie this “good faith” argument. Despite multiple requests for comment, Ahmed has failed to explain the documents, which contain many more troubling themes:
Most unnerving of all were the CCDH monthly agenda entries on seeking “progress towards change in the USA.” Those looking for a short-cut to understanding why these documents are important need only read a comment, apparently by Ahmed in a January 8th, 2024 meeting:
This is a reference to CCDH’s STAR framework, CCDH’s broad plan for speech reform, which includes a “mandatory” framework in which “duties of care” to remove “harmful” content are “enshrined” and forced on private platforms by governments.
As notes from the January meeting explain, when CCDH first got up and running, there was “no legislation in place” to suggest broad censorship-by-proxy format. As of January 2024, however, a host of Western social democracies have passed new laws echoing its main themes, to include the EU’s Digital Services Act, Australia’s Online Safety Act, and the eponymous Online Safety law in Britain. Both New Zealand and Canada have also proposed new laws.
Hence Ahmed’s January comment: “Now we have EU, UK, Aus, CA, NZ.”
As reported in Tablet, Ahmed was key to passing Britain’s Online Safety Act, which endows state regulator Ofcom with exactly the kind of “strong” powers CCDH’s STAR framework describes. It added to already-stringent British laws by giving the state jurisdiction over numerous new categories of speech and speech offenses, including “Sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm” and “Content related to… illegal immigration.” Ahmed was the first witness invited to testify in Parliament about this bill in September, 2021. Meanwhile the Bill’s sponsor, Tory Damian Collins, is a CCDH board member.
The United States is the only “Five Eyes” intelligence partner that has not imposed major new digital speech controls. That the CCDH, which also had a role in passing Europe’s DSA, has its sights on the United States should be of profound concern to American voters. Especially in light of Labour’s apparent growing influence with Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.
The CCDH documents also show what most people already know: the term “moderation” is happy talk for silencing and censoring those you don’t like. In one section, CCDH ponders a letter to “deplatform” the Libs of Tik-Tok site.
In previously discussed Twitter Files, even the most incautious actors carefully chose words like “moderate” or “review,” leaving open the possibility that recommendations by CCDH or the government were not obvious requests to remove content. But with CCDH such ambiguity evaporates. In the CCDH agenda notes they write: “Election Options - how can we intervene in a year of big elections?”
Whether it’s “kill” a company, “deplatform” a perceived enemy, or attempts to “intervene” in elections, CCDH tells on itself.
To summarize: when CCDH tells you who they are, believe them. Believe them when they tell you who they are!
More “British invasion” reporting to come from The Disinformation Chronicle and Racket, with the next document release feature slated for next week.
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