SUMMARY
- The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British NGO with non-profit status in the US, has been plotting behind closed doors to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” recently revealed internal emails show.
- CCDH has close ties with the US government and elected officials, including the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and former House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
- Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, sits on a “Council for Responsible Social Media” that includes a former CIA director, a former NSA director, and other former US military and intelligence officials.
- CCDH set up meetings with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), chairwoman of the antitrust subcommittee and arguably the most influential Senate Democrat on matters of tech legislation.
- The nonprofit’s influence in the UK is also substantial: its co-founder Michael McSweeney is considered the top advisor to the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and its board of advisors includes Damian Collins MP, who masterminded the previous government’s online censorship policies.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit founded in Great Britain with close ties to the country’s current Prime Minister, made headlines recently after a leak of internal emails revealed its top current goal is to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”
Founded by Morgan McSweeney, currently the top aide to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Labour party recently won a large majority, CCDH was from the beginning a partisan project masquerading as a neutral nonprofit. Its earliest activities focused on undermining Starmer’s rivals inside his own political party, the left-wing populist supporters of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
McSweeney, along with Starmer’s Labour party, is accused of meddling in the 2024 presidential election. The Labour party paid for McSweeney to attend the Democratic National Convention in August, where he met with presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The Labour party is also the subject of a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint filed by the Trump campaign, after sending nearly 100 party activists to campaign for Harris in battleground states.
Today, CCDH frequently targets conservative narratives disfavored by the establishment. In the clip below, for example, CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed complains that tech companies must do more to censor the “Great Replacement” theory — a common conservative phrase used to describe the process of mass immigration.
The CCDH has a radical pro-censorship position. In addition to its mission to “Kill Musk’s Twitter” due to its free speech stance, the nonprofit has hosted speakers who think people are so susceptible to misinformation that they need lifelong instruction in “media literacy,” from kindergartners to “80 year olds.”
The speaker in the clip above is Cynthia Miller-Idris, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. PERIL is partnered with Google’s Jigsaw anti-extremism lab, which experiments with Orwellian methods of narrative control such as “psychological inoculation” against disfavored narratives. A recipient of DHS funding, the lab also works with the UK government.
The Transatlantic Censorship Blob
It’s no surprise that DHS-funded censorship researchers are speaking at CCDH events. Despite its origins in the US, CCDH has achieved considerable influence in the US, where it also has tax-exempt nonprofit status. It created the censorship hit-list known as the “disinformation dozen,” a group of twelve social media users the nonprofit alleged to be the primary spreaders of “COVID misinformation.”
The Biden White House subsequently pressured social media platforms to censor the twelve users, among whom was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who would go on to become President Biden’s top primary opponent. The Biden administration’s use of CCDH’s research become a key point in Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit that targeted the government’s role in the online censorship of Americans. It also became grounds for the House Judiciary Committee to subpoena CCDH.
Although the “disinformation dozen” is perhaps the most well-publicized example of CCDH influencing the American government, its reach into US politics and policy goes even further. Research by the Foundation for Freedom Online shows that the UK nonprofit is collaborating with US government officials, as well as a number of former senior officials in the US military apparatus and intelligence community.
The current and former US officials CCDH has collaborated with, through shared board memberships, anti-disinformation and anti-online hate planning summits, and other means, includes:
- A current US special envoy
- A contractor for DHS and the State Department
- Two former secretaries of defense
- Two former directors of the CIA
- A former director of the NSA
- A former director of Homeland Security
- Two former vice chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Two former directors of the National Security Council
- A former FCC commissioner
- A former director of National Intelligence
CCDH also has close ties to the former House Intelligence Committee chairman (and likely future Senator) Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), it is also seeking further access to Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), widely regarded as the most influential Senate Democrat on matters of tech regulation.
CCDH On The Hill
CCDH already has inroads with influential lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including former Democrat head of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who played a leading role in panics over “disinformation.” Jenna Galper, formerly a senior communications advisor for Rep. Schiff, currently works for CCDH’s policy team.
In May 2022, she promoted CCDH’s May 2022 Global Summit to Address Online Harms and Misinformation.
In December 2022, Rep. Schiff wrote a letter urging X CEO Elon Musk to combat rising “hate speech” on the platform, citing research from CCDH. Schiff, along with Reps. Lori Trahan (D-MA) and Sean Casten (D-IL), in August 2023 sent a letter to Musk, pushing back against Musks’s lawsuit against CCDH.
In September 2024 CCDH document cites a Schiff-sponsored bill, the Digital Services Oversight and Safety Act, as a bipartisan bill to strengthen transparency requirements for social media companies.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-MN) office has led much of the left’s tech policy; her office has been invited CCDH’s “Kill Musk’s Twitter” meetings. Klobuchar is a prominent anti-Elon Musk Democrat.
Klobuchar is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, and might be considered the most powerful Democrat on technology policy.
The Minnesota Democrat in 2019 introduced the Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act, which would establish a censorship program at the Department of Education. In 2021, she proposed a bill to crack down on alleged vaccine misinformation and sent a letter to CEOs referencing CCDH’s “dirty dozen” report, which noted that 12 people were most responsible for the proliferation of alleged vaccine misinformation.
The State Department
An America First Legal (AFL) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request found that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) encouraged federal employees at the State Department to pay attention to CCDH’s work, and revealed that the CCDH was directly briefing White House officials.
The CCDH is also actively seeking more contact with the State Department. A leaked invitation list for an invite-only CCDH gala in Washington, D.C. included a State Department contractor, Erica Mindel.
Mindel is currently working as a contractor from the consultancy Guidehouse working in the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Guidehouse also has a long term contract with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for “misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information analysis,” which is worth up to $2.6 million.
The Guidehouse contract started in September 2023, and has a current end date for September 2024, but could continue until September 2025 if DHS exercises its contract extension clauses.
Issue One
CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed currently sits on the Council for a Responsible Social Media, a bipartisan group that aims to devise social media content policy.
The Council includes major national security officials, including:
- Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, and congressman
- Bill Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US Navy Admiral
- Michael Rogers, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA), and US Navy Admiral
- Nicole Tisdale, former director of the National Security Council
- Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who led the Obama-era net neutrality regulations through the agency
- R.P. Eddy, CEO of Ergo and former director of the White House National Security Council
Nicholas Penniman is the CEO of Issue One; he and his father were top investors of Newsguard, and his father currently sits on the board of directors of Newsguard.
Issue One also leads the National Council on Election Integrity, which touted that the council led to the creation of the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.
Prominent members of the National Council on Election Integrity include:
- Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security
- Dan Coats, the former director of intelligence and senator from Indiana
- Chuck Hagel, former Secretary of Defense
Jamie Neikrie, the legislative director for the Council for a Responsible Social Media, was listed in the “Kill Musk Twitter” documents as an invitee to CCDH’s Washington D.C. gala.
Antisemitism “Experts”
On May 23, 2024 US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt hosted a symposium to combat online antisemitism, which was touted as the “first of its kind.” CCDH was, by then, well enough regarded by the State Department to warrant an invitation.
White House Domestic Policy Council Chair Neera Tanden, White House Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger, as well as big tech platform such as Google, Meta, and TikTok, other special envoys from Canada, Israel, and Germany, as well as NGOs such as CCDH, Cyberwell, and the American Jewish Congress attended the meeting.
One day later, a press release noted that big tech platforms promised to address antisemitism, “including establishing dedicated expert positions on policy teams, implementing antisemitism training for key personnel, and increasing transparency by publicly reporting on trends in antisemitic content.”
Combating antisemitism was the founding pretext of CCDH, before it broadened its approach to target other forms of alleged hate and “disinformation.” The purpose of this focus was political: CCDH’s founder, Morgan McSweeney, masterminded the takeover of the UK’s Labour party by the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, with the issue of antisemitism playing a key role.
Starmer’s rise to the top involved undermining the authority of the previous leader, left-wing populist Jeremy Corbyn, whose leadership of the party was marred by constant accusations of antisemitism. CCDH amplified these accusations at every turn, while McSweeney also sought to bankrupt the UK’s leading pro-Corbyn news site – as well as right-wing populist website Westmonster – through advertiser boycotts.
Antisemitism is no longer the sole focus of the CCDH, and it now enjoys influence not just with the current Labour Prime Minister, but also with the leadership of Starmer’s opposition in the Conservative party. Kami Badenoch, who was recently elected as leader of the Conservative party, praised CCDH’s work on “anti-Muslim hate” while she was a minister in the previous Conservative government.
CCDH’s board includes Damian Collins MP, who led the previous Conservative government’s efforts to regulate so-called “online harms.” Collins served as the former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Tech and Digital Economy at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS). He left his post in October 2022. He also served as the chair of the DCMS committee from 2016 to 2019.
Collins also met with the CCDH while he was drafting the government’s Online Safety Bill” as part of “stakeholder engagement.”
In October 2024, Collins joined Orbis Business Intelligence as a non-executive director; the founder of Orbis is none other than Christopher Steele, the creator of the Steele dossier against former President Donald Trump.
Collins has frequently commented on the need for social media companies to take action against content that allegedly incites violence and harassment.
Despite broadening its focus to cover “anti-Muslim hate,” “disinformation,” and other forms of “online harm,” CCDH’s original pretext of combating antisemitism remains an effective weapon for online censorship. One day after the State Department’s symposium, a press release noted that big tech platforms promised to address antisemitism, “including establishing dedicated expert positions on policy teams, implementing antisemitism training for key personnel, and increasing transparency by publicly reporting on trends in antisemitic content.”
