A nonprofit is off the hook for compiling messages posted on X to document a rise in hate speech after billionaire Elon Musk bought the website.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by X, formerly Twitter, which claimed that the Center for Countering Digital Hate illegally "scraped" data from the site in violation of its terms of service, according to The Associated Press.
Breyer said the suit was "unabashedly and vociferously" intended to punish the nonprofit for exercising its right to free speech.
The judge, who sits in San Francisco, also said that X - which claimed it lost millions of dollars in advertising as a result of the CCDH's research - had failed to "allege losses based on technological harms."
"This is a huge win for everyone working to hold social media giants accountable," the center said in a fundraising statement posted online.
X said it "disagrees with the court's decision and plans to appeal."
In a November 2022 report, the CCDH said it found the use of racial slurs against Black people rose three times more than average in the week after Musk, a self-described "free speech absolutist," bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022.
The use of offensive terms for trans people, homosexual men, Jews and Hispanics also increased, according to the report.
In November, IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast, said they stopped advertising on X after the liberal advocacy group Media Matters said their ads were appearing next to messages posted by neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
X sued Media Matters a week later in a case that remains pending and Musk also went on a profane rant during a New York Times DealBook Summit at which he told fleeing advertisers, "Go f--- yourself."
