Elon Musk’s X sued this nonprofit after it exposed hate speech, and its new research shows little has changed

Published

2 years ago

September 13, 2023

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Hate speech continues to flourish on the messaging service formerly known as Twitter, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The CCDH said Wednesday that X fails to remove posts that contain hate speech despite being notified that the content violates the company’s current hateful conduct guidelines.

The CCDH’s report comes a little after one month after X sued the nonprofit over allegations that some of the group’s previous research was derived from unscrupulous methods, including the use of illegally scraped Twitter data.

CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed declined to comment about the specifics of the lawsuit, but said the CCDH did not use data-scraping tools to conduct its latest research and instead “simply went in and had a look.”

For this report, the CCDH collected 300 posts spread from 100 accounts that contained hateful content, such as posts urging people to “stop race mixing” and messages stating that Black people are intrinsically violent. About 140 of those 300 posts contained antisemitic content, including images of Nazi swastikas, messages supporting Holocaust denial and notes promoting conspiracy theories related to Jews.

The CCDH said it reported the posts to X via the company’s user-reporting tools on Aug. 30 and 31. When the researchers followed up a week later, they found that X had only taken down 41 posts, meaning that 259 posts containing hateful content were still active, including one that that referred to Adolf Hitler as “A hero who will help secure a future for white children!” Additionally, 90 of the 100 accounts that were responsible for sending the posts were still active.

Major companies like Apple and Disney ran online ads on X that appeared next to the hateful content, the CCDH report said. One ad from Walt Disney World ran below a post that insulted Black Americans while an Apple ad was displayed above a post insinuating Holocaust denial. Another ad from the corporate server company Supermicro was sandwiched between two pro-Nazi posts that contained images of a swastika.

“What this shows is that it takes out any excuses of this being about capacity to detect problematic content,” CCDH’s Ahmed told CNBC. “We’ve done the detection for you, and here’s how you responded, or here’s how we can see that you responded.”

Ahmed added, “Leaving up content like this is a choice, and that invites the question: Are you proud of the choices you’re making?”

While X’s process for users to report hateful content is “straightforward,” Ahmed said, “the problem is that people on the other end of the alarm bell either aren’t listening, they’ve got earplugs in and they’re ignoring everything, or they are being incredibly selective in what they choose to respond to.”

X did not respond to a request for comment, and instead pointed to a post saying that “based on the limited information we’ve seen, the CCDH is asserting two false claims – that X did not take action on violative posts and that violative posts reached a lot of people on our platform.”

“We either remove content that violates our policies or label and restrict the reach of certain posts,” the company said in the X post, adding that it would review the report when it is released and “take action as needed.”

While he didn’t comment on the specifics, Ahmed told CNBC that he believes X’s lawsuit was intended to place a financial burden on the CCDH, and that he estimates it will cost the nonprofit “half a million just to defend it.”

X attorneys have previously said that the CCDH’s prior research was an attempt to “to drive advertisers off Twitter by smearing the company and its owner.”

Last week, Elon Musk said that he was considering filing a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed was “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” Musk attributed a 60% decline in X’s U.S. advertising revenue to a pressure campaign from the ADL.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt soon responded by saying that Musk was merely issuing a “threat of a frivolous lawsuit” and said that the billionaire’s behavior was “flat out dangerous and deeply irresponsible,” referring to Musk engaging with “a highly toxic, antisemitic campaign” that helped foster the #BanTheADL campaign to trend on the messaging service.

Last Friday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote a post on X saying that “X opposes antisemitism in all its forms” and that “Antisemitism is evil and X will always work to fight it on our platform.” Yaccarino’s post also pointed to a corporate blog post detailing the ways X is addressing antisemitic content on its platform, including improving automatic enforcement and providing training support for its “frontline moderators.”

Watch: If you don’t have the whole cloth of Musk you won’t get the innovation

Technology

Tesla obtains permit to operate ride-hail service in Arizona

Published

3 hours ago

November 19, 2025

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Tesla obtains permit to operate ride-hail service in Arizona

A Tesla Inc. robotaxi on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, on June 22, 2025.

Tim Goessman | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tesla has obtained a permit to operate a ride-hailing service in Arizona, the state’s department of transportation said.

The electric vehicle company applied for a “transportation network company” permit on Nov. 13, and was approved on Monday, ADOT said in an emailed statement. Additional permits will be required before Tesla can operate a robotaxi service in Arizona.

In July, Tesla applied to conduct autonomous vehicle testing and operations in Phoenix, with and without human safety drivers on board. A month earlier, Tesla started a robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, with safety valets and remote operators. Tesla also operates a more traditional car service in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla plans to take human safety drivers out of its cars in Austin before the end of this year. The company is aiming to operate a commercial robotaxi service in Phoenix and several other U.S. cities before the end of 2026.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website, Tesla cars equipped with automated driving systems were involved in seven reported collisions following the launch of the company’s pilot in Texas.

Competitors including Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China are way ahead in the nascent robotaxi ride-hailing market. In the Phoenix area, Waymo operates a sizable commercial business, with at least 400 autonomous vehicles, the company previously told CNBC. In May, Waymo said it had surpassed 10 million driverless trips served to riders across the U.S.

Baidu said in an earnings update on Tuesday that its Apollo Go service “provided 3.1 million fully driverless operational rides in the third quarter of 2025,” representing year-over-year growth of 212%.

Musk has been promising that Tesla will “solve” autonomy for years without reaching its goals. The world’s richest person has continued with the lofty pronouncements.

At the company’s 2025 shareholder meeting earlier this month, Musk said the “killer app” for self-driving technology is when people can “text and drive,” or “sleep and drive.”

“Before we allow the car to be driven without paying attention, we need to make sure it’s very safe,” Musk said. “We’re on the cusp of that. I know I’ve said that a few times. We really are at this point.”

WATCH: Baidu to ramp up global exports as robotaxi service grows in China

Technology

CNBC Daily Open: The flow of money in AI appears one-way at this point

Published

5 hours ago

November 19, 2025

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CNBC Daily Open: The flow of money in AI appears one-way at this point

The Anthropic website on Friday, Aug. 22, 2025.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Money keeps flowing into artificial intelligence companies but out of AI stocks.

In what looks like — once again — a scenario of the left hand scratching the right, Microsoft and Nvidia will be investing a combined $15 billion into Anthropic, while the OpenAI competitor has committed to buying compute power from its two newest stakeholders. At this point, it seems as if a big proportion of AI news can be summarized as: “Company X invests in Company Y, and Company Y will buy things from Company X.”

Okay, that’s unfair. There are a lot of developments in the AI world that are not about investments but, well, development. Google unveiled the third version of Gemini, its AI model, which Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s AI unit DeepMind, said “will be “trading cliché and flattery for genuine insight.” (But I still want an AI chatbot to compliment me on my curiosity when I ask how to cut a pear, so I’m not sure if that’s a pro for me.)

Investors, however, still appear skeptical about AI. Major names such as Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft tumbled Tuesday stateside, giving the S&P 500 its fourth straight session in the red — the longest decline since August.

And if Nvidia — “the top company within the top industry within the top sector,” as CFRA’s chief investment strategist Sam Stovall puts it — fails to satisfy investors’ expectations when it reports earnings Wednesday, we might be seeing the S&P 500’s slide extend.

What you need to know today

The S&P 500 falls for a fourth consecutive day. Other major indexes also moved lower Tuesday stateside, while bitcoin prices dropped below $90,000 before recovering. Europe’s regional Stoxx 600 sank 1.72% and touched its lowest level in a month.

Anthropic signs deal with Microsoft and Nvidia. Microsoft announced Tuesday it will invest up to $5 billion in the startup, while Nvidia will put in up to $10 billion. That puts Anthropic’s valuation around $350 billion, according to a source.

Google announces its latest AI model Gemini 3. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday it will require “less prompting” for desired answers. The update comes eight months after Google introduced Gemini 2.5, and will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

U.S. Senators urge investigation into Trump-linked crypto firm. World Liberty Finance, heavily owned and run by the Trump family, sold tokens to a North Korean hacking organization, an Iranian crypto exchange and others, according to a corporate watchdog.

[PRO] Potentially resilient stocks amid AI slump. There are some global stocks and non-equity assets that could weather the turbulence in U.S. tech names happening recently, strategists told CNBC.

And finally…

Oleksii Liskonih | Istock | Getty Images

Diplomatic spat between Tokyo and Beijing threatens Japan’s already fragile economy

Miffed over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments related to Taiwan, China on Friday advised its citizens against travelling to the country. Japanese tourism-exposed stocks fell in the aftermath of that warning, while experts caution the impact could be more severe over a longer duration.

Takahide Kiuchi, executive economist at Nomura Research Institute, said tensions between the two Asian powers could result in a 1.79 trillion yen drop in Japan’s GDP over the course of one year — a 0.29% decline in the country’s GDP.

— Lim Hui Jie