An explosive report by journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker exposed a scheme by the Center for Countering Digital Hate to aggressively advance censorship on social media and in particular to target Elon Musk's X. Internal documents from the far-left group founded by British political operative and Kamala Harris presidential campaign adviser, Morgan McSweeney, show its plans to “kill Musk’s Twitter” by harassing advertisers on the platform, and working with EU regulators and US left-wing politicians to penalize Musk.
The group also plans to work with elected senior left-wing politicians in the U.S. like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”
Here is the explosive report by Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker, in part:
The documents obtained by The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket show CCDH’s hyperfocus on Musk — “Kill Musk’s Twitter” is the first item in the template of its monthly agenda notes dating back to the early months of this year.
KILL, KILL, KILL: No matter what else the CCDH talks about, “Kill Musk’s Twitter” is its first item of business.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate is the anti-disinformation activist ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, and a messaging vehicle for Labour’s neoliberal think tank, Labour Together. Both the CCDH and Labour Together were founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street, much as Karl Rove is credited with guiding George W. Bush to the White House.
The CCDH documents carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together political operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, leading Politico to call Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.” CCDH’s focus on “Kill Musk’s Twitter” also adds to legal questions about the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) organization.
According to the IRS, CCDH could lose its special tax status if “a substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation.” Yet, CCDH’s third item on its annual priority list is “Trigger EU and UK regulatory action” and the group previously employed the firm Lot Sixteen to lobby congressional offices on “misinformation” in Washington.
Both The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket have sent multiple, extensive questions to CCDH’s current CEO Imran Ahmed, another British political operative tied to McSweeney’s Labour Together. Despite repeated requests for comment, Ahmed has refused to respond.
In the last two months, the Washington Post and Politico, among others, have run a series of features about British advisors from Labour Together rescuing the distressed political damsel that is the Harris/Walz campaign. Politico casts McSweeney as the “election mastermind” who first helped Keir Starmer defeat leftist Jeremy Corbyn to become the head of Labour, all the way to Starmer’s “landslide” win over Conservatives to become Prime Minister this past July, implying that McSweeney and his team can perform a similar miracle for Harris.
McSweeney is an ascendant figure, having just been promoted to Starmer’s Chief of Staff in something of a palace coup after the abrupt resignation of longtime Labour fixture Sue Gray. McSweeney is lionized, not just for a Carville-style rightward tilt within the party, but for mastery of fundraising and dark money, having reportedly pulled a host of new wealthy donors to Labour in the last two years.
After 25 years of the “special relationship” being essentially “one-way traffic,” with Washington politicos advising the Brits, the Democrats “now believe they actually have something to learn from Labour,” as Politico explained. Democrats will supposedly learn from Labour’s tactical brilliance. For example, Starmer countered former Conservative PM Rishi Sunak’s accusations of being soft on immigration by promising to “smash the criminal boat gangs” bringing migrants across the English channel.
The new British government also believes that a Harris defeat would leave Starmer “alone” as the “keeper of the center-left flame” and in “worrying isolation” as “the Grand Atlantic Alliance's last hope.” On top of providing election strategy, over 100 “current and former Labour staffers” have begun knocking on doors for Harris this summer, drawing howls from Trump surrogates such as Sebastian Gorka, who called it a “bloody outrage.”
The Stateside dispatch of Labour personnel has been depicted in British media as a self-interested gambit to keep America’s war machinery closely aligned with Israel and Ukraine, and billions of American defense dollars flowing in both directions.
However, these are only the visible parts of the British invasion. McSweeney’s Labour Together has been operating in the U.S. for several years through CCDH.
The Starmer/Labour Together formula for regaining power in the U.K. relied heavily on CCDH’s aggressive efforts to deplatform rivals on the Left and Right by lobbing accusations of bigotry, misinformation, and other misdeeds. As reported in Tablet and Racket, one of CCDH’s successes involved silencing Starmer’s critics on the left by leading a boycott of advertisers for news sites like the left-leaning Canary, on the grounds that its pro-Palestinian takes were anti-Semitic.
McSweeney has been praised for convincing Starmer that “he needed to sacrifice party unity to demoralize the far-left faction,” as Politico put it.
In the U.S., a now-defunct CCDH offshoot called Stop Funding Fake News led multiple successful boycotts of media figures across the spectrum, from Zero Hedge during the BLM riots to The Federalist. The formula often involved collaborating with a mainstream media outlet to level an accusation of bigotry, followed by a pressure campaign against advertisers to shut off revenue to the target.
“CCDH went directly after us and he worked with Google when they briefly suspended all advertising on Zero Hedge, our primary source of revenue then,” recalls Zero Hedge editor Tyler Durden, noting that the boycott came after CCDH worked with NBC on an article depicting them as racist for claiming damage from BLM riots was under-covered. Similar tactics led to demonetization of The Federalist, whose apparent crime was a June 3, 2020 piece called, “The Media Are Lying to You About Everything, Including the Riots.” Like Zero Hedge, The Federalist criticized mainstream coverage of BLM protests, including calling not-yet-fired CNNanchor Don Lemon a “not very bright man.”
“NBC News colluded with a foreign left-wing group in an attempt to destroy us because it disagrees with our political commentary and media criticism,” The Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway told The Wall Street Journal at the time.
Meanwhile, CCDH launched a separate campaign against Substack claiming the company profited from vaccine disinformation. It failed, as the firm “essentially told them to fuck off” when asked to ban contributors like Alex Berenson and Dr. Joseph Mercola from the platform, as a person with ties to the company put it. Berenson’s crime was the headline, “Vaccines don’t stop Covid hospitalizations or deaths,” an article based on a Journal of the American Medical Associationreport. “At Substack, we don’t make moderation decisions based on public pressure,” wrote Substack’s then-PR Director Lulu Meservey. CCDH then quietly “backed off.”
Now, CCDH’s growing Washington office is working on similar plans to “kill” the online presence of Democratic rivals like Musk by attacking X’s advertising revenue, a tactic first perfected in London against The Canary. CCDH is also laying the foundation for broader regulatory changes in the direction of platform censorship.
“60 meetings on the Hill,” reads one CCDH task assignment from early 2024. “Meeting with 16 congressional offices over the next two weeks to give updates on the Elon lawsuit,” reads another, referring to Musk’s since-dismissed lawsuit against CCDH accusing it of manipulating data to make a case for proliferation of hate speech on X.
CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.
The latter law has been the basis for Starmer and Ofcom threatening Musk with “strong action” in the wake of this summer’s riots, which the UK claims were fueled by disinformation.
That the CCDH is pushing STAR in the US is obvious from its agenda notes. Equally clear however is that the group held those meetings while its senior officials wondered if they were violating lobbying laws. “Question on lobbying — if it is anything that Congress could have a vote on, it counts as lobbying,” reads one note from a January meeting. “Question on lobbying. Imran needs that to be checked, and if necessary register a c4 ASAP,” reads a later note in February.
“QUERY ON LOBBYING”: Agenda notes from January 22nd show CCDH was ignorant about its legal obligations three years after gaining tax-exempt status
CCDH gained tax-exempt status by registering as a 501(c)(3) organization in the US in 2021, but the IRS says “an organization will be regarded as attempting to influence legislation if it contacts, or urges the public to contact, members or employees of a legislative body for the purpose of proposing, supporting, or opposing legislation.” In some instances, it appears the group is cognizant of that line.
“Understanding our limitations… as a 501c3,” was another part of discussions last January. Nonetheless, the group repeatedly scheduled multiple meetings with legislators to discuss pushing STAR and other proposals, with Ahmed and others openly talking about pushing for legislation and how CCDH’s work “will help us inch towards our goal of regulatory action”:
“TOWARDS OUR GOAL OF REGULATORY ACTION”: The tax-exempt CCDH is officially barred from substantial lobbying activities, but not privately.
It’s crucial to understand that CCDH, Labour Together, and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party exist as a single package, with McSweeney at the helm. No political operative in the Western hemisphere is more in demand than Starmer’s “Rasputin,” regularly hailed as a genius. Much like Rove, however, the McSweeney reputation is built more on mudslinging and character assassination than insight into voter needs. Canary-style efforts and boycotts have already begun in the U.S.
McSweeney’s Labour Together colleague Imran Ahmed opened a CCDH office in DC three years ago and began working with American journalists to suppress dissent and enforce narratives friendly to Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration.
The CCDH was also a character in the Twitter Files, notably organizing a letter from State Attorneys General to the platform seeking to ban the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” over Covid-related content, a group that included Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“I hope you will take decisive action to prevent them from endangering people’s safety any longer,” wrote Imran Ahmed in a July 2020 email to Twitter, while forwarding the “The Disinformation Dozen” report.
CCDH and the Twitter Files: Letter to Twitter about the “Disinformation Dozen.”
“The Disinformation Dozen” report coincided nicely with a Biden administration campaign to beat back American fears of the COVID vaccine and was referenced by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in a warning that social media companies should censor the accounts.
“There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” Psaki claimed, citing the CCDH’s work. Three years later the truth finally caught up with Ahmed’s misinformation. In recent months, Forbes, The Independent, and The Guardian have all issued corrections to articles on CCDH’s 2021 report noting that Facebook investigated CCDH’s allegations and found them baseless and without proven methodology.
According to documents provided to both publications along with interviews with CCDH whistleblowers, an invitation-only conference held this past summer in Washington underscores the group’s priorities. Attendees at CCDH’s private event included a slew of liberal groups now organizing against Musk including a senior advisor at the White House, a Democratic Party staffer in the office of Congressman Adam Schiff, Biden/Harris State Department officials, Canadian MP Peter Julian (recently tweeted “Boycott all advertisers on Twitter”) and Media Matters for America (a Democratic party-aligned watchdog now locked in a lawsuit with Musk).
The second annual CCDH priority on the document reads, “Advertising focus.” This likely references the group’s apparent strategy of publishing reports that claim Musk allowed hate to proliferate on X, followed by efforts to drive away the company’s advertisers.
In his soon to be released book “THE FRAUD: Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy,” investigative reporter Paul Holden spends multiple chapters documenting Ahmed’s work during his time in the UK and says CCDH’s activity was appalling. “Ahmed abused the concept of disinformation to attack political opponents, based largely on unfounded claims,” he says.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate invented the “advertising focus” tactic to destroy political enemies back in London. CCDH’s campaign involved constant claims of antisemitism thrown at the Canary to drive away the news site’s advertising and tank their funding. “Bye bye birdie! Hyper-partisan fake news website The Canary is on its last legs!” tweeted British TV host and CCDH campaigner, Rachel Riley, celebrating a 2019 crash in Canary’s advertising.
At the time, Riley and others affiliated with CCDH and a coordinating group called Stop Funding Fake News (SSFN) claimed that CCDH and SFFN’s membership had to remain anonymous for fear of retribution and hate. But the Canary later exposed both groups as fake grassroots organizations that were actually political campaigns operated by Labour Together and Imran Ahmed.
Until the Canary revealed Ahmed as the man running CCDH, he remained in the shadows. Once exposed, Ahmed admitted to running CCDH since its beginning although he gets the date wrong. McSweeney started the group in 2018, but Ahmed claims on his CV to have been its leader since 2017. Ahmed’s CV was provided by a whistleblower.
McSweeney and Ahmed kept much of Labour Together’s political shenanigans hidden from public view, but former Guardian editor Anushka Asthana has dredged up bits and pieces of McSweeney’s rise to power in a recently published book Taken As Red, an excerpt of which appears on the Guardian website:
One of McSweeney’s obsessions was the Canary, an alt-left website that had seemed to appear from nowhere and grown to a peak of 8.5m hits a month. Moreover, Corbyn supporters trusted the site equally to the Guardian, their other favourite source of information. And so McSweeney had an aim – to schmooze the Guardian and kill the Canary. “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us,” he told the Labour Together MPs.
Canary editors riffed off the former Guardian editor’s book excerpt, noting with irony that McSweeney’s CCDH helped kill off their advertisers by laundering fake claims of antisemitism against them …. through the Guardian. Indeed, a later investigation by the media regulator IMPRESS found nothing the Canary published was antisemitic.
“However, what McSweeney did achieve was to tarnish the Canary’s reputation,” the Canary added. “Of course, he also achieved his ultimate goal of destroying Corbyn’s leadership and getting Keir Starmer into power.”
Nobody understood how McSweeney funded his campaign to beat Labour’s left and run his CCDH’s campaign against the Canary, but The Telegraph disclosed some hints earlier this year. During McSweeney's tenure at Labour Together, the group failed to declare over £700,000 in campaign donations from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen.
Fresh from success at destroying the Canary and the Labour left, Imran Ahmed brought the CCDH campaign to the States in 2021. And the group has continued to operate as it has in the past: a dark money political campaign that dances around legalities while hiding the names of employees and donors. As reported in Tablet, U.S. tax records show that Ahmed collected $1.47 million in donations in 2021.
Although CCDH does not disclose donors, $1.1 million of that money came from one anonymous donor, meaning almost 75% of CCDH’s funding in their first year. A whistleblower says that CCDH’s management told staff that this initial bolus of funding came from Aleen Keshishian, a Hollywood agent for actor Mark Ruffalo, who promotes Imran Ahmed on X. Keshishian sits on CCDH’s board, and CCDH employees are reminded to treat her nicely.
Another Keshishian client, the singer and actress Selena Gomez, has also apparently provided secret funding to CCDH, although that donation has not been disclosed publicly until now.
Aleen Keshisian did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket.
Subsequent reports in this The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket series will contain more information about the emerging theme of cooperation between Hollywood figures and censorship advocacy groups like the CCDH.
STAR BACKING FOR “STAR” CENSORSHIP PROGRAM? Agent Aleen Keshishian with client Selena Gomez, reportedly a CCDH financial backer
Journalist Paul Holden, who put together the “U.K. Files” docs here, reported earlier this year that CCDH’s 2021 submission to the IRS for tax-exempt status claimed CCDH was operating as a registered charity in the U.K.
Neither Ahmed nor his attorneys responded to questions about his false paperwork filed with the IRS. We then ran the documents past tax attorney Dean Zerbe, who authored the tax code reform that governs American nonprofits. Zerbe said he hoped the IRS would take a “hard look” at CCDH for submitting false information to gain nonprofit status.
Many of CCDH’s current staff remain hidden, but one of Ahmed’s most critical employees is Callum Hood, CCDH’s head of research. Like Ahmed, Hood has never fully disclosed his ties to the Labour Party’s conservatives who sought to drive Corbyn from power. On his LinkedIn page, Hood lists the Center for Countering Digital Hate as the only job he has ever held. However, sources in London have provided much of Hood’s background. Like Imran Ahmed, he staffed a member of the Labour Party’s conservative wing.
According to British Parliament records, Hood worked for Labour Party MP Ian Austin. Austin helped lead the charge against Corbyn’s leadership and urged voters to back Conservative Boris Johnson. When Johnson became Prime Minister, he then recommended Austin to the House of Lords.
Austin now goes by the title “Lord Austin of Dudley.”
“This was a political project from the beginning by Labour Together that hid its political origins, which is especially ironic as it’s created its own exercise in fake news and disinformation, Holden says. “It’s extremely disturbing that Imran has influence in the US, considering his key aim is to censor speech he disagrees with.”
