Democratic Reps. Lori Trahan (Mass.), Sean Casten (Ill.) and Adam Schiff (Calif.) sent Musk a letter Tuesday slamming the company’s “hostile stance” toward a group that researched hate speech on Twitter.
The letter comes after Musk’s lawyers sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization that tracks online hate speech and misinformation.
The group and other researchers “regularly study trends of potentially harmful behavior on social media platforms and post articles detailing their findings,” including of X’s competitors like Meta, Google and TikTok, the Democrats wrote.
“However, under your leadership, X is taking a hostile stance toward those efforts, further contributing to existing concerns about X’s abilities to effectively address the harms that exist on your platform,” they added.
The letter also asked for details about how the platform allows researchers to gather data, repeating a request the three Democrats made from X in March.
“Independent researchers play an outsize role in providing transparency and accountability into not just X, but all social media platforms,” they wrote.
“However, by filing suit against the CCDH, X is uniquely resisting those important efforts and stifling unbiased research in the public interest,” they wrote in Tuesday’s letter.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
