Elon Musk said that his social media company X will pay the legal bills of users who have been mistreated by their employers for posting or engaging with content on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In an Aug. 5 post on X announcing the move, Mr. Musk pledged to support potential lawsuits regardless of their scale.
“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit. Please let us know.” the billionaire owner of X wrote.
Mr. Musk later added that he would also put up a public relations campaign against companies that punish employees for their social media activities.
“And we won’t just sue, it will be extremely loud, and we will go after the boards of directors of the companies too,” he wrote in response to a comment saying that in the United States, nothing changes behavior faster than the threat of legal action.
While Mr. Musk gave further no details on how users could claim money for their legal fees, some users are quick to put their hands up to show him whom they believe deserves legal funding.
Among those identified victims of employer mistreatment is Kara Lynne, a former employee at the video game company Limited Run Games. She was fired earlier this year after transgender activists accused her of being a “transphobe” who followed purportedly “right-wing transphobic” accounts.
Calling for Ms. Lynne’s firing, the activists also dug up a post from 2016—four years before she started working at Limited Run Games, which said: “If you think the [number] of trans crying about using a bathroom is higher than the perves using the excuse, you are what is wrong with this world.”
According to Ms. Lynne, the outrage was triggered by a post in which she expressed excitement about the release of a new Harry Potter-themed video game, which some activists have threatened to boycott because of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s views on womanhood, such as that transgender people identifying as women but do not menstruate are not real women.
Limited Run Games fired Mr. Lynne just hours after activists complained about her employment, with a statement saying that they “remain committed to supporting an inclusive culture” and want to “foster a positive and safe environment for everyone.”
Appearing to be intrigued by the story, Mr. Musk responded to a post calling for justice for Ms. Lynne by asking, “Kara, is that accurate?”
Ms. Lynne then replied: “The situation is slightly more complicated than the headline. But yes.”
“It was led by someone who dug through my tweets and found a single one from 2016 regarding hesitation of people taking advantage of the bathroom discussion. Started a witch hunt, and I was fired the same day,” she explained in a follow-up post. “Happy to chat more about it if you are interested.”
“Great, let’s have at it!” Mr. Musk wrote.
Saturday’s announcement followed a lawsuit X filed last week against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), British non-profit organization that researches what it calls “online hate and disinformation.”
Specifically, the CCDH claimed it has found that the volume of posts containing slurs has risen by up to 202 percent since Mr. Musk bought Twitter, and the number of posts linking LGBT people to “grooming” have more than doubled over that time. It also argued that paid-for verification is “helping spread disinformation.”
“CCDH has done this by engaging in a series of unlawful acts designed to improperly gain access to protected X Corp. data, needed by CCDH so that it could cherry-pick from the hundreds of millions of posts made each day on X and falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content,” the company claimed, accusing CCDH of obtaining X’s data without the authorization of Brandwatch, a social media analytic firm working with X.
The company said it “not only rejects all claims made by the CCDH but, through our own investigation, we have identified several ways in which the CCDH is actively working to prevent free expression.” That includes allegedly “targeting people on all platforms who speak about issues the CCDH doesn’t agree with,” “attempting to coerce the deplatforming of users whose views do not conform to the CCDH’s ideological agenda,” and “targeting free-speech organizations by focusing on their revenue stream to remove free services for people.”
In an Aug. 1 statement about the lawsuit, CCDH founder and chief executive Imran Ahmed described it as the X owner’s attempt to “silence anyone who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions.”
“The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s research shows that hate and disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the platform under Musk’s ownership, and this lawsuit is a direct attempt to silence those efforts,” said Mr. Ahmed. “Musk is trying to ’shoot the messenger' who highlights the toxic content on his platform rather than deal with the toxic environment he’s created.”
