The head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) attempted to claim that his organisation is not a censorship outfit as he faces potential deportation from the United States for involvement in silencing American voices online.
Imran Ahmed, a left-wing UK-citizen politico turned censorship activist who runs the British government-tied CCDH, gave a string of interviews over the weekend following an emergency Christmas ruling by a Federal District Court judge in New York to block the Trump administration from detaining and deporting him from the United States after he was sanctioned for having led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”
The former Labour Party advisor, who resides in the United States on a Green Card, has accused the Trump administration of violating his Constitutional rights, in particular First Amendment protections, by seeking to remove him from the country over his activist work, which has included efforts to force social media and search companies to blacklist conservative news outlets such as Breitbart News.
In an interview with PBS, Ahmed also asserted that Center for Countering Digital Hate was not involved in censorship, saying: “We’re a nonprofit, and we can’t therefore be censoring things, which is, of course, something that the government does.”
However, documents obtained last year by America First Legal found that members of the CCDH were in regular contact with White House officials in the Biden administration, which reportedly used its findings to weaponize the vast counter-terrorism apparatus of the United States government to silence people during the coronavirus crisis.
Internal CCDH documents showed the body had set itself the task of wielding British and European Union internet control laws, and to “destroy Musk’s Twitter”.
The House Judiciary Committee found in 2023 that the Biden administration had “repeatedly relied” on the CCDH’s infamous “Disinformation Dozen” report to pressure social media firms to “censor Americans, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who CCDH maligned as ‘anti -vaxxers… responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms’.”
Ahmed attempted to cast his organisation’s efforts as merely providing “accountability” to large social media companies, which he described in a separate interview with the left-wing British Guardian newspaper as displaying “arrogance, indifference and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people.”
Like others sanctioned by the U.S. government in this week’s announcement, Ahmed attempted to claim that the State Department’s bid to end censorship was, in fact, an act of censorship and rather than himself having been exposed as a mendacious hypocrite, it is actually his opponents who deserve the label.
He suggested that the reason why the Trump administration was targeting groups such as his was from pressure from tech bosses, saying: “We’ve seen that social media and AI companies are increasingly under pressure as a result of organisations like mine… No one likes being exposed as mendacious or hypocritical, but they call their friends in government or they call their pitbull litigation lawyers and start suing.”
The issue of whether the White House’s efforts to remove Ahmed from the country will come before a court again on Monday. While the British national has expressed confidence that his residency in the United States will be upheld, the State Department said on Thursday: “The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: The United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on X: Follow @KurtZindulka or e-mail to: [email protected]
Read the full article here