‘It’s because you do good work’

By targeting the CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Trump regime is caught in another big lie

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There were many moments of grave despair when doing the work to counter digital hatred and lies. I remember the exact dates when the most harmful hits came, what I was working on, and the discovery of who the real people were behind the campaigns — childhood acquaintances, fired media executives, failed journalists, grifters, psychos, a wide array of soul-sick individuals.

When we launched RadPod, our podcast to expose disinformation and radicalization, the campaign to destroy us mobilized immediately. That was four years ago, but I recall the pain of the initial wave of attacks — designed to discredit us from the world, disenfranchise us from supporters, poison our allies against us — and how I was soothed by these six words:

“It’s because you do good work.”

I have shared those words with many pro-democracy truth activists in the crosshairs of digital hate campaigns. These hate campaigns originate in Lubyanka, and are waged through amoral cutouts located on couches throughout the world. Turns out, a lot of people will work for crypto, targeting journalists, scientists, academics, and activists. They’re paid to make their targets so radioactive, they become discredited, unemployable, and despondent. The PTSD is real and profound, trauma by internet, that often moves off the web and into real life.

“It’s because you do good work” sustained me through some pretty dark times.

The words were a gift to me and my RadPod team from Imran Ahmed, now in the crosshairs of US leaders with snow on their boots.

Under the lie of ‘free speech’ — Ahmed, the founding CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate — was among five people denied US visas after the Trump administration accused them of seeking to ‘coerce’ tech platforms. A US judge has temporarily blocked the detention of Ahmed, who launched a counteroffensive, filing a complaint against senior Trump allies for their bullying action.

Tolerance of the Intolerable

Here is the video clip from RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast Episode 6, December 20, 2021, where he explained to me, Jim, and HiFi why we face attacks:

Here is what he said in that clip:

“In terms of the personal attacks, it’s because you do good work. Now that’s the first thing to remember, and it’s really difficult for our minds to realize this — that when someone’s saying, ‘I hate you, you’re disgusting, you’re a piece of crap, and I want to kill you,’ they’re not doing it because you’re a bad person. They’re doing it literally because the work that you do is important, and that’s the reason why.

I give a lot of advice to organizations, to other nonprofits. I give advice to scientists working on Covid, on the vaccines, and we’ve done that for the last year and a half. We do it pro bono for the main part, to help them understand that this is happening because you’re good. It’s happening because you’re doing something valuable, and they want to stop you from doing it. So they seek to terrorize you.

So I’m sorry that you face it, but you know, take it in one respect, as a measure of the impact of the work that you do.

That particular subtype of malignancy that’s being produced by social media, and by the tolerance of the intolerable by these companies, so you’ve got disinformation, which is the drip, drip of lies, which seeks to recolor the lens through which we see the world, such that we believe that things are not the way that they in fact are — whether it is the organization of hate groups, and we’ve done work on groups as diverse as neo-Nazi terrorist groups to Islamic State — whether it’s that or discourse shaping.

So the way that trolling is used to shape what people feel they can say and to therefore shape discourse in favor of bad actors. I mean, these are all things that happen because the toleration of the intolerable, despite their own rules by the platforms.

And I think it comes down more fundamentally to one thing: the truth is that these companies would make different decisions if it was in their interest to do so.

I always think of these private companies as essentially amoral, they exist to produce wealth, and they will do that within whatever regulatory framework you put around them.”

Ahmed, a graduate of Cambridge University who is from Manchester, England, was living legally in Washington, DC, at the time of our interview. I watched as his team bravely defended their work against a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk, another liar.

Musk sued Ahmed’s nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate for publishing reports on rising hate speech and disinformation after he took over Twitter. Musk complained that the reports led to a decline in ad revenue. CCDH laid bare the facts, with receipts, from what we all witnessed with our own eyes after Musk invited all the previously banned grotesques back on Twitter to spread their hate and lies.

A US judge dismissed the lawsuit in March 2024, ruling that ‘X’ was trying to punish CCDH for its critical speech — free speech btw — and that such lawfare by the richest man in the world was designed to ‘discourage further criticism,’ calling it a First Amendment issue. Today, I noted that Musk banned both Ahmed’s Twitter account and that of the CCDH. As I predicted three years ago, Twitter now operates as a Russian propaganda outlet under the guise of a social media platform.

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Turning Off the Raging Spigot

After being targeted again this Christmas week, Ahmed said in a statement: “I am proud to call the United States my home. My wife and daughter are American, and instead of spending Christmas with them, I am fighting to prevent my unlawful deportation from my home country.”

I often think about how Ahmed, who worked with senior Labour figures, got into defending the free world against digital hate. He was inspired after a terrible tragedy: the murder of his colleague, British MP Jo Cox, in June of 2016. The murderer, an unemployed gardener, had been radicalized online, embracing Nazi and white supremacist ideology. Cox, a humanitarian who supported refugees, was shot three times and stabbed 15 times. Her murder, deemed a terrorist act, was celebrated with 50,000 tweets.

Now, we witness Ahmed defend himself against the US government, for trying to turn off the raging spigot of hateful poison.

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I woke up this morning, a day celebrated in parts of the world as St. Stephen’s Day, and wanted to give him a gift for his strength and bravery.

I sent him these six words:

“It’s because you do good work.”

I returned a gift he once gave to me.

He thanked me.

I reflected this morning about the best thing about doing this difficult work — the people we meet along the way.

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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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