Editor's Note: On "UK Files, Part 2"

Putting a few things in perspective.

The CCDH made headlines of late after being sued by Elon Musk’s X.

After an unwieldy interruption, Racket just published the second part of Paul Holden’s “UK Files” series, the first segment of which was published last October. The piece, titled, “The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Told the IRS It Was A Charity. Documents Say Otherwise,” describes Holden’s efforts to cross-check the IRS filings of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s U.S. entity against British public records, while also digging through previously unreleased internal Labour Party communications.

American readers may be tempted to shrug at this story. The CCDH, apart from making headlines via its ongoing beef with Elon Musk and X and its status as an investigative target of Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government Committee, is not at the forefront of most Americans’ political thinking. Though it is a prominent character in Twitter Files documents, we only published a fraction of those communications.

The fate of CCDH should matter, however. As Holden shows, this group — though perenially represented to news consumers using anodyne terms like “online hate watchdog” (CNN), “anti-hate group” (The Verge, Fortune), an “online group that tracks hate speech” (The New York Times) or even just “disinformation researchers” (NPR) — is in fact the partisan project of a think-tank called Labour Together. The CCDH has been a targeting mechanism deployed against Labour’s left-populist faction in the same way that the Center for American Progress has been used by Clinton/Biden Democrats against the intramural challenge from Bernie Sanders.

As anyone who’s read Thomas Frank’s excellent The People, No knows, the propaganda technique of denouncing populist challengers to the status quo as bigots or traitorous trumpeters of foreign disinformation is an ancient method, one proven to work across more than a century. The CCDH’s mastery of Internet agitation makes it stand out as the modern standard-bearer for this old propaganda mechanism.

Though it represents centrist Labour ambitions in Britain, the CCDH is aligned with mainstream American media and uniparty politics on most issues, which is why Paul’s success in finding documents concretely tying it to Labour Together is important. This makes it at least a little harder for editors now on both sides of the pond to completely blow off CCDH’s political ties when covering its various campaigns to deplatform Labour or Democratic Party critics, or label them purveyors of “hate” and bigotry. They’ll still do it, shamelessly, but they’ll have to at least make a conscious decision to suck each time now.

Lastly, Holden’s effort in digging up the IRS application of CCDH is an example of what indepedent journalism can still do in this rapidly-narrowing speech environment. A handful of good transparency laws and rules were passed long ago making it difficult for powerful institutions to hide basic information from the public. While those tools are still available, we need to use them as much as we can, because bet on this: ways are being sought to close every one of those loopholes. It’s why Racket invests in the filing of FOIA requests. While they’re still allowed, we need to support every one of these archeological digs.

In any case, thanks, and more coming on other topics soon.