The Center for Countering Digital Hate is the anti-disinformation activist ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, and a messaging vehicle for Labour’s neoliberal think tank, Labour Together. Both the CCDH and Labour Together were founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street, much as Karl Rove is credited with guiding George W. Bush to the White House.

The CCDH documents carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, leading Politico to call Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.” CCDH’s focus on “Kill Musk’s Twitter” also adds to legal questions about the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) organization.

According to the IRS, CCDH could lose its special tax status if “a substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation.” Yet, CCDH’s third item on its annual priority list is “Trigger EU and UK regulatory action” and the group previously employed the firm Lot Sixteen to lobby congressional offices on “misinformation” in Washington.

Both The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket have sent multiple, extensive questions to CCDH’s current CEO Imran Ahmed, another British political operative tied to McSweeney’s Labour Together. Despite repeated requests for comment, Ahmed has refused to respond.

In the last two months, the Washington Post and Politico, among others, have run a series of features about British advisors from Labour Together rescuing the distressed political damsel that is the Harris/Walz campaign. Politico casts McSweeney as the “election mastermind” who first helped Keir Starmer defeat leftist Jeremy Corbyn to become the head of Labour, all the way to Starmer’s “landslide” win over Conservatives to become Prime Minister this past July, implying that McSweeney and his team can perform a similar miracle for Harris.

McSweeney is an ascendant figure, having just been promoted to Starmer’s Chief of Staff in something of a palace coup after the abrupt resignation of longtime Labour fixture Sue Gray. McSweeney is lionized, not just for a Carville-style rightward tilt within the party, but for mastery of fundraising and dark money, having reportedlypulled a host of new wealthy donors to Labour in the last two years.

After 25 years of the “special relationship” being essentially “one-way traffic,” with Washington politicos advising the Brits, the Democrats “now believe they actually have something to learn from Labour,” as Politico explained. Democrats will supposedly learn from Labour’s tactical brilliance. For example, Starmer countered former Conservative PM Rishi Sunak’s accusations of being soft on immigration by promising to “smash the criminal boat gangs” bringing migrants across the English channel.

The new British government also believes that a Harris defeat would leave Starmer “alone” as the “keeper of the center-left flame” and in “worrying isolation” as “the Grand Atlantic Alliance's last hope.” On top of providing election strategy, over 100 “current and former Labour staffers” have begun knocking on doors for Harris this summer, drawing howls from Trump surrogates such as Sebastian Gorka, who called it a “bloody outrage.”

The Stateside dispatch of Labour personnel has been depicted in British media as a self-interested gambit to keep America’s war machinery closely aligned with Israel and Ukraine, and billions of American defense dollars flowing in both directions.

However, these are only the visible parts of the British invasion. McSweeney’s Labour Together has been operating in the U.S. for several years through CCDH.

The Starmer/Labour Together formula for regaining power in the U.K. relied heavily on CCDH’s aggressive efforts to deplatform rivals on the Left and Right by lobbing accusations of bigotry, misinformation, and other misdeeds. As reported in Tablet and Racket, one of CCDH’s successes involved silencing Starmer’s critics on the left by leading a boycott of advertisers for news sites like the left-leaning Canary, on the grounds that its pro-Palestinian takes were anti-Semitic.

McSweeney has been praised for convincing Starmer that “he needed to sacrifice party unity to demoralize the far-left faction,” as Politico put it.

In the U.S., a now-defunct CCDH offshoot called Stop Funding Fake News led multiple successful boycotts of media figures across the spectrum, from Zero Hedgeduring the BLM riots to The Federalist. The formula often involved collaborating with a mainstream media outlet to level an accusation of bigotry, followed by a pressure campaign against advertisers to shut off revenue to the target.

“CCDH went directly after us and he worked with Google when they briefly suspended all advertising on Zero Hedge, our primary source of revenue then,” recalls Zero Hedge editor Tyler Durden, noting that the boycott came after CCDH worked with NBC on an article depicting them as racist for claiming damage from BLM riots was under-covered. Similar tactics led to demonetization of The Federalist, whose apparent crime was a June 3, 2020 piece called, “The Media Are Lying to You About Everything, Including the Riots.” Like Zero Hedge, The Federalist criticized mainstream coverage of BLM protests, including calling not-yet-fired CNN anchor Don Lemon a “not very bright man.”

“NBC News colluded with a foreign left-wing group in an attempt to destroy us because it disagrees with our political commentary and media criticism,” The Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway told The Wall Street Journal at the time. 

Meanwhile, CCDH launched a separate campaign against Substack claiming the company profited from vaccine disinformation. It failed, as the firm “essentially told them to fuck off” when asked to ban contributors like Alex Berenson and Dr. Joseph Mercola from the platform, as a person with ties to the company put it. Berenson’s crime was the headline, “Vaccines don’t stop Covid hospitalizations or deaths,” an article based on a Journal of the American Medical Association report. “At Substack, we don’t make moderation decisions based on public pressure,” wrote Substack’s then-PR Director Lulu Meservey. CCDH then quietly “backed off.” 

Now, CCDH’s growing Washington office is working on similar plans to “kill” the online presence of Democratic rivals like Musk by attacking X’s advertising revenue, a tactic first perfected in London against The Canary. CCDH is also laying the foundation for broader regulatory changes in the direction of platform censorship.

“60 meetings on the Hill,” reads one CCDH task assignment from early 2024. “Meeting with 16 congressional offices over the next two weeks to give updates on the Elon lawsuit,” reads another, referring to Musk’s since-dismissed lawsuit against CCDH accusing it of manipulating data to make a case for proliferation of hate speech on X.

CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.

The latter law has been the basis for Starmer and Ofcom threatening Musk with “strong action” in the wake of this summer’s riots, which the UK claims were fueled by disinformation.

That the CCDH is pushing STAR in the US is obvious from its agenda notes. Equally clear however is that the group held those meetings while its senior officials wondered if they were violating lobbying laws. “Question on lobbying — if it is anything that Congress could have a vote on, it counts as lobbying,” reads one note from a January meeting. “Question on lobbying. Imran needs that to be checked, and if necessary register a c4 ASAP,” reads a later note in February.

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