Musk's X gets German judge removed in battle over election data

By Friederike Heine and Hakan Ersen

BERLIN (Reuters) - Elon Musk-owned X has secured a German court motion to remove a judge overseeing a legal battle between the social media giant and two activist groups over sharing election data, a court document seen by Reuters on Friday showed.

Earlier this month, a regional court in Berlin granted a motion by the civil activist groups to force X - formerly Twitter - to share real-time access to data on the February 23 German election until two days after the vote.

The two groups said they needed the data to let them track misinformation and disinformation ahead of the election.

X filed an appeal as well as a motion to remove a judge in the case whom it argued "had positively engaged" with social media content from the plaintiffs - Democracy Reporting International and the Society for Civil Rights.

The court and both groups confirmed the decision when contacted by Reuters. Motions against two other judges were dismissed. U.S. law firm White & Case, which represented X, declined to comment.

The legal battle is taking place against the backdrop of a stand-off between Germany's political establishment and Musk, who has blasted incumbent Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a "fool" and endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Both groups argued that X had a legal duty to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as the reach of posts, shares and likes - information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.

'PRIVACY AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION'

X said separately earlier this week that it would sue the German government in state and federal courts shortly before the election, saying Germany is the country within the European Union that most frequently requests information about user data.

"X believes that these legal demands for user data are unlawful and has taken cases in both German federal and state courts challenging the lawfulness of the government's overreach into our users’ privacy and freedom of expression," its global government affairs division said on X.

Reuters contacted Germany's Constitutional Court, the Federal Administrative Court and the Berlin regional court on the matter, which all responded that no cases had been filed by X to date.

The German government did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

A hearing on the preliminary injunction will take place on February 27 at 0930 GMT with the two remaining judges, and a decision is expected later that day, another court document seen by Reuters shows.

The date of the hearing means the activist researchers will not obtain real-time access to the data in their critical time frame, but a decision could set a precedent for similar cases in the future.

Separately, tech billionaire Musk and aides at the new cost-cutting U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are pursuing a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy at the behest of President Donald Trump.

(Reporting by Haken Ersen and Friederike Heine; editing by Matthias Williams and Mark Heinrich)