Ron Coleman | How Can We Protect Freedom of Speech On Social Media? | OAP #21
Chase Geiser is joined by Ron Coleman.
Ron Coleman is a Partner at the Dhillon Law Group and resident in its New York office. Ron is a commercial litigator with extensive first-seat trial and appellate experience who focuses on torts of competition such as trademark infringement, unfair competition and consumer law.
He is known for his First Amendment advocacy, regarding both religious and free speech rights, including his representation of Simon Tam and “The Slants” in the watershed free speech case, Matal v. Tam, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition against registration of “disparaging” trademarks was unconstitutional.
An alumnus of a number of major commercial firms in New York and New Jersey, the states in which he is admitted, Ron maintains a leading-edge media practice representing political and new media figures in defamation and intellectual property claims, challenges to social media “cancel culture” or “deplatforming” cases as well as traditional intellectual property litigation on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants in federal and state courts throughout the country.
Ron has been perennially listed in the World Trademark Review’s “WTR 1000 Top Practitioners” guide for his trademark litigation work in New York and the World Intellectual Property’s Review’s “WIPR Leaders” directory, as well as Super Lawyers; he is AV rated in Martindale Hubbell.
He received the American Bar Association IP Section’s 2018 Mark T. Banner Award for Impact on IP Law for his work on Matal v. Tam, and his blog, Likelihood of Confusion, is one of the longest-running and most widely read intellectual property blogs on the Internet.
Ron is very active on social media, notably Twitter, and has published, written and presented extensively on IP, social media and free speech issues around the country. He is a member of the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, the Federalist Society and the state bar associations of New York and New Jersey.
Ron has successfully represented clients of every size in state and federal courts, arbitrations and mediations in a variety of litigation matters, including contract disputes, distributorship litigation, trademark and unfair competition cases, business tort claims, toxic tort and insurance coverage litigation, discrimination and wrongful discharge cases, copyright infringement claims, and cases involving trade secrets, restrictive covenants and real estate.
His litigation experience runs from pretrial investigation and early dispute resolution through every aspect of bench and jury trials as well as appeals.
Ron received his AB from Princeton University and graduated from Northwestern University School of Law.
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase'es Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Ron's Twitter: https://twitter.com/RonColeman
Ron's Podcast Twitter: https://t.co/FMziSDtXSU?amp=1
Podcast Links:
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/oneamerican
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IAmOneAmerican
I just want to tweet it so it's on my feed so people can tune in.
And then I'll be ready to start talking.
Start talking.
Okay, let's see.
Tweet.
Great to have that on.
Okay, that should do it.
We are live and facing the world.
That's the world?
This?
I always thought the world revolved around me.
Looks like it does.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
I'm excited to talk to you.
Well, it's very, very, very, you know, very everything.
I just kind of catching up belatedly on what you've done here in just like two weeks or something.
Yeah, just a couple of weeks.
I've been hammering them out.
About a month, really.
I think I did my first one on May 25th.
Oh, May 25th.
Maybe I saw June 20th.
Well, I probably did it on June 25th.
But I started about 30 days ago.
And basically, once I got reached a certain threshold of Twitter followers, I started reaching out to people and realized that they would agree to come on.
So I just started doing them.
Well, that's that, right?
So I'm kind of looking and seeing, you know, you're 13,000 followers, respectable, but you, you know, you've got some pretty well-known names.
I know.
I think it's because I'm just overwhelmingly charming, you know?
I mean, there was no other reason that you would come on unless it was just well, there's no reason that, and I know that that reason wasn't why people came online.
So just for the audience, can you tell me a little bit about your background to give a little context?
I could.
But you know what?
I want you to first tell, first of all, how's that?
Do I sound better now?
You sound much better, actually.
Yeah, I don't look any better, but I do sound better.
Clark, who are you?
I'm Chase.
Chase.
You can call me Clark if you want, though.
I'm a big fan of the vacation movies.
That's funny.
I was just, well, I wouldn't know anything about that.
Chase.
Yeah.
Who are you?
You're a band author.
I am one American.
Yeah, so.
Okay, so is everyone in the building?
Yeah, yeah.
So band author is mostly a joke because I published all of Fauci's emails in an e-book because they were in public domain.
I thought you were like, you know, you could be a banned author by like never getting anything published.
Well, I probably, yeah, exactly.
I published them all on Amazon and within like 24 hours, they took them down.
So I just, I just put banned author in my bio, sort of.
Got it.
But I haven't written, I did write one Amazon best-selling book.
It was called How to Hack the Amazon Bestsellers List, and it was eight bullet points, and it went number one for about an hour.
Gotcha.
But I'm not a real author.
I am working on a book now, but I'm not sure.
You're just a guy who decided to just start doing this?
Yeah, I just started kind of getting pissed off.
You seem to know what you're doing.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
My background's in audio engineering, so I have a little bit of like a production experience.
I own an advertising business, so I sort of understand content and how that works.
I just never applied those skills really to myself.
I always did it for clients.
And then after COVID and all the political upheaval that's been going on the last 12, 24, 36 months in the United States, I kind of just reached a threshold where I was like, you know what?
I don't really know what I can do, but I want to do something.
And so I figured I'll do this and see where it leads.
That's a good answer.
Now I'll tell you who I am.
Great.
Everyone knows who I am.
It's such a, how could you even ask that?
I'm Ron Coleman.
I'm a lawyer.
I'm sitting in my office in Montclair, New Jersey, which is in northern New Jersey.
It's a very, very, very nice town.
It's near where I live in Clifton, New Jersey.
I am the New York and New Jersey office of the Dylan law firm.
My partner is Harmeet Dylan, the renowned Republican First Amendment and civil rights lawyer who is in charge of the firm and who rides over the firm from our main office in San Francisco.
She's admitted to New York.
Also, a lot of our lawyers are, but this is the first time since I joined the firm almost a year ago, which was August of last year, that we've had a New York office, that she's had a New York office with a person in it.
I recently, I'm not guessing it's not so recent now, but I have been with a series of law firms, and I'm finally now with a law firm that has a very similar kind of idea of what practicing law is, which doesn't mean it's the only idea or it's the right idea, but it is the idea that works for Harmed and for me, which is we do commercial litigation.
We focus on a handful of core areas that we do.
We don't claim to be everything to everyone.
She and I have very compatible practices.
She's done much more employment law than I have.
I think she's more of an entertainment lawyer than I have.
I, on the other hand, have been into intellectual property lawyer.
I'm until the last year or so, probably was best known, if one can be known for anything as a trademark lawyer.
And I established a certain amount of fame as a First Amendment/slash trademark lawyer in connection with my representation of Simon Tam in the Slants trademark case from several years ago, which is known as Tam versus Mattel.
I also have a blog.
I'm talking about that case.
I'm not as intimately familiar with it as I would like to be.
Yes.
And you're not doing it.
In other words, you're just calling up famous people, asking them to talk to you.
So sorry.
Tell versus Tam.
Simon Tam.
But it's all, but it's from love.
It's from love.
I know.
I appreciate it.
Simon Tam is a very, very talented young man who is like me a bass player, but unlike me, actually a competent and professional bass player and frontman, as they say, although he's not the singer for a band called The Slants.
And everyone in the Slants is an Asian American.
The Slants wanted to register their trademark of the Slants for the name of their band.
I'm still here.
I have just my camera under reset.
Okay.
Thank you.
Now I'm the best looking guy on the screen.
I know.
Oh, and it's gone.
And I was going to be the only clerk for a minute there.
Simon wanted to register the name of the Slants as a trademark for his band.
And he was refused because the Lanham Act, the trademark statute at the time, prohibited the registration of disparaging terms as trademarks.
There's a lot to unpack, but basically, although the statute was certainly not intended as an anti-ethnic slur measure or a civil rights measure, but it had been interpreted as one in the last 10 years or so, erroneously.
The argument that Simon was making before we got involved in the case was this is a reappropriation.
It's sort of like the N-word that they use in rap songs.
You called us this with derision.
We're now going to appropriate it for ourselves as a term of pride.
And I was following those cases on my blog, the likelihood of confusion trademark blog, likelihoodofconfusion.com, which is semi-retired now because I'm doing less trademark work and for other reasons as well, like no one reads blogs anymore.
Simon argued that we are Asian Americans and we want to take up this rather obscure name as a source of pride.
Now, the fact is, he didn't know it, but there is an inherent flaw with that argument.
One of the, there are two.
One of them is that a trademark can never be put into a cultural, any kind of context other than the context of a customer looking at a product and a name and deciding whether to make a purchase.
So you can't say it's the context of an Asian American using it.
So how could you say it's the context of a racial slur then?
Well, hold that thought.
In fact, one of the things we said when I took up the case was that this is an English word, unlike the N-word, unlike other racial slurs that have been rejected.
And I'll get back to you in a second about what the Patent and Trademark Office said about that.
But the other reason that it's okay, it's a reappropriation.
It's not meant as a slur is that you can get a trademark registration and then turn around immediately and assign the trademark to somebody else.
And then your context is going to change.
And we can't, there's no way to monitor that, nor should there be any way to monitor that.
So when I took over the case and we redid the application to eliminate any reference whatsoever to ethnic identity, because again, it's an English word.
So I said it's a diagonalness thing.
And the PTO examiner said, oh, no, we know who Simon Tam is.
He's an Asian American and he uses this in connection with his Asian American band.
And I said, were the Nuremberg laws incorporated into the Lanham Act?
Because you've got no business inquiring into the economic identity of somebody seeking a trademark registration.
In fact, at one point I said to Simon, it really was ironic because they were doing it in order to prevent a slur being used, but at the same time.
No, not to prevent a slur from being, well, to sort of make a statement about a slur.
In fact, that particular slur hasn't been used in probably 100 years.
I didn't even know it was a slur.
Yeah, no, I actually had that discussion with a number of Asians.
It's a pretty antique idea, I'm a slur.
But nobody seemed to be interested in that argument.
And we appealed the rejection.
We took it up through the federal circuit.
And eventually the federal circuit sitting on bunk, which means all 12 members of the court, heard the argument and ruled that the anti-derogatory prohibition on trademark registrations known as Section 2A was unconstitutional as a form of government discrimination based on viewpoint discrimination.
It was knocked out of the Lanham Act.
The Supreme Court upheld it, said there's no such thing as hate speech under the United States Constitution.
And I became world famous for about 15 minutes.
How was that?
How was it?
Winning in the Supreme Court.
Well, I bet that was thrilling, but the 15 minutes of fame, did you enjoy that?
Yeah, it was fine.
It was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of fun.
And actually, I was able to ride it for a while.
Well, you still have lasting influence.
You still have quite a following on social media.
Well, I definitely leveraged that.
First of all, while I was involved in that case, a number of people who didn't necessarily know just how special I am took a harder look at me, including one of your previous guests, Kurt Schlichter, who's my, you know, who's a good friend of mine, and who didn't remember until I reminded him recently that he wasn't paying any attention to me until he found out that was my case.
And he forgot all about that.
But I leveraged my involvement in that case into a much larger following.
And I also got involved in a lot of other sort of high-profile cases involving free speech and deplatforming, which is a free speech issue, even if it is not a First Amendment issue.
If a private company kicks somebody off the internet for having their wrong political views, that's still a free speech issue.
It's still a censorship issue, even though it's not done by the government.
Could you argue that it's a First Amendment issue if we infringe on the company's right to perform the censorship?
You could, but that's just about the weakest response, I think, to the attacks.
And that argument would come from the point of view of either that it's forced speech, which would be problematic for the company because then they would have to be taking the position that every tweet is their speech.
They don't want to be responsible for that.
That's a Section 230 issue.
And it's also alternatively, they could take the position that it's a form of forced, It's a violation of their right to free association because they shouldn't have to associate to which the response would be: um, you're not associating, you just have a freaking website.
Um, right, Walmart is associated with every customer that goes through, right?
And so, what we have now, though, is the case that we just that Harmed and I just filed in California on behalf of uh Rogan O'Hanley, DC Draino, who has 2 million followers on Instagram, but it was kicked off Twitter in November after the election by a California state,
a State Department Politburo, which it was this agency that was supposedly in charge of making sure that election security was not threatened.
And they were basically just getting the names of the debt.
They were involved with Democratic campaigns who would give them these names and say this person is misrepresenting how California manages manages its election security.
And he was sent info to Twitter, and then Twitter would block Twitter just and they banned him.
So, how can you argue that?
How can Twitter argue then that it's a private company if it's doing whatever the government says?
That's well, so we just filed that lawsuit, and we'll see how they order.
I mean, the much more interesting defendants in that lawsuit are the Attorney General of the State of California and his minions, and the National Association of States Attorneys General, which was part of this system also.
It's the different case.
It's the case that everyone has been waiting for, which is to prove that something that people have been talking about since January, which was that either implicitly or otherwise, there probably was some government angle here,
either unspoken, and in other words, that there seemed to be some kind of tacit agreement between social media and certain governments, which was that if we let you if we don't regulate you, you will take guidance.
Humorous, yeah, humorous, basically.
There's sort of like a buddy system going on there, unspoken almost.
And that's very troublesome to me.
It turns out that it's spoken.
And if you, if people, if people want to find out more about it, you know, they could no, I'm fascinated with that.
And that's that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on because I am very um concerned about big tech censorship, but I am not a lawyer and I have a sense of the Constitution and a sense of rights on an intuitive level.
But the extent of my knowledge of law is, you know, thumbing through the Federalist papers.
Okay, so I'm not by any means an expert.
I've read Locke, I read Wealth of Nations, which, of course, is an economics book more than a legal book, but nonetheless, there's still implicit legal ideas in the text, right, about property rights.
And I'm curious as to whether or not, do you think it would be legal for the federal government to make it illegal for big tech platforms to censor users unless the speech being censored is a violation of federal law?
No, I think that would be illegal if it were that broad.
What I have written, though, in an article that I co-authored with Will Chamberlain from Human Events, and which in 2019, and which I also have a longer and somewhat more scholarly version of the form of a white paper, is that it would be completely reasonable for the federal government to, and Section 230, actually, Section 230 does two things.
It does many things, but among the two things it does is the publisher versus platform distinction that everyone is always railing on about is not relevant to this discussion because what it is relevant to is not censorship by platforms, but rather actions against third parties, such as defamation actions, or rather conduct by third parties, people who use Twitter.
You can't sue Twitter for someone defaming you on Twitter.
That's a common sense law because Twitter's like the mail.
Twitter's like, you know, you're not the publisher.
You don't control what people say.
And that's not our issue.
Our issue, however, is another section of section, another part of Section 230, which says that a provider of an internet service or an internet service provider, I should say, is permitted to limit or restrict access to its platform to anyone who uses it for
harassing improper, unauthorized, et cetera, et cetera, conduct, which is written very broadly.
But one of the key things that's written in there is that it has to be done in good, that authority, which is critical to the growth of the internet, has to be done in good faith.
What we have in a world where no left-wing commentators are ever banned based on politics, but many right-wing commentators are, and where racism is permissible, but anti-Semitism, I mean, racism is not permissible.
But anti-Semitism is.
But anti-Semitism is.
I mean, a certain kind of really gross down-the-middle anti-Semitism is not permissible.
But if you use the word Zionist instead, or if you're black or Muslim, you can pretty much get away with almost anything in terms of anti-Semitism.
So that's not good faith.
That's not good faith.
And that's so, my argument in that article is that right now there's no change needed to Section 230 because that's the way the statute is written, and that you could, the Federal Trade Commission and the individual states under their local FDA,
their little FTC acts, as they're known, have the authority right now to promulgate regulations that would prohibit social media companies from banning people in their state without giving them an opportunity for notice and of a hearing and some kind of dispute resolution.
I believe that such regulations would be defensible, but so far no one, the approach that was taken in Florida is a little bit different from what I've suggested, but it's a good start.
That's really interesting.
And what would those hearings look like?
Would they be like Title IX hearings at universities where it's basically not exactly your peers?
Or how would that work?
Well, I certainly haven't gotten that far.
I do think that it would be that saying that, you know, setting up a system, I mean, the Title IX hearings that have been, every court that has been exposed to one has just about nine-tenths of the courts have thrown them out.
Of course.
But, you know, you would want you'd want it to be fair.
But the point is, if there were even the slightest hint of due process or fairness or even handedness or accountability for these arbitrage, I mean, as of right now, there's not only not accountability, there's not even the social media platforms don't feel a need to even explain their decisions or justify them.
So I think it's well within the realm of traditional commercial regulation that has existed in this country for well over 100 years with respect to all kinds of businesses to impose this on the business of running a social media platform, Which, by the way, one of the things that we often hear, and especially I've heard it from judges more than once, look, you're not paying anything for this.
So you're not entitled to any particular – first of all, you're assuming that we're the users, we're the customers.
The customers are the people who do pay, the advertisers and the people who buy data.
We're the product, right?
So can you induce me to come onto your platform and be your product and have me invest hundreds or thousands of hours and hundreds or thousands or more of dollars over time and induce other people to come by virtue of my being on the platform,
other people join the platform because they like my content or the interaction that I'm responsible for develops the platform.
And then without compensation, can you just take that away from me when you have promised under your terms of service that there are a set of rules?
And I have the reasonable expectation that those rules will be enforced fairly and even-handedly.
I would say that that's a pretty strong consumer protection issue and it should be treated as one.
Have you followed the Brett Weinstein dark horse story at all with what's happening on with ivermectum on YouTube?
At all would be the right way to frame the question.
I'm aware of it, and I know that he's hopping mad about it, and so are a few other people, but I don't really know the twists and turns.
I just know that YouTube is weird.
You know, it is strange trying to figure out what the different shades of oppression and wrongthink are.
And probably there are people who have done this methodically.
What'll get you banned on Twitter versus what will get you banned on YouTube versus what'll get you banned on Facebook?
And when the payment platforms, and I had this discussion with Michael Malis in a, you know, in an episode of my podcast, Coleman Nation, Ron Coleman on Coleman Nation available wherever podcasts downloaded.
Thank you.
Those, you know, he says if there's anything to get upset about, he thinks it's not being banned from Twitter because you can always set up a soapbox in Hyde Park, I guess.
But when they, when, when, when Chase sends you a letter telling you that, Chase Bank, what's that?
Oh, I thought you meant, I thought you were talking about me.
I was going to say, that's why I say Clark.
That's a good one.
When JP Morgan Chase tells you that we're shutting your account or PayPal says we're shutting your account, and someone like Laura Loomer cannot open a bank account anywhere just because she's Laura Loomer.
And Laura Loomer is not a criminal.
She has never supported criminals.
She's never, you know, she's just a person that got a lot of Muslim organizations angry at her.
She might be hard to take, but so are a lot of customers of, you know, of these companies.
So this is the kind of stuff that's going on that definitely has to be dealt with.
So just for the sake, I'm going to try to frame this dark horse podcast issue to the best of my knowledge.
I've watched the episode that was the instigator of this problem that they had.
And I've since watched the Joe Rogan episode where Brett and Pierre Corey went on and sort of laid out their case.
And so I'll do the best I can to outline what's going on.
It might be accurate, it might not, but for the sake of argument, let's just assume that it is.
Okay.
All right.
So my understanding is that Brett, as an evolutionary biologist and Pierre Corey, as a reputable doctor, did a podcast episode that spanned two to three hours in which they looked at the data and basically made the case that ivermectum could be a potentially effective treatment for COVID.
Which you're not saying.
Which I'm not saying.
I'm just trying to say what happened.
And you're not saying, right?
They made a case, not necessarily a D case, but they made a case that it could be potentially effective treatment.
And they made the case that it's especially showing promise as a preventative measure.
And they further sort of implied, according to my understanding, that it may have been covered up in order to protect the emergency use case for vaccines, right?
Because you can't get emergency use status for a vaccine if there's an effective treatment in the market, allegedly.
And it's passed, what's the word I'm looking for?
It's ivermectum is in the public domain because it's an old enough drug.
So there's not a lot of financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to push it.
That's basically, that's the gist in a nutshell, as I understand it.
And they were banned from Twitter, or not Twitter, they were banned from YouTube for basically COVID misinformation allegations.
YouTube has a policy that you can't spread misinformation about vaccines.
And they kind of imply that the reason is to protect people from making decisions that could ultimately result in sickness or death, right?
Because doctors are as good at that as YouTube.
Right, right.
And so I'm not trying to make a case whether or not Brett or Pierre are correct.
I'm just saying, I'm just curious as to, A, if they are wrong, as in if Brett and Pierre are wrong, is it right to censor them?
And B, if they are actually right and it comes to light that they were censored inappropriately because YouTube made a bad call, then who's liable?
Because you could almost argue in this case that information that could potentially result in saving of lives was withheld by a private business.
And so is that business liable then?
I don't know.
Just as a lawyer, I'm really interested in your thoughts.
And I know that I kind of have there's several points in there.
Yeah.
So, I mean, on the first point, if they're wrong, no one in their right mind would hold YouTube liable.
And I'm not even sure YouTube has attempted to make a commercial argument.
And I think they wouldn't, because to make it would be to allow for the possibility of liability.
Because you have to get it from a doctor, that's going to always be the proximate cause of your taking it.
That's going to always, you can't get around that.
And moreover, obviously, if you go into YouTube, you can think of all the supplements that are sold on YouTube and all the health advice that's given out on YouTube.
They're really vetting all that?
Of course they're not, obviously.
On the second question, could there be liability for their holding it back?
Probably not.
They probably don't have a duty to anyone in particular.
It's immoral to do so, to hold back information without justifying it for the reasons that I just said.
And where there's an obvious political and well, political, let's just say, in many, many respects.
You know, there are obvious political reasons for choosing this particular thing to censor.
You know, the problem isn't in terms of liability for someone not getting the, in fact, unlike HCQ, doctors are still allowed to prescribe it.
So you can still, whether or not you learn about it on YouTube, you can learn about it a million other places and your doctor can prescribe it to you for you.
And that's up to you between you and your doctor.
But it seems, you have to realize that, and I'm sure you do, that the decision to engage in this level of censorship is being made at the highest levels because no legal department would ever say because of liability reasons or for any other sort of rational content monitoring reason that can
be justified by consistent practice or even a practice that YouTube would want to engage in consistently, which is to vet the truthfulness of content in its videos, even with respect to health and even with respect to medicines.
They don't do that.
Gotta be kidding, of course not.
Obviously, the decision is being made at a very high level and probably for reasons that are not so savory.
And notwithstanding the fact that the people at YouTube know this and they know that we know it and they know that we know that they know it.
They're doing it anyway.
They're doing it anyway because they are confident.
Either they are confident in their ability to get away with it, which is reasonable.
Alternatively, they feel they have no choice for some reason we have not necessarily figured out.
Because when you say, well, The conspiracy-minded suggest that it's because of the emergency status of the vaccine.
Maybe, but what the hell does that have to do with YouTube?
Right.
They're not in the vaccine business, are they?
So it doesn't quite add up.
And I do think that the fact that they have decided to, and given the high, you know, the prominence of the people involved, you know, it's something's going to happen.
You know, this is just, you know, whether or not this is the straw that breaks the camel's back, the camel's back is getting lower and lower to the ground.
So from a legal standpoint, and you know, I don't know whether or not this sort of behavior, what I'm sort of getting a sense of is that this isn't necessarily illegal for YouTube to do.
It just seems like it sucks, right?
And it's, and I don't see, no, I wouldn't see it.
I wouldn't, I would never call it illegal.
I would say that it is in the category of censorship that I think ought to be regulated, but no such regulation exists now, unless you take my point of view with respect to Section 230.
And even then, it's a hard case to, you know, there's a lot of moving parts here.
But the idea that YouTube is getting into the business of deciding winners and losers in the medical treatment field just seems like such a bad general counsel point of view.
And they have really smart people working for them.
So they've been through this.
That's the amazing thing.
That's what I find fascinating: these conversations have been and are taking place, have taken place and are taking place.
And the decision was made to still go ahead and do this as intuitively ridiculous as the decision seems from a legal point of view.
There's got to be some other risk that they're avoiding that is not immediately clear.
Well put.
Okay.
That's that's creepy, but fascinating.
So, so, and I know that you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier and uh um with respect to the case that you're um uh pursuing now, but what what then is the what is a legal way to regulate this so that we're not infringing on the right of private businesses to sort of silence whoever they want on their own damn platform,
uh, but at the same time we're protecting the ability for um people to express themselves without fear of being completely deplatformed well right so as I said I you know there should there the rules have to be enforced you know the basic regulatory regulatory approach is rules if you have rules they have to be enforced even-handedly if they're if someone has a claim that he has been deprived of access to your platform
In a manner that is not consistent with good faith, you should be entitled to a review of that decision, and you should be entitled to some sort of legal redress if it is not reviewed, you know, fairly.
Basically, the way we review civil rights, any other civil rights claim, this is a kind of civil rights claim, in my view, or a consumer protection claim, which is, you know, a very different kind of administrative law issue, but they can both be turned into, I mean, civil rights is made an administrative law issue through the Civil Rights Commission and all sorts of local commissions.
Does that only apply to immutable discrimination on the basis of immutable qualities?
Because what we're seeing here is really discrimination on the basis of ideas.
Well, the only analogy I was making was to, there's, in terms of civil rights laws, yes, it's immutable qualities, and on the local basis, religion.
But you also have business regulation that requires you to get a license to give a haircut, and business regulation that, you know, tells you how, you know, how much rat hair can go into the jiffy pop.
I mean, everything in American commerce is regulated, and there's nothing about, I mean, your initial question is an important one, because it is the answer, or the proposed answer to the question I'm about to ask, which is...
which is what makes what makes social media platforms different from any other business in terms of regulation?
Why should a social media platform be exempt from treating its customers fairly?
And I mean, for example, think of the when you when you buy an installment contract, you sign into an installment contract is under most under the state laws of many states is like a three-day cooling off period.
You have an absolutely no questions asked right to get out of that.
That's a why, why is that a violation?
Who says the state's allowed to step in?
The state says.
And, you know, the courts have basically, you know, have approved these sorts of things in almost every kind of context.
And there's a gazillion types of regulation like this.
And there's also regulation of all, of any kind of deceptive practice.
Any kind of deceptive practice is a violation of consumer law.
So as I said before, it's a deceptive practice to say, come on, here are the rules.
They apply to everyone.
And I'm going to now build this platform.
I'm going to build my account on your platform.
And then you're going to not apply the rules to everyone.
You're just going to use them as a pretext for getting me off the site.
So that's a contract.
That's essentially a consumer deceptive practice.
And on that basis, you would be entitled to certain kinds of relief.
The way you structure it, whether you need a lawyer, whether you can do it informally, that's potentially complicated, but it's potentially simple.
So I think that that works.
I do think that there are also, in terms of what I was just saying a second ago, which is that this, why should selling widgets be different from selling accounts on Twitter?
First of all, you don't buy an account on Twitter.
So you really, you know, we look at it wrong.
The fact that I don't pay for an account on Twitter shouldn't tell you, oh, therefore, Twitter's off the hook.
It should actually be the opposite.
Why is Twitter giving me this free account?
Why are you offering me a free weekend at your resort?
Is it for my benefit?
Is it really?
Blowing away.
Twitter is our customer and we should be setting the terms.
To some extent, that is true.
We are the product.
We are the inputs, as they say in antitrust law, to what Twitter sells to those who buy its data and those who it sells advertising through those who advertise on Twitter.
So does it become different then if you're both the product and the consumer?
So in my case, I do spend a modest amount of money every day on promoting my on Twitter ads.
I would say that then you're so that I mean, it is very common in cases, in legal claims to make a distinction between the hat, your rights wearing the hat of a consumer and your high and your rights wearing the hat as a as a producer or as,
for example, under consumer, under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, you can have a relationship with a company under which you are a consumer because you don't sell the stuff that, in other words, you're not in the business of what you, for example, if I have a factory that just makes cinder blocks, what could be more industrial than that?
But you come knocking on my factory door and sell me website building services.
I'm a consumer.
Under New Jersey law, my cinder block company is a consumer.
The fact that it's a commercial entity, what the law is really getting at is you're not sophisticated and you're not an expert in the field of building a website.
So I can have that relationship.
But on the other hand, if you want to buy a bunch of cinder blocks from me for the brick and mortar store you're building for people to come to you to sell websites, then it's just a commercial, that's a regular commercial relationship.
Interesting.
Okay.
Wow, man, this is so complicated.
But at the same time, it's simple, right?
It's weird how it's sort of nuanced like that.
Well, only because I have the gift of explaining the complicated to the simple.
I appreciate that.
So how do you think this is going to play out over the course of the next, let's just say four years?
Because there's a lot of big things happening in the next four years in terms of elections.
So there's going to be some heat going on.
How's it going to play out?
I don't know.
I mean, on the one hand, you do have certain states taking action based on, I think to some extent they were, you know, I have reason to believe that a lot of states' attorneys general did look at the paper that I wrote on this topic a couple of years ago and that it has been part of the body of thinking and work that have led to some of the statutes and
some of the proposals in various states.
Those statutes and those actions and those regulations are going to be challenged, of course.
I think there's also an issue with, you know, there are good elections have consequences, but they're not always the consequences we expect them to have.
So the head of the FTC was just appointed by President Biden just brought an action against Facebook.
Not to just bring an action against Facebook, but rather the FTC action against Facebook that was just dismissed, and which is going to be presumably amended.
It was dismissed without prejudice.
It's going to be amended and a new complaint will be filed.
Facebook today asked that the new head of the FTC, Ms. Khan, be not, you know, recuse herself because of her past criticisms of social media companies.
That's extraordinary.
This is who was...
Then who the hell is supposed to get that job?
Because everybody's criticized social media at some point.
All right.
Well, not everybody accepts, you know, I could name certain names of people who actually think it's perfect.
It couldn't be better.
Build your own if you don't like how these work.
This is, you know, the Biden administration, you know, whoever is pulling the strings there chose to appoint someone with a history of not just signing off on whatever Silicon Valley has to say about things.
And, you know, that's intriguing.
So I don't, you know, there are often surprises in store.
I do think that a lot of people who have not necessarily been heard from yet, but who are out there, millions and tens of millions of people, saw what happened in October, November with social media.
And I mean, I think we haven't really fully appreciated yet what the impact has been of the utter erosion of confidence and trust in the corporate media.
Yes.
That's going to, that's going to continue to happen, making social media more and more important.
And, you know, you can censor the most influential voices, although many of the most influential voices have not been censored.
It's fascinating to realize who has managed to avoid that.
Right.
A lot of the people who've been banned.
Right.
If you're, you know, people who are who are out there and who are, you know, unpopular are more likely to be censored than people who are really popular.
Doesn't make it any more right.
I mean, it was amazing to me that when I was, I spoke to a law professor who is known, used to be very friendly with him, but he has just become so bought by Google.
And everyone in this field, in the field, knows who I'm talking about.
I'd rather not just trash some of my name if I can avoid it.
And I said to him at an event where we were both speakers, I said, I noticed that you wrote about the motion to dismiss Laura Loomer's lawsuit against the Council on Arab Council for American Islamic Relations.
And As we talk through it, he said, you know, I think she's got, I think she's got a good point on that such and such score, but is she the person on whose behalf that ought to, that point ought to be made.
And I said, Eric.
How about an ad hominem?
How, how, how is that?
How is that ever a proper consideration for whether or not a legal point is made?
What happened to neutral principles?
What happened?
I mean, and all the, and, you know, someone who I used to be pretty friendly with and I used to do a lot of work with said to me, you know, we had a vicious debate, and he has all these minions who come in behind him when you have a debate with him about my representation of Gavin McGuinness.
I didn't realize you represented Gavin.
I represent Gavin in a lawsuit for defamation against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which resulted in his being banned from it.
He is the plaintiff.
He sued them for defamation.
That lawsuit was filed two and a half years ago.
The motion to dismiss by the Southern Poverty Law Center has been in front of the same senior status judge for two years.
He hasn't touched it, as far as we know.
Does he have infinite time?
None of us has infinite time.
I just didn't know if there was a requirement in terms of response and something like that.
No.
So it's whether he has a program in place to make sure that his decision granting their motion comes out before he dies, I don't know.
Holy shit.
But you never know when you're going to die.
And a person should repent before he does so.
But when I had this argument with Ken White, who I don't want to mention his name either, you know, what kept coming up during the course of discussion was, well, your client is a racist scumbag.
So that, since it was true, I said, how do you make the argument based on the principle that because you think my client is a racist scumbag, he got what he deserved?
That's not the principle.
The principle is, was he defamed by being accused of 10 things that he didn't do, one of which happened to be being a racist scumbag.
And by the way, there is this concept among judges that calling someone a racist is an expression of opinion.
And I can understand how that could be the case in certain contexts, but the idea-It's very convoluted in time.
It's very convoluted because, let's face it, if I told you that Barack Obama is a racist, that's just, is that really racist against blacks?
You really have to accept that as just my opinion.
I think that you can actually demonstrate as an empirical matter that that's wrong, that I lied when I said that.
And I think it's ridiculous to suggest that you cannot prove that someone is a risen to racist.
It might be you could only prove it in 30% of cases.
Well, it depends on how you define racism, too.
There was a time when racism was simply the belief that one race is either inherently inferior or superior to another.
And now there's a whole school of thought with critical race theory, for example, that means that you're racist if you're born white passing because you have inherent privileges.
So that, you know, those are very, very different definitions for the same term that we throw around.
And I think that's part of the issue with just throwing around, is he a racist?
He's a racist, he's a racist.
Like, what do you mean?
Because it's one thing to lynch and it's another thing to lock your door when somebody of a different race crosses the street at a red light.
You know, like I'll tell you a story that people, you know, I let's face it, I have 135,000 followers on Twitter.
There are some people who've been following me for a while and who've heard and read certain of my stories a few times, but maybe the maybe your people haven't heard this one.
I'll tell it very quickly because I know that we're getting to that point.
But when I was in college, I would sometimes do experiment.
I would sometimes be a volunteer for pocket money for 50 bucks.
I would be a psychology subject.
And it was really, you know, light stuff.
And I had one psych, I had one, one time I signed up for an experiment.
The guy called me up.
Come on down, such and such time.
Okay, I get there.
They showed me a corridor and said, okay, there are two rooms.
When you get to the end, go into either one of the rooms and you're going to be interviewed in there.
So I get to the rooms.
They're identical, same furniture, same everything.
There are two guys.
There's a guy sitting in each room.
One is white and one is black.
So I went into the room with the black guy.
And then the person who escorted me in said, okay, you're done.
Come on out.
Say, congratulations.
You're not racist.
You're not prejudiced.
We used to say prejudice in those days.
I said, why not?
Because you went into the guy with the black room.
I went into the guy in the black room, so I wouldn't be perceived as prejudiced.
I had no basis whatsoever to go into the white guy's room or the black guy's room.
But I knew that if I went into the white guy's room, I didn't say this part, schmucks like you would say that I was prejudiced.
That's a great story.
But I did get my 50 bucks.
That's a hoot, man.
That's a hoot.
Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on.
It's my pleasure.
And solve the world's problems.
Well, I'm only one American.
Exactly.
So where can people find you and follow you?
So you see, I put my handle on Twitter there, Ron Coleman.
It's pretty much all you really need.
I mean, if someone who wants, I have a lot of videos on YouTube and a couple of other.
If you just go to your favorite search engine and search for videos, just whenever you put in Ron Coleman, put in Ron Coleman lawyer, or you're going to get an African-American bodybuilder who is extremely large.
He's not me.
I am not he.
So I've got videos and I've got the Twitter and I've got the podcast, Coleman Nation Coleman-Nation is where I have my podcast.
I started it not much before you.
And I didn't go directly to the video as you did, but I'm going to be moving in that direction very, very soon.
It is a little bit easier to get people on audio early, like easier to schedule people for audio only.
But, you know, I think it's more fun this way to have the option.
Thank you.
If you need any tips for that, because I know all the tools to make it.
Well, I could tell that.
Because having gone through this process of ramping up myself through executive podcast solutions, I noticed that your deal is pretty professional.
You know, I see that everything looks slick and together.
