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 ready to I'll be ready to start talking.
Start talking.
Okay, let's see.
Tweet.
Great to have Pat Ron Coleman.
Amen.
Thank you.
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 um coming on.
I really appreciate it.
I'm excited to talk to you.
Um very uh, you know, um everything.
I I I just I'm kind of catching up belatedly on in 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 in May 25th.
Oh, oh, May 25th.
Maybe I saw June Twitter.
Well, I probably did them on June 25th.
But I started about 30 days ago, and basically once I got uh 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, it's 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 my well, there's no reason that that but and I'm I know that that reason didn't wasn't why people came on mine, so um just for the audience, uh, can you tell me a little bit about your background to give a little context and then we can 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.
Um Clark.
Who are you?
I'm Chase.
Chase.
You can call me Clark if you want, though.
Why don't you talk?
I'm a big one.
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 I am one American.
So yeah, so is everyone in the building.
Yeah, yeah.
So um uh banned author is mostly a joke because I published all of Fauci's emails uh in a in an e-book because they were in public domain.
I thought you were like, you know, being you could be a band author by by by like never getting anything published, right?
Well, I probably yeah, exactly.
I published them all on Amazon and within like 24 hours they took them down.
Um so I just I just put banned author in my bios where we're got it.
But I haven't written uh I did write one uh Amazon best selling book.
Um it was called How to Hack the Amazon Best Sellers List, and it was eight bullet points and it went number one for about an hour.
Got it, uh but I'm not a real author.
I am working on a book now, but um I'm not gonna be.
Yeah, I just started kind of getting pissed off.
And um, you seem to know what you're doing.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
I um I I have my background's in audio engineering, so I have a little bit of like a production experience.
I have 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 um after COVID and all the political upheaval that's been going on the last 12, 24, 36 months in the United States.
I I I kind of just reached a threshold where I was like, you know what?
Like 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 it it's a it's such a how could you even ask that?
I'm Ron Coleman, I'm a lawyer.
I'm sit I'm sitting in my office in Montclair, New Jersey, which is in northern New Jersey.
It's a very, very, very nice town.
Uh, it's near where I live in a Clifton, New Jersey.
I am the New York and New Jersey office of the uh Dillon Law Firm.
My partner is Harme Dillon, the renowned Republican um First Amendment and civil rights lawyer, who um is in charge uh of the firm and who uh is 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 in it 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 uh I'm not re guess it's not so recent now, but I I have been with um 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 our meeting for me, which is we do commercial litigation, we focus on a handful of core areas that we do.
He 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.
Um, 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 establish a certain amount of fame as uh 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 um Tam versus Mattel.
I also have a blog.
I'm not as intimately familiar with it as I as I would like to be.
Yes, and you should you're not doing it, in other words, you're just calling up famous people, asking them to talk to you, and you're so I'm sorry.
Simon Tam.
But but it's all but it's from love.
It's from love.
I know.
I appreciate it.
Simon Tam is a um is a as a is a very, very talented uh young man who is uh like me a bass player, but unlike me, actually a competent and professional bass player.
Uh and and um frontman, as they say, although he's not the singer for a band called the Slants.
He 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'm just my camera to reset.
Okay.
Thank you.
Now I'm the best looking guy on the screen.
I know.
Oh, and then it's gone.
And I was and I was gonna be the only clerk for a minute there.
Umon wanted to register his uh 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 the statute was certainly not intended as a as a an anti-ethnic slur uh measure or a civil rights measure, but it had been interpreted as one in the last 10 years or so erroneously.
Uh the argument that Simon was making at the before we got involved in the case was this is what 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, uh the The Likelihood of Confusion trademark blog, uh Likelihood of Confusion dot 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's 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 uh it's the context of an Asian American using it.
So how could you say it's the context of a racial slur then?
If well, uh hold that thought.
Uh 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 um other racial slurs that have been rejected.
And they and I'll get back to you in a second about what the patent and trademark office said about that.
But the other the other reason that 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 the 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 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 the ethnic idea into the eco think identity of somebody seeking a trademark registration.
In fact, at one point I said to Simon, which we really was kind of ironic because they're 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.
I mean, the fact is that particular slur hasn't been used in probably a hundred years.
But I didn't even know it was a slur.
Yeah, no, I actually had that discussion with a number of of the Asians.
It's a pretty antique idea.
I'm a slur.
But nobody seemed to be interested in that argument.
And we impaled the rejection.
We took it up through the federal circuit, and eventually it was we are it was the federal circuit sitting on bunk, which means all 12 members of the court heard the argument and ruled that the anti-derogatory prohibition of trade on trademark registrations,
known as section 2A, was unconstitutional as a form of government discrimination based on viewpoint um viewpoint uh 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 um I became world famous for about 15 minutes.
How how was that?
How was it winning in the Supreme Court?
Well, that I bet I bet that was thrilling, but uh the 15 minutes of fame.
Did you enjoy that?
Yeah, it was fine.
It was it was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of fun.
Uh and it 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 he wasn't paying any attention to me until he found out that was my case.
And and And he forgot he forgot all about that.
But um I leveraged my 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.
Although 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 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 um, 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 you just have a freaking website.
Umart is associated with every customer that goes through.
Right.
And so what we have now though is the case that we just that Harmita and I just filed in California on behalf of uh Rogan O'Hanley, DC Draeno, who has two million followers on Instagram, but it was kicked off Twitter in November after the election by a California state,
uh State Department Politburo, uh 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 uh the dead the they were involved with the democratic campaigns who would give them these names and say this person is missed constra is is misrepresenting how California manages manages its election security, and and he was just that info to Twitter and then Twitter would block it.
Twitter just and they they banned him.
They they they're 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 that so we we just filed that lawsuit, and we'll see how they order.
I mean, the 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 it's the it's the different case.
This is 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, right?
Either on spoken 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 to the case.
Humorous, yeah, humorous, basically.
It's sort of like a um a buddy system going on there, that unspoken almost.
And that's that's very troublesome to me.
It turns out that it's spoken, and and if you uh if if people want to find out more about it, you know, they couldn't.
No, I'm 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 and 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.
Um I read Wealth of Nations, which of course is an economics book more than a legal book, but nonetheless, there's still implicit idea legal ideas in the text, right?
About property rights.
And um I might 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 um the speech being censored is a violation of federal law.
No, I think that would be illegal if it were that broad.
Okay.
What I have written though, in an article that I co-authored with with Will Chamberlain from Human Events, and which in 2019, and which I also have a longer and somewhat more scholarly version of is a you know the form of a white paper, is that it would be completely reasonable for the federal government to 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.
Twitter is like the mail.
Twitter is like, you know, you're not the publisher.
You don't control what people say.
Okay.
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 or or restrict access to its platform to anyone who uses it for
harassing uh improper, unauthorized, etc.
etc.
conduct, which is very written very broadly.
But one of the key things that's written in there is that it has to be done in good this 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 is not permit permissible.
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 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 um that that's so uh my argument in that article is that right now there's nothing 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 F 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 um of notice and of a hearing um and uh some kind of dispute resolution.
I believe that the such regulations would be defensible, but so far no one's the the approach that was taken in Florida is a little bit different from from what I've suggested, but it it's a good start.
That's really interesting.
And what would those hearings look like?
Would they be like Title IX hearings of universities where it's basically not exactly your peers, or how would that work?
Well, I I 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 every court that has been exposed to one has just about nine-tenths of the courts have thrown them thrown them out.
Of course.
But you know, you would want you'd want it to be fair, but the point is it if there were even the slightest hint of due process or fairness or even handedness, or um accountability for these arbitrary.
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 a hundred years with respect to all kinds of businesses to impose this on the business of running running a social media platform, which by the way, let's rem you know, 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 a you're not entitled to any particular that first of all, you're assuming that we're the users, we're the customers.
The customers are the people who do pay, the the 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.
Induce other people to come by by virtue of my being on the platform, other people join the platform because they like my content, or the interaction that I 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 um Brett Weinstein dark dark horse story at all with what's happening on Thibermectum on YouTube?
At all would be uh 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 um YouTube is is weird.
You know, it is strange trying to figure out what the different shades of oppression and wrong think 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 have this discussion with Michael Malice in a you know, in an episode of my podcast, Coleman Coleman Nation, Ron Coleman on culmination available wherever podcasts are tagged downloaded.
Um thank you.
Those um, you know, his he says if there's if there's any thing 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 Chase sends you uh a letter telling you that Chase Bank, what's that?
Oh, I thought you meant I thought you were talking about me.
Uh that's why I say Clark.
That's a good one.
What when when Chase when JP Morgan Chase tells you that we're shutting your account or a PayPal says we're we're shutting your account, and and and you someone like uh Laura Loomer cannot open a bank account anywhere just because she's Laura Loomer and Laura Lamer is not a criminal.
She has never supported criminals.
She's never, you know, she 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 it's the kind of stuff that's going on and that definitely has to be dealt with.
So just for the sake, I'm gonna try to frame this uh uh dark horse podcast issue uh to the best of my knowledge.
Uh I've watched the episode that was the instigator of this problem that they've had, and I've since watched the Joe Rogan episode uh where um Brett and uh 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 uh Brett, as an evolutionary biologist and uh Pierre Corey as um uh 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 um could be a uh a potentially effective treatment, um, but for for COVID.
Which you're not saying.
Which I'm not saying.
This is I'm just trying to say what happened.
And you're not saying, right?
Um they may they made the case they made a case, not necessarily D case, but they made a case that it could be potentially effective treatment, uh, and they made the case that it's especially showing promise as a preventative measure, and they further sort of implied uh um, according to my understanding, that it may have been covered up in order to protect the emergency use um case for vaccines, right?
Because it you can't get emergency use status for a vaccine if there's an effective treatment in the market, allegedly.
And um, it's past um uh uh 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 basic 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.
There's a YouTube has a policy that you can't spread misinformation about vaccines, and they kind of they they they imply that the reason is to protect people from making decisions that could ultimately uh result in sickness or death, right?
Because doctor doctors aren't as good at that as YouTube, right?
Right, right.
And so I'm not trying to make a case I uh whether or not um uh Brett or Pierre are correct, right?
I'm just saying I I'm just curious as to A, if they are wrong, as in if Brett and Pierre are wrong, is that 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.
I just as a lawyer, I'm really interested in your thoughts, and I know that I kind of 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.
Okay, 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 the that's gonna always be the proximate cause of your taking it.
That's gonna always you you can't get around that.
Um moreover, obviously, if you will 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.
Um, it's It's immoral to do so to hold back information, you know, without justifying it for the reasons that I just said.
And where there's an obvious political and political, let's just say, in many, many respects.
Um, you know, the there are obvious political reasons for for choosing this particular thing to censor.
You know, it it 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's it's seems it's you have to realize that 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.
Um it's it obviously the decision being made at a very high level, and probably for reasons that are not so savory.
And and 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.
We know that they know they're doing it anyway because they are conf either they are confident in their ability to get away with it, which is reasonable, alternatively 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 why 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 um the fact that they have decided to, and given given the high, you know, the the prominence of you know the people involved, you know, it's something's gonna happen.
You know, I I this is just a good, 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, I'm I'm what I'm sort of getting a sense of is that this isn't necessarily illegal for YouTube to do.
It's just seems like it sucks, right?
I don't see no, I wouldn't see it.
I would I would never call it illegal.
I would I would say that it is in the category of censorship that I think ought to be regulated, but yeah, no such regulation exists now unless you take my point of view with respect to Section 230.
And even then, it's it's a hard case to it's 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 you know, from from a 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 is that these conversations have been and are taking 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 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 regular regulatory approach is rules.
If you have rules, they have to be enforced even handedly.
If there, if if someone has a claim that he has been deprived of access to your platform in a 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 uh you know fairly 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 uh you know, a very different kind of administrative law issue, but they can both be turned into an administration.
I mean, civil rights is made a civil is made a administrative law issue through the civil rights commission and the all sorts of local um commissions of that nature.
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 of civil rights laws, yes, it's immutable qualities and on the local basis religion.
Um you also have business regulation that decide 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 it is the answer or the proposed answer to the question I'm about to ask, which is what makes what makes social media platforms different from any other business in terms of regulation.
Why should I 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, there's 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 vibe?
Why who says the state's allowed to uh to step in?
The state says, and you know, and the state the courts have basically you know have approved these sorts of things in almost every kind of context.
And there's a gazillion kinds of types of regulation like this, and there's also regulation of all of any kind of deceptive practice, any kind of deceptive practice um, you know, 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 gonna now build this platform.
I'm gonna 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, you know, that that's essentially that's an a consumer deceptive practice.
And on that basis, you know, you would be entitled to certain kinds of relief.
The the you know, the way you structure it, you know, whether you need a lawyer, whether you can do it informally, that that's potentially complicated, but it's potentially simple.
Um so I think that you know, I think that that works.
I do think that there are also, you know, in terms of what I was just saying a second ago, which is that this, you know, what why should that why should selling widgets be different from selling accounts on Twitter?
Which, well, first of all, you don't buy an account on Twitter.
So you really the fact you, 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?
Twitter is our customer, and we should be setting the terms.
That to some extent, that is true.
We are the pro 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 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 monest 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 you know in legal claims to to make a distinction between the hat, your 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 law, 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.
I if I have a factory that just makes cinder blocks, okay.
What could be more industrial than that?
But you come knocking on my factory door and sell me web uh website building services.
I'm a consumer.
Under New Jersey law, my cinder block company is a consumer.
The fact that it's a commer a commercial entity, what what the law's really getting at is you're not sophisticated and you're not an expert in the field of um you know, building a website.
So I can have that relationship.
But on the other hand, if I want to, if you want to buy a bunch of cinder blocks for me for your for the brick and mortar store you're building for people to come to you to sell websites, then it's that's just a commercial, that's a regular commercial um relationship.
Interesting.
Okay.
Wow, man, this is so this is so complicated.
Um, but at the same time, it's simple, right?
It's weird how it's 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 what how do you think this is gonna 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 gonna be some heat going on.
What how's it gonna play out?
I don't know.
I mean, on the one hand, you do have you have certain states taking action based on um, 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 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 that had led to some of the statutes and some of the proposals of in various states.
Those those statutes and those actions and those regulations are gonna be challenged, of course.
I think there's also an issue with um, you know, there are gonna 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.
Uh just brought an action against Facebook.
And I didn't just bring in an action against Facebook, but rather the FC, 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 um not, you know, be recuse herself because of her past um criticisms of um social media companies.
That's extraordinary.
This is someone who 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 well, everybody except uh, you know, I could name certain names of people who actually think it's uh it's perfect.
It couldn't be better.
Build your own if you don't like how these uh work.
But this is you know, the Biden administration, you know, whoever is pulling the strings there, chose to appoint someone with a a history of not just signing off on whatever Silicon Valley has to say about things.
And I, you know, that's intriguing.
So I don't, you know, there are often surprises in in store.
I I do think that a lot of people who who have not necessarily been heard from yet, but who are 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 we 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 gonna 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, you know, to realize who has managed to avoid that.
Right.
Like a lot of the people who have 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 def uh 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 just I'd rather not just trash some of my name if I can avoid it.
Um 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 um lawsuit against the council on um Arab Count the accounts 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 is 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, um, 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.
We 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.
Um that lawsuit was filed two and a half years ago.
The motion to dismiss by the Southern Property 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 gonna die.
And a person should repent before he does so.
Um when I had this argument with Ken White, who I I wouldn't want to mention his name either, you know, what kept coming up during the course of discussion was well, your client is 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 and he got what he deserved.
That's not the principle.
The principle is it was he defamed by being accused of 10 things that he didn't do, one of one of which happened to be being a racist scumbag.
And there, by the way, there is this concept among judges that calling someone a racist is an expression of opinion.
And I can understand what how that could be the case in certain contexts.
But the idea convoluted in time.
It's very convoluted because uh let's face it, if I told you that uh uh Barack Obama is a racist.
That's just is that really uh he's anti that he's a racist against blacks.
You really have to accept that as just my opinion.
I think that you can actually demonstrate as a 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 or isn't a racist.
It might be you could only prove it in 30% of cases.
Well, it depends on how you define racism too.
I mean, 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 um that's part of the issue with the just throwing around, is he a racist, he's a racist, he's a racist.
Like, what do you mean?
Because it's it's one thing to lynch, and it's another thing to lock your door when when somebody in a different race crosses the street at a red light, you know.
I'll tell you a story that I 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 uh maybe you're maybe your your people haven't heard this one.
I'll 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 uh experiment.
I would sometimes be a volunteer for 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 I one time I signed up for an experiment, and the guy called me up.
Come on down, touch and such time.
Okay, I get there, they showed me a carter and said, Okay, there are two rooms when you get to the end, go into either one of the rooms, and you're gonna 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 a black guy.
And then the person who escorted me in said, okay, you're done.
Come on out.
So congratulations.
You're not racist.
You're not prejudiced.
We used to say prejudice in those days.
We're not.
I said, why not?
Because you went into the guy with the black room.
I went into the guy who 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, um, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on.
Um and solve the world's problems.
Uh well, I'm only one American.
Exactly.
So um, where uh uh where can people find you and follow you?
So you see, I put my hand on Twitter there, Ron Coleman.
It's pretty much all you really need.
Uh I mean, as someone who wants, I I have a lot of videos on YouTube and a couple of other.
If you if you just um 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 gonna get an African American bodybuilder who is extremely large.
He's not me.
I am not he.
Um, so you I've got videos, and I've got the the Twitter, and I've got um the podcast, Coleman Nation Coleman hyphen nation.
Um, is where I um have my podcast.
I started it not much before you.
And um I didn't go directly to the video as you did, but I'm gonna 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 when they do for for audio only.
Uh, but you know, it's I think it's more fun this way to have the option.
Thank you.
So if you uh need any tips for that, because um I know all the tools uh to make it.
Well, I can tell that I could because because having gone through this process of ramping up myself uh you through executive podcast solutions, um I noticed that your deal's pretty professional.
You know, I see that you you're you know, everything looks slick and together.
You're doing it all yourself, so homebrewing.
Yes, sir.
You demand.
I appreciate it.
Great talking to you.
Yeah, you're awesome.
And uh thank you again for coming on, and I look forward to continuing to follow you.
