Twitter Hit With MASSIVE Lawsuit Over Anti Conservative Bias
Twitter Hit With MASSIVE Lawsuit Over Anti Conservative Bias. I told Jack Dorsey lawmakers would be coming for them and here we are only a few weeks later. Devin Nunes has filed a 250 million dollar lawsuit against twitter over their bias against conservatives.Nunes argues that Twitter is essential in American Democracy and they must uphold fair standards and stop shadow banning conservatives and republicans.Twitter does seem to hold a bias against conservatives and in favor of left wing, far left, and intersectional feminist accounts having let many of the worst offenders off with a warning while suppressing people on the right.In response to this we are now seeing a Florida Lawmaker push forth a bill to make it illegal for a social media giant to censor views based on subjective reasons.
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California Republican Devin Nunes has filed a $250 million lawsuit against Twitter over their conservative bias, arguing that shadow bans and selective enforcement may have actually influenced our elections.
He stresses the importance of Twitter by saying that a candidate that isn't on Twitter is a losing candidate.
Now, I argued to Jack Dorsey and their head of trust and safety on the Joe Rogan podcast.
that if they didn't uphold American legal standards of discourse,
it would only be a matter of time before lawmakers came after them.
Not only are we seeing this lawsuit, but in Florida at the state level,
an anti-censorship bill was passed that would restrict censorship on certain grounds.
Today, let's take a look at what's going on with this lawsuit, whether or not it has merit,
and then take a look at the legislation in Florida, which could potentially change
things in our country when we deal with social media and censorship.
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Our first story from Fox News.
Nunes sues Twitter, some users, seeks over $250 million alleging anti-conservative shadow bans and smears.
Now before we read this, I do want to point out there is a conflicting narrative coming from the Washington Post.
Clearly this issue is extremely political.
And the Washington Post highlights some of the more absurd claims made by Nunes, which in my opinion are worthy of criticism.
But let's start by reading Fox News to see what their take on the issue is.
California GOP Rep Devin Nunes filed a major lawsuit seeking $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages against Twitter and a handful of its users on Monday accusing the social media site of shadow banning conservatives to secretly hide their posts, systematically censoring opposing viewpoints and totally ignoring lawful complaints of repeated abusive behavior.
In a complaint filed in Virginia State Court on Monday obtained by Fox News, Nunes claimed Twitter wanted to derail his work on the House Intelligence Committee.
which he chaired until 2019 as he looked into alleged and apparent surveillance abuses by the government.
Nunes said Twitter was guilty of knowingly hosting and monetizing content that is clearly abusive, hateful, and defamatory, providing both a voice and financial incentive to the defamers, thereby facilitating defamation on its platform.
Devin's legal team writes, Twitter created and developed the content at issue in this case by transforming false accusations of criminal conduct, imputed wrongdoing, dishonesty and lack of integrity into a publicly available commodity used by unscrupulous political operatives and their donor clients as a weapon.
Twitter is responsible for the development of offensive content on its platform because it in some way specifically encourages development of what is offensive about the content.
The lawsuit is separate from Nunes' work on the House Intelligence Committee, where he is now the ranking member.
Additionally, as the complaint stated, Twitter has a duty to exercise reasonable care to avoid hosting outwardly defamatory content because of its increasingly important role in current affairs.
Access to Twitter is essential for meaningful participation in modern-day American democracy, the complaint stated.
A candidate without Twitter is a losing candidate.
The ability to use Twitter is a vital part of modern citizenship.
A presence on Twitter is essential for an individual to run for office or engage in any level of political organizing in modern America.
That is because Twitter is not merely a website.
It is the modern town square.
Twitter is equivalent to the private owner of a public forum who has fully opened its property to the general public for purposes of permitting the public's free expression and debate.
That is, in fact, what Twitter has always claimed to be.
And this is an extremely important point that I actually brought up on the Joe Rogan podcast.
There's something called a POPs, a Privately Owned Public Space, and this was extremely relevant during Occupy Wall Street.
Zuccotti Park, where the protests took place, was privately owned, and there was an argument that protesters had no right to be there because it was private property.
However, They successfully argued that if you welcome people in the public to come onto your space, then you must welcome the protests as well.
In response to this, a plaza close to Occupy Wall Street actually barricaded off its public space because even though it was privately owned, they knew protesters could come and occupy like they were at Zuccotti.
This is the argument presented to Twitter.
Twitter is privately owned, but it is a public forum.
They open their doors to everyone.
They allow some speech and not others.
This argument asserts that because it is a space for political discourse, they must be open to all political ideas so long as it's legal in the United States.
But it is important to point out the absurd portions of this lawsuit.
This was an orchestrated effort.
Devin Nunes sues Twitter.
Devin Nunes is cow for defamation.
There is a cow on Twitter.
But it isn't just any cow.
It claims to belong to Rep.
Devin Nunes of California.
Hanging out on the dairy in Iowa looking for the little treasonous cowpoke, reads the bio of the account, Devin Nunes's Cow, which as of early Tuesday had nearly 45,000 followers.
The opinionated bovine appears to not be the biggest fan of its owner.
Devon's boots are full of manure, it once tweeted.
He's utterly worthless, and it's past your time to move him to prison.
On Monday, Nuna said he is suing the cow account, other individual users, and Twitter for defamation and negligence, alleging that the social media platform knowingly acted as a vessel for opposition research and censors conservative voices.
The lawsuit, the latest one accusing a social media site of anti-conservative bias, drew criticism Monday as many, including legal experts, questioned its motivations and wondered if it could be a publicity stunt.
In the lawsuit, Nunes accused Twitter of shadow-banning conservatives, such as himself, while facilitating defamation on his platform, by ignoring lawful complaints about offensive content and by allowing that content to remain accessible to the public.
Even if it allegedly violated the site's terms of service or rules.
In recent years, shadowbanning, which refers to the practice of hiding an active user's posts from others on a platform, has become a politically loaded catch-all for censorship, according to the post's Abby Holheiser.
As of right now, I still receive emails from people who are being suspended for tweeting the phrase, learn to code.
Learn to code itself is not offensive in any way.
In fact, Jack Dorsey said they may have been a bit too aggressive in how they were policing that particular phrase.
But they're still doing it.
Nothing has changed.
In fact, it's only gotten worse.
This story from yesterday.
Twitter censors the Federalist co-founder over Lisa Page tweet.
Twitter claimed it mistakenly removed a tweet from the Federalist co-founder Sean Davis about Lisa Page's congressional testimony Monday, but denied employing shadowbanning tactics against its users.
Davis tweeted a portion of the former FBI lawyer's testimony last week, but soon noticed that the tweet was not appearing for other users, despite still being visible when he was logged into his own account.
He tweeted, Is Twitter experimenting with shadow bans by deleting tweets so others can't see them, but keeping them visible to you while you're logged in?
I had to republish my original Lisa Page transcript tweet because it was disappeared to everyone but me.
He added yesterday, Twitter confirmed to me via email that it did shadow ban one of my tweets about Lisa Page's congressional testimony in order to keep people safe.
Twitter deliberately deleted the tweet URL, yet kept it visible for me when I was logged in, so I'd think it was still up.
The story adds at the end, Twitter has faced allegations of shadowbanning before, most prominently this past fall, when several Republican congressmen's accounts were suppressed in Twitter search results.
Republican Florida Rep Matt Gaetz announced the time that he was bringing a Federal Election Commission complaint against the company, and Republican California Rep Devin Nunes was said to be exploring legal options.
On Monday, Nunes filed a lawsuit seeking over $250 million in damages from Twitter for allegedly shadow-banning conservatives and systematically censoring opposing viewpoints.
We know Twitter is biased, whether you agree with their rules or not.
Conservatives don't believe in the idea that hate speech should be banned.
Twitter does.
That's a left-wing ideological viewpoint.
I don't understand necessarily how you define left and right at this point anymore, but from a tribal standpoint, it is typically the left arguing for banning hateful and offensive words.
But more importantly, Twitter's rules against misgendering and deadnaming are specific to a feminist ideology and not even to mainstream liberals.
Therefore, It is a fact.
Twitter holds a bias in their rules.
A lot of people have brought criticism my way saying that I'm arguing in favor of people being allowed to harass and intimidate marginalized groups.
That's not the point at all.
I'm just trying to highlight that Twitter actually has these rules in place that half the country doesn't agree with.
In fact, in some cases, the majority of the country doesn't agree with these rules.
But now it's coming to law.
In Florida, a bill was proposed that would actually stop Twitter censorship.
This story from TechSpot.
Florida Senator Joe Gruters proposes the Stop Social Media Censorship Act.
Websites could be fined for censoring hate speech.
Given that they boast user numbers in the tens of millions and yearly revenues far beyond that, it's tough to deny the influence of websites like Facebook and Twitter.
However, many politically-minded users feel that this influence is being wielded unfairly.
One Florida senator has lost his patience with such practices and decided to take matters into his own hands.
Republican Joe Gruders has introduced Senate Bill 1722, which he refers to as the Stop Social Media Censorship Act.
The act may enable Florida's Attorney General to hit social media websites with $75,000 in fines if they censor users for hate speech or other subjective reasons.
They go on to say that this punishment would only apply to social media websites with 75 million users or more.
The bill itself is actually a bit more complicated than that, and I have to say, it actually is decently thought out, though it's not perfect.
In the bill they say, whereas, this state has a compelling interest in holding certain social media websites to higher standards for having substantially created a digital public square, and whereas, This state has an interest in helping its citizens enjoy their free exercise of rights in certain semi-public forums, commonly used for religious and political speech.
Now, therefore... And the bill then goes on to list essentially what it would do.
Restricting speech for political reasons or religious reasons would not be allowed.
However, they do include some exemptions.
Adding, this section does not apply to any of the following.
A social media website that deletes or censors a social media website's user's speech,
or that uses an algorithm to disfavor or censor speech that, one, calls for immediate acts of
violence, two, is obscene or pornographic in nature, three, is the result of operational error,
is the result of a court order, comes from an inauthentic source or involves false impersonation,
Adding, a social media website user censoring of another social media website's user's speech,
and six, only.
Only users who are 18 years of age or older have standing to seek enforcement of this act.
And this is extremely complicated.
Under Section 230 of the Telecommunications Decency Act, Twitter is immune.
They're completely immune.
In fact, it was argued in court at one point that Twitter could ban literally any protected class they want under Section 230.
In a story from the Washington Times in relation to the lawsuit filed by Jared Taylor, A judge seemed skeptical to an argument made by Twitter and asked, Twitter can discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, sexual preference, or physical disability or mental disability, he asked.
I understand your position.
I'm going to just respectfully disagree with it.
Twitter argued, a bookstore could not be required to carry books that it doesn't want to show for any reason, and no one gets to ask.
And they don't have to say in their contracts with the people they buy their books from that, you know, we have a right to turn away any book at all and not sell any book at all, he added.
Now I'm not a lawyer, but I do have to disagree with that argument.
Twitter is a public forum for debate, not a bookstore.
Twitter isn't selling anything.
In fact, it sounds like he's arguing Twitter is purposefully selecting the speech that it promotes on its platform.
You also have to consider that Twitter has a section called Moments.
This is a section that's curated and presented by Twitter.
If there's any bias in Moments, perhaps then Twitter may be liable because that is an editorial section.
The Florida bill has not yet passed.
As of the 13th, it was introduced.
But it's going to be interesting to see how Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media sites deal with this kind of legislation.
It's entirely possible this bill makes its way to the Supreme Court.
Now, again, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't necessarily know how it works, but my understanding is that when it comes to many civil rights issues, they start at the state level.
The state seeks to impose some kind of restriction or right to people.
Then when it's challenged, it moves up to the courts and eventually the Supreme Court makes a ruling which could affect the entire country.
Again, not a lawyer, not 100% sure, but this is how it was explained to me by some people who do work in law.
So this could change the game in a lot of ways.
If Twitter is forced to get rid of its hate speech rules, You're gonna see a ton of people flood the platform, and I don't necessarily know if that's a good thing.
While I do think free speech is important, the internet is very different.
And I've pointed this out before, Twitter already kinda sucks.
There's a lot of great things about it, but the whole platform is just people being mean to each other.
I don't think Twitter is making things better by enforcing hate speech rules and being biased, but I don't know what the platform will be like if everyone's just even meaner and more aggressive.
However, ultimately, Twitter is a powerful platform that does influence elections, and if that's true, then there's only one course of action that seems to make sense.
Twitter must respect American legal standards for discourse.
We should not be allowing massive, multinational, billion-dollar corporations with foreign investors' control Over our public space.
But that's just me, someone who leans left and thinks regulation can be a good idea.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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