SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Devin Nunes can't sue Twitter over statements by fake cow, judge rules:
A judge has ruled that Rep. Devin Nunes has no right to sue Twitter over statements made by a fake Internet cow, someone parodying his mother and a Republican strategist.
Judge John Marshall said in a decision Friday that Twitter was "immune from the defamation claims of" Nunes, R-Tulare, due to federal law that says social media companies are not liable for what people post on their platforms.
Nunes "seeks to have the court treat Twitter as the publisher or speaker of the content provided by others based on its allowing or not allowing certain content to be on its internet platform," Marshall wrote. "The court refuses to do so."
Nunes sued Twitter, the two parody accounts known as Devin Nunes' Cow and Devin Nunes' Mom and strategist Liz Mair in March 2019. He alleged the latter three had defamed him online, ruining his reputation and causing him to win his 2018 election by a narrower margin than normal. He accused Twitter of being negligent for allowing the alleged defamation.
Twitter's lawyers, in their motion to dismiss the suit, argued that Twitter was immune from the lawsuit due to federal law. The law, known as Section 230, says that social media companies like Twitter are not liable for what third parties post on their platform. The only exception is if Twitter personally helped develop or create the content. Both Twitter and Nunes agreed the company did not do that in this case.
Also at Ars Technica.
Previously:
(2019-03-22) "He's Literally Suing an Imaginary Cow": Late-Night Hosts Mock Rep. Devin Nunes
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @06:12PM (4 children)
>> I dream of these assholes being charged for their crimes, along with every police officer guilty of abusing their power and committing war crimes against civilians.
Over the last half century, the US has turned politics from a practical way to solve common problems into a cultural arena to display resentments. Dealing with these problems is going to take government - actual lawmaking, actual budgeting, complex compromises - all the boring, dogged work of government that is more C-SPAN than Instagram.
You are part of the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @09:24PM (3 children)
The former never existed. The 'good old days' never existed.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @11:11PM
There have been times where Americans have worked together. That you attempt to deny this makes me wonder whether you're just ignorant, a political shill or both.
Politics has long been called "the art of the possible." But that requires compromise. When you demonize your neighbors, friends and family, you destroy opportunities to make life better for *all of us*.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Here's a sampling of just how misguided/full of shit you are [nationalaffairs.com]:
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/history-of-bipartisanship/ [bipartisanpolicy.org]
https://theconversation.com/congress-used-to-pass-bipartisan-legislation-will-it-ever-again-107134 [theconversation.com]
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/history-shows-bipartisanship-dissolves-crises-evolve [wilsoncenter.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEczkhfLwqM [youtube.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartisanship [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2020, @05:00PM (1 child)
Out of curiosity, what would make you think this?
Rather than go for some historical accounting, which a peer comment did well enough, I'd simply approach things more logically. Today you obviously see the country is embroiled in an increasingly bitter divide. And I think you can see little to nothing is getting done in the country. You can even see some obvious quantitative measurements of this. In our first 36 presidents, exactly 1 was impeached. Of our past 9 presidents, 3 have been impeached. But anyhow, this all poses a bit of a logical problem problem. When the United States was first formed it was, certainly relative to Europe, pretty much an inhospitable backwoods outpost. By contrast Europe and Asia were both home to immensely powerful and developed empires that had, in some cases, existed and (by the standards of the time) thrived for millennia.
200 years later, America had become completely dominant and those formerly thriving empires had completely deteriorated. Now there's no doubt that the World Wars (and America's ability to escape relatively untouched) played a major role in this, but even before the World Wars - American dominance had become increasingly clear. The wars simply formalized it. So if back then we were how we are today, how did we get from point A of mostly inhospitable backwoods outpost to point B of dominant world power by nearly every metric?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2020, @05:52PM
You answered your own question yourself: America became dominant because we reaped the rewards of the World Wars, but didn't take any damage. Power was then leveraged against our ideological/geopolitical opponents, and the rest is history.
Politics was every bit as bitterly partisan and divided then as it is now - but it has been very rare in the last 100 years or so to see any political party whose foreign policy wasn't rapaciously capitalistic, so they can generally agree on bullying small countries and giving their resources to American corporations.