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
Related Stories
"He's Literally Suing an Imaginary Cow": Late-Night Hosts Mock Rep. Devin Nunes:
On Monday, Devin Nunes' cow was an obscure Twitter account with around 1,200 followers. Then Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) filed a lawsuit demanding that Twitter and several Twitter accounts—including the user behind the pseudonymous cow—pay him $250 million for the "pain, insult, embarrassment, humiliation, emotional distress and mental suffering, and injury to his personal and professional reputations" caused by their tweets.
Now, Devin Nunes' cow has more than 420,000[*] Twitter followers—that's more than Nunes himself, who has 395,000 followers.
It's a beautiful example of the Streisand Effect. Nunes appears to have filed the lawsuit in part to raise his own profile within the conservative movement, as the lawsuit was peppered with gratuitous swipes at the Democratic Party, Fusion GPS, and other high-profile villains in the conservative pantheon.
But the lawsuit appears to have done more to raise the profile of Devin Nunes' cow than it did Nunes himself. Television comedians Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and Stephen Colbert all had fun at Nunes' expense on Tuesday night.
"He's literally suing an imaginary cow," Kimmel said, noting that Nunes had co-sponsored the Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act during the last session of Congress. "We can't have livestock insulting our elected officials. This DevinCow account obviously really bothers Devin Nunes. So in the interest of civility, I'm asking you please don't follow @DevinCow on Twitter."
[...] Santa Clara University legal scholar Eric Goldman is skeptical that Nunes will win his lawsuit. The law gives online service providers like Twitter broad immunity for content posted by its users. As for Devin Nunes' cow, many of the supposedly defamatory statements made by the parody account are clearly non-actionable opinions.
[*] 420,000 at the time the linked story was posted (2019-03-20 18:42:00 UTC). At the time of this submission (2019-03-21 03:42:03 UTC) the count had risen to 534K. That works out to adding 1000 followers every 5 minutes or so.
Following @DevinCow on Twitter could reveal moooving comments on all that is at steak in this rare social medium... you can run but you can't hide.
(Score: 3, Funny) by SomeGuy on Friday June 26 2020, @11:06AM (2 children)
Hmm. Someone posts on Twatter and gets harassed by stupid shit. Who would have ever thought?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @01:06PM
Moooove on Devin, nothing to sue here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @08:15PM
He likes to be Little Trump and the last several years he has taken to ape his hero by filing frivolous lawsuit after lawsuit. I dont' know if he knows they are frivolous, but he does it to make a political point, or if he thinks his opponents will back down, or if he is just ignorant (or a little from column A, a little from column B, . . . ).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stormreaver on Friday June 26 2020, @01:24PM (4 children)
He's doing that all by himself, by being a complete and utter moron.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday June 26 2020, @01:33PM (2 children)
And if I, not a lawyer, understand the law correctly, the judge was a lot narrower in his ruling than he needed to be. Nunes is a public figure, and as such doesn't have much protection against being parodied, satirized, etc. He'd basically need to prove that the "publications" were intended to deceive.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday June 26 2020, @02:38PM (1 child)
He'd have to prove that:
1. The statements in question were false.
2. The person doing the posting knew they were false, rather than just mistaken.
3. The statements were something somebody could reasonably believe to be true.
4. That he actually suffered real damage.
Point 3 is usually why parody accounts and comedy bits about public figures are totally legal, e.g. John Oliver telling the world that Bob Murray was in the Times Square M&M store with his pants down.
And of course since he's still in Congress, he can't reasonably claim damages here.
But I'm also quite sure that Nunes knew that his suit would be thrown out, and was just trying to create costs for Twitter to encourage them to censor any criticism of him.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @02:49PM
Just happens to be Trump's pet project, so there's sucking up to the Boss going on too. Let's see if Trump can resist joining in the debate. Ha ha that's a joke, son - he's always on the lookout for noise making opportunities.
Let me guess... righteous indignant blowhard or wounded American hero? Decisions decisions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @05:16PM
udder moron
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @01:39PM (1 child)
What a sore loser.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @02:52PM
> What a sore winner.
FTFY. I heard he got the largest inauguration crowd ever for a Congressman.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @01:54PM (1 child)
When does Twitters curation of content cross the line of good faith?
Personally, if they want to be a platform then they should have a TOS that is fair and equally enforced. I think the law should change to state as much and if there is unfair or unequal enforced TOS then they lose those protections and liable for suit.
It's great that we had a law that protected those tech companies and allowed them to become giants. It's not so great that as soon as they became giants and the most profitable companies in the world that they use their position to shit no people they don't like.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2020, @03:43AM
Make them adopt CoCs too.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @01:57PM (1 child)
Buthurt republitard snowflake whines like a little baby when some people say bad things about him on the Internet.
Meanwhile, the entire republican machine, including their beloved sexual-predator-in-chief, spews a neverending stream of misinformation, half-truths, thinly-veiled accusations, incendiary comments and lies all over the web everyday, day after day, year after year, and they see absolutely no problem with that.
Typical hypocritical republitard filth.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @02:01PM
Reps lie, dems build entire NGOs upon lies.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @02:16PM (7 children)
The timing here following the recent DoJ suggestions regarding Section 230 seems unlikely to be a coincidence. There's no way he expected to be able to win this, and by losing he now has standing for appeals and has started the process needed to eventually see the nuances of Section 230 decided by the Supreme Court.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @05:59PM (5 children)
Over and over we see Republicans lose their shit and attack people over nothing. They are stuck in the past and willing to cheat, lie, and steal their way into power.
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.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2020, @01:41AM
I think this is closest to the truth.
He is probably trying to act the part of the illustrative case for rewriting the CDA.
Not that it couldn't use some rewriting, but I don't see it being rewritten to outlaw parody of a public figure.