Important free speech case involving Twitter
moves forward,
by Ann Corcoran 6/17/18
I
first told you about the case filed by Jared Taylor (American Renaissance)
against Twitter here in February.
Now we learn that Taylor’s lawsuit can advance as a California judge
refuses Twitter’s effort to dismiss the case.
Editor: I use Twitter almost
daily and was steadily moving upward in follower numbers until a few months
ago. It isn’t my imagination, I know that Twitter is doing something
(maybe shadow-banning to some of my 14 thousand followers) to keep my numbers
down. So they don’t have to ban you outright as they did Taylor, they simply
make sure you can’t expand your reach.
Here
is the news from AP at ABC News: Lawsuit over white nationalist’s Twitter ban
clears hurdle - A
California judge has refused to throw out a lawsuit that accuses Twitter of
violating the free speech rights of a leading white nationalist figure by
banning his social media account.
San
Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn ruled in Jared Taylor’s favor during
a hearing Thursday on Twitter’s request to dismiss the suit, court records
show. Taylor claims Twitter
permanently suspended accounts belonging to him and hundreds of other far-right
users in December based solely on their political views and affiliations.
The judge described Taylor’s case as a “classic public interest
lawsuit” and said it “goes to the heart of free speech principles that long
precede our constitution,” according to a transcript of the
hearing.
“Now,
it may be speech that you and I don’t wish to enjoy, but that’s not germane to
the determination of whether it’s public interest. Public interest doesn’t have
a flavor of ideology to it; public interest is whether it benefits the public,”
Kahn said.
Company
attorney Patrick Carome argued that platforms like Twitter have a First
Amendment editorial right to choose what kind of content to distribute.
The judge asked Carome if he was arguing Twitter has an “absolute First
Amendment right” to remove anybody from its platform, including on the basis of
their religion or gender.
“Twitter doesn’t do that,” Carome responded, “but that is what the
First Amendment guarantees to First Amendment actors.”
Taylor
is a Yale-educated, self-described “race realist” who founded an Oakton,
Virginia-based, tax-exempt nonprofit called the New Century Foundation. He
operates American
Renaissance, an online magazine that touts a philosophy that
it’s “entirely normal” for whites to want to be a majority race.
Taylor’s
lawyers argue access to Twitter is “essential for meaningful participation in
modern-day American democracy.”
More here. LOL! I’m wondering if the SPLC is going
to say AP and ABC News are racist outfits for publishing this important news
about free speech. This should be good—-stay tuned! By the way, even if you
aren’t on Twitter, you can see my Twitter feed in the right hand column of RRW.
I post all of my RRW articles there plus other things that interest me. If you
are on Twitter, I am @RefugeeWatcher. Yesterday’s post about the Maine man murdered by Somali ‘youths’in Lewiston went viral on Twitter.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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