As my first lawyer explained to me, "Anybody can sue you for anything. The question isn't 'Can they sue me?', it's 'Can you afford to go the distance?'"
Twitter has plenty of lawyers, and can afford to hire plenty more, including lawyers in whatever country you set this up in. They could go after owners, workers, hosting companies, ad providers, network providers, and anybody else with a significant connection.
Who knows if they'd bother. But I don't think anybody should expect a simple dodge to make them completely safe.
It seems significant that Twitter wasn't a party to that case. People seem to be enthusiastically conflating it with some sort of ruling on what Twitter can or must do. I'm not sure if you are, but even bringing it up worries me.
No they don't. Twitter cannot be sued for something someone tweets that is false or defamatory about someone else. That individual tweeter is responsible. Unlike Fox or CNN who are responsible for what their reporters and commentators say. If Twitter ventures against the spirit of 230 protection, which was designed to protect neutral platforms like a utility, then they deserve to lose it. It's not about who produces a segment, Twitter is clearly the publisher and distributor. 230 was designed to protect free speech not to allow unlimited corporate intervention into speech.
Oh there's definitely some path of legal wrangling that may end up compelling Twitter to do something here. In the end whether that's true or not will simply come down to a Judge and if Twitter wishes to fight further (eventually to the top court) or stop and give in. It doesn't have to be written in the constitution for someone to be compelled to do something wacky in this country.
My point is that there is an age-old institution to solve this problem, called a court. We all participate in a social contract where the court's decisions about subjective matters have the force of law.
Where it gets weird is that Twitter also has an explicit user contract with the underlying USA social contract/courts as a dependency! If you could physically live in Twitter apartments, and somehow remain safe from war, why not only depend on the Twitter contract and its moderation system? And that's how we get to the future world of Snow Crash.
You, and many in these comments, seem to be conflating twitter’s legal rights with their informal social obligations. No one is saying this is illegal behavior by Twitter. Some are saying it’s very annoying of them to go back on their established policies and break thousands of websites.
Twitter is going to have some major, major legal problems with the current Missouri lawsuit - acting as a direct agent of the US Government puts Twitter 100% under the jurisdiction and requirements of the 1st Amendment. "The government shall not infringe" now includes Twitter censorship!
Social media as also enabled mentally ill and fringe lunatics to have a voice that is nominally equal to people who are rational and law-and-order based. In so far as individuals should show "reasonable restraint" in anything they do or say (to avoid 1st Amendment, discrimination, slander, libel or other ILLEGAL speech acts), that is partially and centrally an individual's fault as well.
Both feed on each other. Both are evil in any sense of what civilization and civil society are. The pendulum will swing back and in many ways already is.
When a group of people act like terrorists, it's absolutely wrong or illegal. It's not polite but politeness is not the measure. The definition of terrorism lately is (per the FBI):
Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
Committing slander or libel or violating the 1st Amendment (if government OR GOVERNMENT AGENT) is precisely terrorism by the above legal definition given by the government itself.
There are laws. Nothing suggests that Twitter intends to break the law. If they do break the law I'm sure that they'll be held to account, also according to law nothing less, nothing more.
So I am not a lawyer, and if you do this stuff you should get a real lawyer (I mean, I have lots of real lawyers! ;P), but I am on the front lines of a lot of these battles (look into who I am if you haven't; hell: I've had Snapchat once try to come after people in my ecosystem, and the only thing their lawyers had as an argument was trademark law... I easily shoved them away), and I am going to claim Twitter would have no legs to stand on. At best--at BEST--they could ban you and all of your company accounts from their service.
This seems... strange to me. Users are the life and blood of services like Twitter; I would do everything in my power to keep my users happy and protect them from harassment. I'd rather lose one abusive user than many good users.
The lawsuit explanation, especially, seems strange. I know threatening to sue is a common past-time for certain internet users (even though chances are they don't know what they're talking about and couldn't afford it anyway), but has anyone ever successfully sued a service for banning them?
Literally not true. They can simply decline and if the Govt wants to come after them they can sue each other and in cases where it’s legal content then Twitter will win. This is extremely well established and not even remotely weird or some dark unexplored corner of Constitutional law.
Disagree with the established precedent if you want, but if you do, I’d recommend picking a different battleground than whatever this Twitter Files fiasco is. This stuff isn’t even on the questionable end of the spectrum.
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