Hongkongers Battle Supporters Of Beijing For The Soul Of The Chinese-Language Wikipedia

from the beyond-edit-wars dept

When Wikipedia was first launched 20 years ago, it was widely derided as an impossible project, bound to fail or, at best, to produce worthless rubbish. And yet today, along with open source software, it is undoubtedly the best demonstration that a distributed team of volunteers can produce work that is not just free but arguably better than anything created for profit using traditional, top-down management approaches. But beyond that, Wikipedia has become something else: a unique repository of validated information and thus, implicitly, a store of "truth" about the past and the present. That has turned many pages of Wikipedia into a battleground, as people with different views fight in sometimes fierce "edit wars" over what counts as "verified". The choice of information and even how things are phrased often have considerable social, economic or political importance. No surprise, then, that there is a struggle taking place over what Wikipedia should say is happening in the contested space of Hong Kong. Back in July, an article in the Hong Kong Free Press explained:

As Hongkongers reckon with the closure of one of the city's mainstream news outlets [Apple Daily], drastic political changes and a sweeping national security law, the city's keyboard warriors on Wikipedia are also coming under pressure.

Battles between competing editors of the crowd-sourced encyclopaedia's articles about Hong Kong political events have been a daily occurrence since the beginning of the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests.

As increasing numbers of mainland Chinese contribute to the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia, those in Hong Kong worry that their perspectives will be lost:

In the war to set narratives using news sources that may have political biases, whether pro-Hong Kong or pro-China, the question of which news outlet gets a seal of "reliability" becomes a key battleground.

Since then, the situation has become so serious that the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns and operates all the different language editions of Wikipedia, has been forced to step in. Maggie Dennis, the Wikimedia Foundation's Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, wrote this week of "infiltration" of Wikimedia systems, "including positions with access to personally identifiable information and elected bodies of influence." Dennis claims that "we know that some users have been physically harmed as a result. With this confirmed, we have no choice but to act swiftly and appropriately in response." The actions were as follows:

We have banned seven users and desysopped [removed administrator privileges from] a further 12 as a result of long and deep investigations into activities around some members of the unrecognized group Wikimedians of Mainland China. We have also reached out to a number of other editors with explanations around canvassing guidelines and doxing policies and requests to modify their behaviors.

Setting the narrative for these politically-sensitive events is so important to the Chinese government that it is unlikely that Wikimedia's moves will put an end to this "infiltration". On the contrary: we can probably expect the organization to come under even more pressure to tell things the way Beijing wants them portrayed, and to hell with Wikipedia's cherished neutral point of view.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: beijing, china, culture, hong kong, shared knowledge, truth
Companies: wikipedia

Does Taking Down Content Lead Ignorant People To Believe It's More Likely To Be True?

from the well-that's-a-tough-question dept

Harpers has a giant and fascinating article by Barrett Swanson entitled The Anxiety of Influencers that has received some attention online. Most of the reactions are the kind of typical tut tutting about the existence of TikTok/Instagram influencers whose entire (quite short) careers as "influencers" are based on their ability to get famous on social media for influencing. I do understand why people -- especially older folks (a category I now inhabit myself) -- look down upon these stories and shake their heads and wonder "what has happened to the children these days?" However, I'm more in the camp of recognizing this kind of thing happens in every generation, and I don't begrudge kids these days from trying to chase a dream, even if it feels like a silly one to someone not of that generation. There will always be young people chasing dreams, and along with it old people complaining about the kids these days. I don't think that approach is particularly useful, so I'll just say that the article is an interesting window into some of the "collab houses" that have sprung up all over (though mostly in LA), full of kids trying to become famous as influencers.

The reason this is here on Techdirt is one tiny bit of the article that touches on content moderation. At one point in the article, Swanson -- who deftly alternates between chronicling "the kids these days," envying some of their fame and attention, and recognizing just how preposterous all of this is -- is talking with Chase Zwernemann, who (perhaps somewhat incredibly) is one of the "adults" in the collab house space at a geezerly 21 years old, enabling him to be "VP of talent management" for what he and his colleagues want to suggest is an academy to produce influencers. And Chase appears to have some interesting views about the state of the world, and what he learns online.

Chase, the media liaison and self-described “influencing professor,” agrees. Later that day, he will tell me that “we’ve been kind of lucky to have these outlets across the last few months because we’ve been more exposed to what’s really going on.” For instance, just a few weeks ago, he was at home scrolling through his phone as a ritual of pre-sleep entertainment, at which point he stumbled upon “some kind of documentary” about the apparently rampant levels of Satanism in the U.S. entertainment industry. The documentary offered a detailed exegesis of demonic iconography, which supposedly many directors embed in their TV shows and movies. “It freaked me out, one hundred percent,” Chase says, “because I’ve seen those types of things—those signs and symbols—in these entertainment people’s offices, and so then to see this documentary and to start putting the pieces together, I mean, it’s nuts, man.”

At this point, I nonchalantly inquire as to whether Chase could maybe brandish his smartphone and pull up the video in question, and I’m soon made to view something called “Out of Shadows,” which has been posted on YouTube by an account called—I shit you not—Thinqing QAnon. Later, when I ask Chase whether he’s ever heard about the QAnon conspiracy, he says no, but explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.

And... frankly... I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. Sure, there's an element of The Streisand Effect in there, which I understand pretty well. But, this is a slight veering off from the Streisand Effect -- assuming that every takedown via content moderation must only be done because of the "hidden truths" the content reveals.

This certainly gets to the heart of some of the cultish conspiracy theory nonsense that goes around these days. In this view, nothing can be proven false, because merely attempting to do so somehow validates it. We've seen this before, with other conspiracy theories, but it makes me wonder if the scale is different in this case.

And that then opens up the question of what, if anything, should be done in such a situation. Leaving up blatantly false disinformation that is sucking people in with nonsense and lies is obviously problematic. But so is recognizing that removing the disinformation may lead people to believe in it more strongly. How do you square those two things and come up with a plan to respond? Part of it, obviously, is that different people react to things in different ways. Clearly, young Chase's reaction to finding out this content keeps getting deleted is not the way everyone (or even most people) will respond. But it's unclear how many others would fall into that camp. Or what to do about the Chases of this world that are taking information that should be seen as evidence that they're mainlining disinformation, and interpreting it instead as evidence that the misinformation is true.

To some extent, this brings me back to a point that I've been making for years concerning questions of content moderation: we can't expect "someone else" (government, big companies, journalists, fact checkers, etc.) to solve every problem. That's just not how it works. To some extent, at some point, there needs to be some personal responsibility and some level of media literacy for the people who consume all this stuff. And clearly we've got a long way to go on that front.

Filed Under: content moderation, disinformation, influencers, truth

Twitter Making It Easier To Study The Public Discussions Around COVID-19

from the good-to-see dept

There has been a lot of talk about how this moment in history is going to be remembered -- and as Professor Jay Rosen has been saying, a key part is going to be an effort by the many people who failed to respond properly to rewrite the history of everything that happened:

There is going to be a campaign to prevent Americans from understanding what happened within the Trump government during the critical months of January to April, 2020. Many times Donald Trump told the nation that it has nothing to worry about because he and his people have the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus well in hand. They did not. He misled the country about that.

“It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he told CNBC on January 22. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” he told Sean Hannity on February 2. On February 24, Trump tweeted that “the Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”

He misled the country. This basic fact is so damning, the evidence for it so mountainous, and the mountain of evidence so public — and so personally attached to Donald Trump — that the only option is to create confusion about these events, and about the pandemic generally, in hopes that people give up and conclude that the public record does not speak clearly and everything is propaganda.

The battle over rewriting history is going to take many forms in many different ways -- and so it's good to see a company like Twitter making it easier for researchers to look at the actual history of the public conversation during these months.

To further support Twitter’s ongoing efforts to protect the public conversation, and help people find authoritative health information around COVID-19, we’re releasing a new endpoint into Twitter Developer Labs to enable approved developers and researchers to study the public conversation about COVID-19 in real-time.

This is a unique dataset that covers many tens of millions of Tweets daily and offers insight into the evolving global public conversation surrounding an unprecedented crisis. Making this access available for free is one of the most unique and valuable things Twitter can do as the world comes together to protect our communities and seek answers to pressing challenges. 

It would be interesting to see if others (cough Facebook cough) would do the same thing as well. How the history of these times is written is going to be important in seeing how we deal with the next such crisis.

Filed Under: conversation, covid-19, history, pandemic, truth
Companies: twitter

Largest Hospital System In The US Threatens To Fire Doctors & Nurses For Telling The Truth About COVID-19 Disaster

from the this-seems-truly-fucked-up dept

Last week we talked about just how insane it was that hospital administrators were threatening and/or firing doctors and nurses for speaking out publicly on social media about just how unprepared America's healthcare system has been for the COVID-19 pandemic -- and now we find out it gets even worse. Business Insider has seen a memo sent around by the country's largest hospital provider, HCA Healthcare, noting that they changed their social media guidelines just as the pandemic got really cooking, to tell those healthcare professionals on the frontline that telling the truth in public might cost them their jobs:

HCA Healthcare, which has 185 hospitals in 20 states, sent an email to employees on March 24 that added new guidelines for social media and media inquiries during the pandemic. The email said HCA employees could get disciplined or even fired for posting information on social media about its policies about treating patients with COVID-19, the illness caused by this coronavirus. The health system also barred employees from speaking to journalists about the virus without explicit permission from HCA's communications director.

One nurse, Jhonna Porter, told Business Insider that HCA Healthcare had already suspended her for violating these new guidelines and did so retroactively, for her activity before March 24. Porter, a charge nurse at West Hills Hospital in California, said HCA Healthcare suspended her without pay on March 25, a day after sending the email updating its social-media policy.

The situation with Porter seems particularly ridiculous. She was talking in a private Facebook group with her colleagues, and that's why she got suspended:

Porter said HCA Healthcare issued her suspension over a phone call and told her it was for talking to her colleagues in a private Facebook group about a floor the hospital had turned into one for treating patients with COVID-19. Porter said the health system said her social-media activity was a violation of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly known as HIPAA, which mandates that healthcare workers keep patient information private.

Porter said her post did not name the health system or mention sensitive patient information. Rather, she said, she was being punished for being a whistleblower who called out equipment shortages and other hospital issues.

It is true that HIPAA rules are (often overly) strict, and that does limit what healthcare providers can share, but this seems like trying to pin a false HIPAA violation on what is actually embarrassing whistleblowing in the midst of a pandemic.

It's ridiculous how many times it needs to be said, but, in the midst of a pandemic, accurate and transparent information sharing is the key to actually getting a handle on this and minimizing the damage. That our hospitals are doing the opposite is not just scary, it's literally putting lives in danger. Meanwhile, I'll just toss this paragraph here:

HCA Healthcare is publicly traded, with backing from the private-equity firms Bain and KKR, which took the system private in a $33 billion deal in 2006, at the time the largest leveraged buyout in history. Its market capitalization on Monday was nearly $30 billion.

You don't say.

Filed Under: doctors, hospitals, nurses, transparency, truth
Companies: hca healthcare

Austrian Hotel Drops Libel Lawsuit Against Guest Who Complained About Pictures Of Nazis In The Lobby

from the calling-a-nazi-a-nazi-still-protected-expression-(but-just-barely) dept

Some sanity has finally prevailed in Austria, where libel laws are anything but sane. Earlier this year, a guest of the Ferienhof Gerlos hotel in Austria was sued by the hotel after posting reviews that mentioned the unexpected presence of a photo of a man in a Nazi uniform by the front entrance.

The guest -- referred to in court documents only as "Thomas K" -- said a few things the hotel didn't like in his reviews. This:

At the entrance they display a picture of a Nazi grandpa.

And this:

This made us wonder what the hotel owners are trying to tell us with this image. This incident speaks volumes about the current state of affairs in this region of Austria.

The hotel owners claimed the photo was not of a "Nazi grandpa," but rather the only photo they had of this relative who was definitely not a Nazi. The owners claimed the person had never been a member of the Nazi party, but rather only a member of the military force controlled by the Nazi government. Checkmate, I guess.

Except that wasn't actually true. The reviewer being sued did his research and discovered the person in the picture had been a member of the Nazi party. So, an actual "Nazi grandpa," not just a "Nazi-adjacent grandpa."

Despite all of this, the Austrian court sided with the hotel owners. It granted a preliminary injunction, stating that the hotel owner's interest in "protecting her reputation took precedence over the guest's right to freedom of expression."

Having actual evidence backing Nazi claims is no defense to libel accusations by someone who wants to "protect" their reputation, I guess. Fortunately, the court reconsidered this decision and decided that maybe having proof that the Nazi being called a Nazi by a hotel guest is actually a Nazi might tip the scale back in favor of freedom of expression.

The court rolled back the injunction in November, citing the evidence showing the accused Nazi was a literal Nazi. With the injunction gone, the hotel owners have decided it's probably not a good idea to keep suing.

The owners of an Austrian four-star hotel who took one of their visitors to court over his online review criticising the portrait of a “Nazi grandpa” in its lobby have dropped the case because the guest managed to unearth evidence showing their relative had in fact been a member of the Nazi party.

I wonder how much a visit to the German National Archives costs?

The hotel’s owners, who say they had not been aware of their relatives’ party membership, will likely have to pay their former guests’ legal costs of about €10,000 (£8,350).

The hotel owners could have done a little research before engaging in litigation, but that same thing could be said about lots of plaintiffs in bogus defamation suits. Careless litigation tends to do more damage to reputations than anything defendants have said. The decision to place a photo containing a person wearing Nazi symbols at the entrance of a hotel was a terrible judgment call by the owners. A simple apology and an explanation would have been far better than this expensive mess it made for itself.

Filed Under: austria, defamation, nazis, reviews, thomas k, truth
Companies: ferienhof gerlos

Sometimes The Cost Of Revenue Is Too High: Twitter Bans Political Ads As Facebook Deals With Ongoing Shitshow

from the the-fun-of-content-moderation dept

There's been a lot of talk in the last few weeks about political ads online, kicked off by Facebook "clarifying" that its fact checking rules for regular advertisements don't apply to political ads, after President Trump's campaign ran some ads that were laughably inaccurate. That kicked off a series of political stunts, including Elizabeth Warren taking out her own misleading ads to call out Facebook (though, as we noted, that whole stunt seemed particularly silly since she had previously complained that Facebook shouldn't be blocking political ads -- when they were her own). The debate rages on with everyone insisting that their viewpoint is correct, and with few acknowledging that there is no good answer.

If you fact check political ads, you will undoubtedly be accused of bias against those whose ads get blocked. And a big part of the problem is not about whether or not something is "factual" but about nitpicking around the semantics of what is and what is not a fact, or in how it's presented. This is why most fact checking operations constantly get called out, since so much is a judgment call. And, because of that, there is a reasonable position that Facebook has staked out that when it comes to politics, it doesn't want to be in the business of judging the veracity of one side or another. Of course, that response is wholly unsatisfying and is easy to spin as "letting politicians lie."

And, unsurprisingly, we're now seeing stunts like the one attempted by political activist Adriel Hampton, who has registered to run for governor of California solely to be exempted from having to post truthful ads (or, more realistically, solely to make a protest-point about what he thinks about Facebook's political ads policy). Facebook has already said that they won't allow him to run false political ads on its platform, and Hamptom says he's "considering legal action." Any such legal action would flop, thanks to CDA 230. Once again, content moderation at scale runs into lots of challenges and obstacles, no matter what you do -- and it's particularly fraught in the political advertising context.

Facebook execs have tried to make this point recently, though it's doubtful that anyone is truly convinced:

Anyone who thinks Facebook should decide which claims by politicians are acceptable might ask themselves this question: Why do you want us to have so much power?

In our view, the only thing worse than Facebook not making these calls is for Facebook to make these calls.

Part of the issue is that everyone is conflating a few different issues -- including the powerful position these companies have within the advertising ecosystem, the ability of politicians to target ads, the success of those advertising campaigns, and the nature of truth itself. Each of those are challenging issues, and not all solutions work the same for each -- yet they all get lumped together. And, inevitably, that means a dissatisfying result for all.

But there's another option: which is not to play at all.

Amusingly, the very next paragraph in Facebook's attempted defense of its policy is to try to tie itself to other scrutinized platforms:

Our approach is consistent with companies like YouTube and Twitter. And broadcasters are required by federal law not to censor candidate ads.

To which Twitter has replied: "Nuh uh!" and officially announced it won't allow any political ads on its platform at all:

Twitter is planning to ban political ads from its service globally, the company announced Wednesday via a series of tweets from its CEO Jack Dorsey. The ban will go into effect Nov. 22.

Dorsey said the ban will cover ads about specific candidates and issues — the broadest possible ban. Some ads will be allowed to remain, including those encouraging people to vote. According to a Twitter spokesperson, news organizations are currently exempt from its rules on political advertising, and the company will release full details on exemptions next month.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in practice -- and I can already predict that there will be judgment calls about what is and what is not a political ad in the coming weeks and months, and plenty of criticism will be leveled when groups think the company decides incorrectly (one way or the other). Again, this remains something of a no win situation in which lots of people will be unhappy.

However, this brought to mind a larger point that I thought was worth making. One of the trite arguments that people keep making about these companies and the decisions they make is that they're entirely about what will increase revenue -- and that these companies want to accept whatever ads they can to maximize that revenue at every opportunity. But, of course, revenue is only one side of the equation. How much that revenue "costs" is a big deal as well. And, it seems pretty clear that Twitter (while watching what Facebook was going through) decided that the headache of dealing with this question was likely way too big of a "cost," even if it wasn't directly a monetary cost.

For what it's worth, Mark Zuckerberg himself has argued that the revenue from political ads is negligible in the grand scheme of things, so the company could ban them without a significant hit. It has just chosen not to, for whatever reasons (Facebook tries to suggest lofty ideals about "giving people a voice" which seems like utter nonsense, because paid advertising has nothing to do with "giving people a voice.")

I raise all of this to go back to my recent paper on "Protocols, Not Platforms." One of the most common criticisms I've heard of that paper is that none of the big social media companies would ever adopt such a system, because it would likely mean giving up control and some amount of revenue (advertising or otherwise). In the paper I try to argue that this is not necessarily true. For one, there are some possible new business models that could replace advertising, but more importantly the costs of continuing to deal with complaints about content moderation are likely to continue to grow at an increasing rate -- and some of those platforms may decide that it's just not worth it any more. And then they may decide that they need to pick another path -- and moving to a protocols-based solution, in which they shift the power away from their own centralized control, and out to the ends of the network, could become much more appealing.

And that's why I find Twitter's decision here quite interesting. It's not going nearly as far as I hope these companies will go eventually -- but it does show that the headaches created by setting themselves up as arbiters (or not) of truth might be so painful and costly that companies will look for ways to get out of the business altogether. That's actually an encouraging sign. It's a hell of a lot better than a company insisting that it can somehow magically deal with this mess and choose which political ads are okay and which are not without pissing everyone off.

Filed Under: advertisement, benefit, content moderation, content moderation at scale, cost, political ads, revenue, social media, truth
Companies: facebook, twitter

Elizabeth Warren's Feud With Facebook Over 'False' Ads Just Highlights The Impossibility Of Content Moderation At Scale

from the damned-if-you-do dept

You may have heard over the past few days about a bit of a feud between Presidential candidates -- mainly Elizabeth Warren -- and Facebook about how the company handles political ads with false information. It began a week or so ago when the Trump campaign started running a bunch of Facebook ads around impeachment, some of which were blatantly false, based on totally debunked claims. Facebook, however, just recently clarified its policy, noting that while it will block ads that its partner fact-checkers have determined to be untrue, that does not apply directly to political candidate ads themselves:

We rely on third-party fact-checkers to help reduce the spread of false news and other types of viral misinformation, like memes or manipulated photos and videos. We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny. That’s why Facebook exempts politicians from our third-party fact-checking program. We have had this policy on the books for over a year now, posted publicly on our site under our eligibility guidelines. This means that we will not send organic content or ads from politicians to our third-party fact-checking partners for review.

In response to this, Warren decided to hit back by deliberately posting a "false" ad to call out Facebook's policy (in this case, her ad declared that "Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election." The ad then calls out Facebook's policy and attacks the company for its stance. Here's how it read:

Breaking News: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election.

You're probably shocked, and you might be thinking, "how could this possibly be true?"

Well, it's not. (Sorry.) But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform -- and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.

If Trump tries to lie in a TV ad, most networks will refuse to air it. But Facebook just cashes Trump's checks.

Facebook already helped elect Donald Trump once. Now, they're deliberately allowing a candidate to intentionally lie to the American people. It's time to hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable—add your name if you agree.

Except... it turns out that the latter part of Warren's "fake news ad" -- the part which she presents as truthful -- is actually false as well. As Facebook itself noted in a tweet (yes, in a tweet, from Facebook) directed at Warren, Trump is airing TV commercials with the same debunked claims in them on TV stations, and it's one of the most viewed ads:

In other words, the central claim from Warren's campaign -- that other providers, such as TV stations, would not allow such blatant lies in ads -- is pretty clearly untrue. And while some are arguing that Facebook pointing this out "backfired spectacularly", it didn't. It is true that Warren is now claiming that Facebook's argument supports her point, but I don't see that at all.

If anything, it shows the damned if you do/damned if you don't nature of content moderation.

Let's take a second to remember that it was just a few months ago that Warren got really angry at Facebook for temporarily blocking one of her ads. And that time Warren responded by arguing that Facebook should not be able to "shut down a debate" over a political topic. And, yet, in this case, when they won't shut down Trump's posts, suddenly she's mad about that too?

As Julian Sanchez rightly points out, no matter which way Facebook goes, it's going to get yelled at.

And this is the point that lots of us have been trying to make regarding Facebook and content moderation. If you're screaming about all the wrong choices you think it makes to leave stuff up, recognize that you're also going to pretty pissed off when the company also decides to take stuff down that you think should be left up.

Now, there is a consistent way to interpret Warren's position -- which is that in either case, Facebook is "too big" because (as she suggested earlier this year) it can "shut down" the debate on this topic. Except, that's also pretty obviously bullshit, because much of this debate actually happened... on Twitter. And also across lots and lots of media sites.

There are good reasons to be worried about Facebook's market position. There are good reasons to be concerned about the amount of lies that get flung around by political campaigns. But this whole debate over lies in ads is not a Facebook problem. If you want to get at the fact that politicians will lie, well, then you're going to need to take that up with the 1st Amendment. Blaming Facebook for taking the reasonable stance that it doesn't want to be the one directly judging whether or not a politician is being truthful is silly. If it had to review every single political ad for truthfulness, I doubt Elizabeth Warren would be very happy about it either. Hell, part of the problem is that "truth" is not an exact standard either. Some things are misleading, but "technically" true. Some things could count as "little white lies." Some could be blatant falsehoods. But where anything falls is often a matter of opinion, and Warren should actually be happy that Facebook is refraining from making a judgment call on the truthiness of political ads.

Filed Under: advertising, campaign ads, content moderation, content moderation at scale, donald trump, elizabeth warren, truth
Companies: facebook

SPLC Asks Court To Toss Proud Boy Founder's Defamation Lawsuit By Asking 'Where's The Lie?'

from the suing-the-libs-to-own-the-snowflakes-or-something dept

A few months ago, Proud Boys founder (and Vice co-founder) Gavin McInnes sued the Southern Poverty Law Center over a bunch of negative things it said about him and the "western chauvinist" group he founded. The SPLC designated the Proud Boys as a "hate group," citing lots of hateful things its members have said/participated in.

As is the wont of far too many "free speech warriors" who believe free speech means everyone else shutting the hell up and letting them spew their ignorance, Gavin McInnes decided the opinion of the SPLC was actionable libel. It isn't. Not even in Alabama. Unfortunately, the state has no anti-SLAPP law, so the SPLC must defend itself against McInnes' ridiculous claims with almost zero hope of recovering any of its legal costs.

If you want to know everything wrong with McInnes' claims, Mike Masnick's very thorough post goes into great detail about the stupidity of the lawsuit, the hypocrisy of McInnes and his legal rep (Ron Coleman), and disingenuousness of attempting to use government force to silence certain people's opinions while pretending you're so very worried about the state of free speech in America.

To sum up briefly, McInnes claims the SPLC's "hate group" claim rises above mere opinion because… some people might agree with the SPLC's assessment of the Proud Boys. McInnes, as the founder of the Proud Boys, claims this has harmed him directly, as have a number of allegedly-defamatory claims made about him directly by the SPLC.

The SPLC's motion to dismiss [PDF] has been filed. So has a supporting brief [PDF] further shredding the dubious claims and legal illogic of McInnes' lawsuit. (h/t Andrew Fleishman)

It's a fun read, at least for those who recognize McInnes' lawsuit for the utter bullshit it is. It's always entertaining to watch litigious jackasses get torn apart by their own words and this motion to dismiss does not disappoint. The best defense against defamation allegations is the truth. And McInnes has given the SPLC legal reps plenty to work with.

Several of the challenged statements are non-actionable because, as the allegations of the Complaint itself reveal, they are substantially true. See generally Addendum. For example, McInnes claims to be defamed by a statement that members of the Proud Boys marched in Charlottesville with Richard Spencer. Compl. ¶ 286. The same paragraph of the Complaint in which that claim is asserted also acknowledges that the Proud Boys “expelled four members for attending the event.” Id. It is, therefore, concededly (and literally) true that Proud Boys members marched in Charlottesville, as did Richard Spencer. [...]

Similarly, McInnes claims to be defamed by being described as an “Islamophobe,” Compl. ¶ 239, but he does not (and cannot) dispute that he has referred to himself in precisely that manner in published interviews. And while McInnes denies calling Asian American “‘slopes’ and ‘riceballs’ on FOX News or the VDARE website,” Compl. ¶ 256, this statement is substantially true as well. As McInnes well knows, an article under his byline used precisely these slurs to describe Asian Americans—albeit in Taki’s Magazine, rather than on VDARE. A statement that McInnes called Asian Americans “slopes” and “riceballs” in Taki’s Magazine would have absolutely the same effect on a reasonable reader as an assertion that he did so on VDARE. Accordingly, the challenged statement is substantially true as a matter of law.

McInnes also claims he's been defamed by things the SPLC said about the Proud Boys -- a group he admittedly founded (but has now sort of disowned). He attempts to stretch these statements that are not directly about him to be directly harmful to him (and, of course, defamatory). But, as the SPLC points out, McInnes doesn't even attempt to deny the truthfulness of the statements made about the Proud Boys.

This conclusion is buttressed by the innumerable statements that McInnes does not challenge. These statements include, first and foremost, the voluminous primary source materials directly cited or linked to in the Articles themselves—i.e., the Proud Boys’ and McInnes’s own statements and conduct. To take just the most obvious example, the Complaint does not challenge a single specific statement made on the SPLC Proud Boys Page, which, through hyperlinks and other citations, cogently and extensively lays out SPLC’s case for why it considers the Proud Boys to be a hate group. McInnes’s failure to grapple with the Proud Boys Page alone demonstrates that the overarching thrust of SPLC’s publications about him and the Proud Boys would be the same with or without the statements on which he bases the Specific Claims.

If these are substantially true, they cannot be defamatory, even if McInnes feels his reputation has been tarnished by his association with the group by the SPLC.

The ones quickest to call others "snowflakes" for being offended by others' words are filing lawsuits over hurt feelings. McInnes' past is filled with words and deeds that would lead many to deem him "hateful." That he formed a group that engages in the same sort of bigoted speech McInnes does is no one's fault but McInnes'. There are consequences to uttering speech others find objectionable. Those consequences are not legal causes of action.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, defamation, free speech, gavin mcinnes, truth
Companies: splc