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.