38
votes
Elon Musk’s lawyers quietly subpoena public interest groups
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Anna Merlan, Walker Bragman, Dan Friedman, Inae Oh, Mother Jones, Sophie Hurwitz, Sarah Szilagy, Siri Chilukuri, Serena Lin, Julianne McShane, Jamilah King, Samantha Michaels, Jacob Rosenberg, Julia Métraux
- Published
- Aug 23 2024
- Word count
- 990 words
Oh boy, finally something on Tildes I can answer WHEN I HAVE TIME TO WRITE AN ANSWER!
You're right in most of your points, but a few key points I want to expand on/correct for you:
There's three simultaneous shitty legal things Musk is doing here:
Directly suing non-profits who had the gall to directly criticise his garbage platform for, well, hosting repugnant filth. These lawsuits are unlikely to succeed as the initial lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate was a total failure. Why is he pursuing these lawsuits even though they're undoubtedly a waste of money? Because it's not about winning, it's about using his bottomless pit of money as a weapon to batter critics into silence via legal war of attrition.
Trying to force non profits to disclose pretty much anything possible related to the above lawsuits. Here, his lawyers are looking for any tiny bit of evidence they can find to sue another 'enemy' of twitter, regardless of how tenuous. Again, the goal isn't to find a legitimate basis for a lawsuit but just enough to make it past initial filing and waste their money in frivolous legal fees. Notice a trend here?
Suing the advertisers indirectly via GARM, which a few other comments discuss. The key point with GARM is that his lawyers argued this to be illegal coordination to price fix/freeze out Twitter. The argument was never that they HAVE to go advertise on twitter, but that discussing the reasons why they don't want to associate with his platform is anti-competitive and illegal. This is a patently absurd argument and almost certainly would've also been destroyed in court, but GARM was low budget and opted to fold instead. Yet again, Musk waging legal warfare without any real legal basis for his claims.
As you can see, the truly horrible thing that's playing out here in the worst example I can recall is that we have a rich manchild utilizing his bottomless pit of money to waste everyone else's time and money in pointless lawsuits until they sit down and shut up.
My personal opinion is that the Western legal system generally and the US especially needs some dramatic reform on how Legal costs are awarded. It is far too easy for bad-faith entities and individuals with a lot of money to abuse the system like this. California's anti-SLAPP legislation is one good example of a protection, but we really need Federal/national protections on a similar basis AND a more general punishment for clearly frivolous lawsuits.
Prior to reading this, I was under the impression that anti-SLAPP was already federal, but after looking it up it appears it only exists in 33 states. Is there something about California’s implementation that stands out amongst the others? Or are California’s generally progressive laws working in conjunction to promote a more fair judicial environment?
California's anti-SLAPP laws are simply the strongest in the country. It puts discovery (an expensive part of the lawsuit) on hold until the judge decides on the motion to strike. In addition to awarding attorney's fees and costs to a defendant who gets a lawsuit dismissed based on anti-SLAPP, they can also sue the person who filed the SLAPP lawsuit to recover damages for abuse of the legal process.
@sparksbet already answered this better than I could have - I am not American so I am not a full expert on the intricacies of the difference between the different anti-SLAPP legislation. The big piece that I've noticed in my following of the issue broadly is that the California legislation is by far the one that is brought up most frequently in the news and other reports (and therefore seems to be the most actively used, but I have no numbers to back that up).
I was not aware that their legislation was unique in the ability to recover damages against the abuser, but if that's true it would definitely be a strong reason why it's a much more effective application than most other pieces of legislation. If I find time, I definitely want to go read up more on the issue :).
I don't know for sure whether they're the only state that allows you to do a "SLAPPback" suit, but the combination of that and the other parts of their anti-SLAPP law definitely is why the state has a reputation for very strong anti-SLAPP. Its connections to the entertainment industry likely play a role there, and that also makes you more likely to hear about their anti-SLAPP.
We really need federal anti-SLAPP, though. As it currently stands, plaintiffs far too often are able to pick and choose from available jurisdictions to select the one with the weakest anti-SLAPP to file in.
You’re 99% spot on, the only thing I might suggest is for you to look into the brief history of that Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) mentioned.
A different angle I came across was that GARM essentially sprang up as a way for these big companies to outsource decision making about where to advertise without damaging their brand, and therefore GARM’s existence kinda is by definition a coordinated boycott. If GARM never existed and each of these companies came to the same conclusion at their own pace, there would be no case.
GARM discontinuing could have long-term consequences for the Internet at large. For those not aware, GARM is the organization that standardizes “brand safety” categorizations (i.e. porn, terrorism, drugs, hate speech, and other things advertisers may want to avoid).
While the current categorization may be sufficient, it only takes a shift in dogwhistles to create a new type of category that can’t be agreed upon across the industry. The net effect is that it doesn’t get put into a blocklist for advertisers and can be funded despite negative societal effects.
This dissolution of GARM may put a chilling effect on future industry collaboration and force more advertisers to be on the hook for their individual decisions of where to spend their money. In an ideal world that might be a good thing, but under a fascist regime where anybody who dares go against the party’s alignment is punished, it could be a very bad thing.
What are some plausible example dog whistles that could pop up?
I don’t want to pretend to be able to predict future dog whistles so I’ll just list a few terms/phrases that cropped up over the years that eventually had a negative political association advertisers would probably want to avoid:
While these may have originally been benign (or even seen in a positive context), the discourse about them eventually got dominated by right wing extremism.
what, like they would publish a press release that they are doing this? why 'quietly' ?