The Day Of Judgment

The haters met their day of judgment and lost, a California judge ruled against woman who was using hate speech on Twitter.

TERFs Don’t Have a Right to Be Transphobic on Twitter, Court Rules
Writer Meghan Murphy filed a lawsuit against Twitter after being banned for misgendering and deadnaming trans women. It was just thrown out.
Them
By Nico Lang
February 16, 2021


A California court ruled that Twitter was within its right to ban a TERF activist from its platform for violating policies on transphobic hate speech.

In a 42-page opinion published by the First District Appellate Court on January 22, a three-judge panel found that Twitter did not violate free speech laws when it deactivated the account of Meghan Murphy for referring to trans woman Jessica Yaniv as a “man” in a series of tweets and sharing her deadname. Murphy, the former founder of the website Feminist Current, further accused Yaniv of “trying to extort money” after filing a complaint against a Canadian salon that refused to perform a Brazilian wax on her.

Twitter claimed the remarks violated policies rolled out in November 2018 that prohibited users from misgendering or deadnaming trans people and barred Murphy from the platform for life.

After Murphy brought a lawsuit against Twitter in 2019, the social media giant claimed it was protected under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that internet service providers cannot be held liable for the content of information shared through their services. While that law was written before the age of social media, it has since been interpreted as extending to companies like Twitter.

Writing for the court, Associate Justice Sandra L. Margulies agreed that Section 230 prevents Murphy from seeking damages from Twitter for deactivating her account. “The clear terms of Twitter’s user agreement preclude a claim for breach of contract based on the allegations of Murphy’s complaint,” she wrote.

Furthermore, the court found that Murphy’s complaint did not detail a “breach of a specific promise” but instead pertained to “attacks on Twitter’s interpretation and enforcement of its own general policies.”

There always seems that the conservatives always cry “First Amendment” when they are spewing their hate but they seem to have a mental block and can’t get it though their heads that the First Amendment only applies to the government. Also there are limits to “free speech” such as yelling “fire” in a movie theater but there are also “fighting words” and “hate speech” that the First Amendment does not protect, Cornell University Law School puts “fighting words” this way…

Fighting words are, as first defined by the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), words which "by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality."

Fighting words are a category of speech that is unprotected by the First Amendment. Further, as seen below, the scope of the fighting words doctrine has between its creation in Chaplinsky and the Supreme Court's interpretation of it today.

But unfortunately “hate speech” is not covered, Lawyers.com puts it this way,

The First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of expression. Many Americans—from college students to journalists to legal scholars—believe that guarantee shouldn’t apply to hate speech. As they argue, hate speech tramples on the constitutional rights of its targets by insulting, threatening, or silencing them based on characteristics that are protected under antidiscrimination laws (such as ethnicity, religion, gender, or disability). After all, the U.S. Supreme Court has carved out First Amendment exceptions for certain kinds of particularly dangerous or harmful speech. But the Court hasn’t recognized an exception for hate speech, unless it falls under one of the other kinds of unprotected expression.

The ruling by the California court is a major victory for us in that it allows companies to block what they consider “hate speech.” So watch out when you click on “I agree” for those terms and conditions on contracts and websites, you might be giving up some of your rights.

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My laptop is going into the computer hospital today to get a good cleaning so I don’t know exactly when I will get it back so I might miss a couple of days posting.