Journalist and feminist Meghan Murphy lost her lawsuit against Twitter, but that won’t stop her from campaigning for more free speech on the platform.
In November, Meghan Murphy was banned from Twitter after she got in trouble for the offense of misgendering transgender people, a type of speech that is banned under the platform’s “hateful conduct policy.”
But, she argues, the newly added restrictions were applied retroactively to her tweets. Plus, her lawsuit claims, Twitter shouldn’t censor such speech at all. According to the court decision:
A California court sided with Twitter in the lawsuit, but Murphy says she’s planning an appeal. The issue isn’t just about her tweets.
“It’s a public interest case, so it’s not just specific to me,” she says over the phone. “It’s really in the end about holding Twitter accountable and making them responsible for their commitments and promises to their users. The end result of the case would be that Twitter wouldn’t be allowed to randomly ban people for ideological or political positions, and that they be more clear about their rules and follow their own rules and follow through on their commitment to free speech.”
The legal issue is complicated, as the government has generally left Twitter to function as a private company, able to create its own rules about what speech it allows on its platform.
The platform takes its role as monitor seriously, and it even banned one user for sending death threats to Mr. Peanut, the mascot of the snack-food company Planters. Murphy says she gets emails “all the time” from other Twitter users who’ve been banned for saying things like “men can’t get pregnant.”
To get the court to throw out the case, Twitter cited Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media platforms such as Twitter from being liable for content published on its platform, but also allows it to moderate its content — within reason.
Murphy’s argument, though, is that the censorship of her and others like her is not reasonable, and Twitter has more of a role in public discourse than that of a private company that can do as it chooses.
“I think it’s really scary that this massive corporation has so much power over the information that we’re allowed to access and the news we’re allowed to access and what journalists and writers are allowed to say and criticize and comment upon,” she said. “People can say, ‘Well, it’s a private company, they can do what they want, they can make their own choices.’ But we all know that social media controls information now. We can’t just pretend this is just a private company. We’re giving them way too much power if we do that.”
