
Twitter Sued by Blogger Who Was Banned for Saying “Men Aren’t Women”
Last year, Twitter banned Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy for having the unmitigated gall to post a tweet telling users that “men aren’t women.” Now Murphy is fighting back with a lawsuit against the social media giant, accusing Twitter of violating its own terms of service, which assure users that they will be notified when there are changes to the “hateful conduct” policy on the site.
“Twitter’s repeated representations that it would uphold the free speech rights of its users and not censor user speech were material to the decision of millions of users, like Murphy, to join,” reads court documents filed in the case against the site. “Twitter would never have attracted the hundreds of millions of users it boasts today had Twitter let it be known that it would arbitrarily ban users who did not agree with the political and social views of its management or impose sweeping new policies banning the expression of widely-held viewpoints and perspectives on public issues.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Twitter said: “Twitter believes Ms. Murphy’s claims are meritless and will vigorously defend itself against this suit.”
Legally speaking, Twitter may be correct in assuming they can escape liability for banning Murphy from their platform. We have a suspicion that Murphy knows this. If we were to guess, this lawsuit is more about raising awareness when it comes to Twitter’s far-left biases and letting the world know that the site is trying to silence voices that do not conform to the liberal agenda.
What’s remarkable in this case is that Meghan Murphy is hardly a conservative. She’s a radical feminist who would probably cross the street to spit on someone like Mike Pence. She just doesn’t happen to believe that male-to-female transgenders are women in any way, shape, or form. It’s difficult to see where she’s wrong about that.
Nor is she wrong about drawing attention to Twitter’s left-wing bias, to which even CEO Jack Dorsey now readily admits.
In an interview with Sam Harris last week, Dorsey was asked specifically about the Murphy case and others like it, in which commentators are punished or banned for taking stances against left-wing dogma.
Dorsey replied: “I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore. I don’t believe that we should optimize for neutrality.”
Which is CEO-speak for “well, we’re just going to cater to leftists, and if you don’t like it, go start your own Twitter.”
The market is wide open for a free-speech defender to do just that.