On Thursday, a Christian “humor” site called The Babylon Bee published an article titled “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication.” When the clearly satirical (though not in the funny way) article showed up in people’s newsfeeds, they were pointed to a Snopes article debunking the post, and the owners of the site were issued a warning that their page could be demonetized for publishing “fake news.”

Why did this happen? Because Snopes published an article “debunking” it, which triggered Facebook’s “fake news alarms” to go off. When the owner of the site contacted Facebook, they apologized and the matter was resolved.

Despite this, conservatives across the internet have been exploding in rage for a few days now, claiming that this is part of a plot concocted by the evil liberals at Facebook meant to censor conservatives and Christians.

Over on The Federalist, writer Bre Payton complained that the article was clearly satire, suggesting that no reasonable person would think it was real.

This is obviously a joke and is clearly marked satire and is published on a site entirely devoted to satire. But the uptight jerks over at Snopes decided to fact check the Bee’s claim, to ensure that no one actually thought that CNN “made a significant investment in heavy machinery.” Uh, okay. Thanks, Snopes! Would’ve totally fallen for that one!

For this particular article, I am perhaps inclined to agree with her. The post, though painfully unfunny, was clearly absurd. However, she then goes on to claim that this is part of nefarious plan to censor conservatives on Facebook, which it is not.

People have, however, previously believed articles in The Babylon Bee before. So many people believed one article, titled “Steven Furtick Signs 6-Year, $110 Million Contract With Lakewood Church,” that resulted in Furtick having to record a video saying it wasn’t true.

Also outraged, of course, was rape apologist Mike Cernovich, who claimed that this was not only censorship, but persecution of Christians. He also claimed that various media sites kicking him off was a precursor to said Christian persecution.

Via RightWingWatch:

“Don’t defend me. I don’t need you to defend me. Here’s what I need you to say: ‘Facebook and Snopes, they hate Christians. If you let them get rid of Cernovich, we are next.’ And that’s the truth. It’s proven now,” Cernovich said. “So rather than let people drag you into the weeds about Cernovich and this and that, just say, ‘They are only going after Cernovich because the real target is Christians like us.’”

Cernovich urged viewers to download and reupload his warning on their own social media accounts because “none of us are going to be here much longer.” He declared, “If you’re a Christian, Facebook—they hate you. There’s no other way to put it.”

“They want you to be afraid of the gospel. If you preach the gospel, or you even profess your love of Christ and then just make jokes, if all you say now is ‘I’m a Christian’ and then you make jokes, you will be targeted by Snopes, you’ll be targeted by CNN, you’ll be targeted by Facebook,” he said.

What a martyr!

Cernovich also explained that this will not stop with the occasional mismarking of satirical news as fake news — but soon lead to banning Christians from even having jobs!

“If you think this is going to end when they ban you from social media, if you think they aren’t going to make it so you can’t have a job if you’re a Christian, that you can’t run a business if you’re a Christian—this is just a warm-up.”

Yes, this is true. The true goal of liberals is to take out 80% of the workforce. For reasons. What reasons? We don’t know, we’ll get to that later, I guess, after we ban all of them from social media, which is a thing we are definitely trying to do.

The grand irony here is perhaps best illustrated by another unfunny article from The Babylon Bee site.

The article reads:

Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt shocked fans Monday when he admitted on Twitter that he was “praying” for Clerks director Kevin Smith, who suffered a heart attack Sunday night. Pratt is the latest in a long line of Hollywood elites who are guilty of using fame and power to accost those in lower positions with unsolicited acts of prayer. Smith, who was in a hospital bed at the time of the prayer, could do very little to prevent Pratt’s alleged unprovoked supplications.

Pratt, as you may know, was not in fact banned from Hollywood for saying he was praying. No one has been banned from anywhere for saying they are praying. No one is getting banned from Hollywood or social media for merely being Christian. No one is getting fired from their jobs for being Christian, although if our labor laws were designed by Conservatives, that would be a totally legal thing to do to people. No one is persecuting Christians, on Facebook or elsewhere.

But back to the satire!

This is a problem conservatives have brought upon themselves through their long and storied history of thinking satirical articles are real. Perhaps the best example of this is The Onion’s famous “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex” story, which fooled not only many angry Yelp users, but also Louisiana Congressman John Fleming.

I’ll just leave this one here.

The Onion is the best known satirical news site in all the country, and people regularly believe things in it are real. There is an actual website dedicated to tracking this. If people are going around thinking The Onion is real, then yes, sometimes satire does need to be “debunked.”

Just last May, furious racists angrily shared a satirical and obviously fake article claiming that Malia Obama was arrested for dogfighting.

A brief trip to the Facebook page “America’s Last Line of Defense,” the satire site that the Malia article came from, features myriad comments from angry conservatives responding in earnest to obviously fake articles.

And let us not forget the Pope’s “endorsement” of Donald Trump. That was from a “satire” site, too, and yet millions thought it was real.

Clearly, something being obvious satire is no proof against conservatives believing it. Should the page have been demonetized? Of course not — it was a mistake and I’m glad that it was rectified. But the site wasn’t targeted explicitly because it was Christian — it was targeted because it was not a site any reasonable person would immediately recognize, and so when the Snopes article went up, it triggered an algorithm. It wasn’t anything personal and it had nothing to do with religion.

Facebook algorithms suck for everybody (including Wonkette!). But if Conservatives want to get mad that people think they’d believe satire is real, then they should probably stop thinking satire is real all the time.

And now, this is your OPEN THREAD and a totally non-satirical plea for you to drop some cash into Wonkette’s tip jar!

[The Federalist | Right Wing Watch | Poynter]

This weekend, we were treated to a number of charming statements about the Parkland survivors from people who, by all rights, should be obscure cultural footnotes in the year 2018, but somehow are not.

Frank Stallone, Sylvester Stallone’s brother that we all forgot existed, posted a thing on Twitter about how much he imagined David Hogg’s peers would like to punch him in the face.

He later apologized for that.

Also, too, NRA board member and mediocre-at-very-best musician Ted Nugent said that the Parkland survivors had no souls.

The dumbing down of America is manifested in the culture deprivation of our academia that have taught these kids the lies, media that have prodded and encouraged and provided these kids lies. I really feel sorry for them because it’s not only ignorant and dangerously stupid, but it’s soulless. To attack the good law-abiding families of America when well known predictable murderers commit these horrors is deep in the category of soulless. These poor children, I’m afraid to say this and it hurts me to say this, but the evidence is irrefutable, they have no soul.

But, unlike the slightly classier Frank Stallone, he will not be apologizing! Because those students did hate speech to him first!

In a rather incoherent video posted to Facebook, Nugent complained that the internet totally ruined his “firestorm of guitar solo magic” by thinking that was an asshole thing to say.

Transcript via Media Matters:

I was told, coming out of a firestorm, a firestorm of guitar solo magic, that I was trending on Facebook because somehow, some dishonest, lying idiots claimed that my identifying, accurately and honestly, those in the gun control marches who call people who don’t agree with them child murderers — now if I called you a child murderer without having any evidence, that would be hate speech. So they are guilty of hate speech. I merely identified that you have to have mush for brains to accept, blindly accept, the propaganda from the gun-hating, freedom-hating, America-hating, liberal Democrat left media. And who out there believes that so much of the media – who believes CNN, anybody? MSNBC, anybody? ABC, CBS, NBC? Certainly Media Matters, really? Boy, what a hypocritical title that is. Media Matters, MoveOn.Org, Southern Poverty Law Center, the Huffington punks, who believes these people? So they claimed that it’s hate speech to identify the hate of people that call us child murderers, because we don’t believe in banning guns, which won’t save any lives. So they’re so blinded by their hate, and their mushy brains have so robotically accepted the propaganda ministry’s lies and deceit, that their hate isn’t hate. My identifying their hate, is hate. What the hell? So I stand by my words.

For what it is worth, I am pretty sure that no one referred to his claims of soulless mass murder survivors as “hate speech.” In fact, I am pretty sure that everyone just thought it was a gross and shitty thing to say, not unlike other things that come out of Ted Nugent’s mouth.

Conservatives like Nugent often like to suggest that we call the things they say “hate speech” in order to insinuate that we are trying to establish laws to keep them from saying shitty things. You know, because other countries do have “hate speech” laws.

Of course, no one is trying to “ban” Ted Nugent from saying shitty things. They are just pointing out that he says shitty things. This, too, is an expression of free speech. Ted Nugent is allowed to say whatever appalling things he likes, and then people can say, “Wow! Ted Nugent sure is a horrible person!” As far as I know, there is no constitutional provision preventing anyone from thinking Ted Nugent is an asshole.

The fact that people thought what he said was appalling had nothing to do with “the media.” All Media Matters did was quote him verbatim. People then responded to that. To his words. That is the reason it was “trending.” Because people heard the words that came out of his mouth and said “Gee, Ted Nugent sure is an asshole” and then posted that on their social media accounts. There were no lies, there was nothing to disbelieve, there was merely a recording of him saying these things. If he stands by those things and thinks they were good things to say, what reason does he have to complain about “the media” reporting on them?

All in all, I don’t think anyone is waiting on tenterhooks for Ted Nugent’s heartfelt apology. If anything, given that he once adopted an underage girl in order to have sex with her legally, those teenagers are probably pretty grateful that he doesn’t like them.

And with that, it’s your OPEN THREAD!

[Media Matters]

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EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is really obsessed with his own safety — it’s why he just has to fly first class (except when he’s flying on his own dime) and have a 20-member security detail protecting him 24/7, you see: Environmental extremists are always threatening his life! It was very inconvenient, therefore, when a couple of Democratic senators went and released a summary of an internal EPA memo which found there was no basis for the agency’s claims that Pruitt faces an incredible number of threats. According to that memo, written in February, intelligence officials at EPA had “not identified any specific credible direct threat to the EPA administrator,” according to the letter from Senators Tom Carper of Delaware and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

When the news broke this week, the agency took quick action: It shitcanned the EPA official who’d authorized the memo. Politico has the awful truth:

Mario Caraballo was the deputy associate administrator of EPA’s Office of Homeland Security, which in February concluded that an earlier assessment failed to identify credible direct threats against the administrator that would justify his heavy security spending […]

One source with direct knowledge of Caraballo’s dismissal said the agency claimed he was let go because of a personnel issue from a previous military job nearly a decade ago that had been resolved then and already been reviewed by EPA several years ago. That source said senior officials also were not happy with the report from Caraballo’s office.

“They’re trying right now to just keep pressure on the wound,” the source said. “They’re trying to find out where these leaks are coming from … They’re in full panic mode right now.”

In their letter to Senator John Barrasso, the Wyoming Republican who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senators Carper and Whitehouse asked for oversight hearings to look into the EPA’s apparently exaggerated threat assessments, based on the content of the February memo and other internal EPA documents.

Carper and Whitehouse offered these scary examples of what poor Scott Pruitt has had to endure, from an October 2017 memo by a member of Pruitt’s personal security detail (PSD). Yr Wonkette is not a security professional, but they don’t exactly sound like death threats to us:

The letter notes that not a single incident in the memo mentioned air travel, although that seems awfully short-sighted — what if that one guy with the old paint scrapings brought them on a plane, huh?

Carper and Whitehouse cite a portion of the February report that Caraballo had approved, for which he was later given the boot:

Nevertheless, the EPA and Donald Trump have both repeatedly cited “death threats” against Pruitt as justification for his fiercely loyal Dora Milaje security detail, which sometimes has to pull EPA law enforcement members off actual investigations of environmental crimes to protect Pruitt from nothing.

In response to the letter, Senator Barasso said there wouldn’t be any oversight hearings, and also got angry at the two Democrats for revealing internal EPA security information, although they’d done nothing of the sort:

“I am deeply troubled that members of the committee would publicly release law enforcement sensitive information regarding the safety and security of a cabinet member and his family,” Barrasso said in a statement. “This letter selectively quotes non-public documents.”

Barrasso added that “any reasonable reading” of those documents supported a conclusion that Pruitt faced a “variety of direct death threats.”

Nope, nuh-uh, no death threats, at least according to the memo that pushed back on that narrative, getting Mario Caraballo fired for his trouble. Senator Barrasso didn’t say anything about that particular part of the story, which is one heck of a surprise.

The New York Times has more on how the EPA has been sifting through social media to assess whether anyone out there is trying to kill Scott Pruitt — and again, there isn’t any evidence that Pruitt is in danger. We also learn that Pruitt has been accompanied by his personal Sarduakar brigade for non-work outings to such highly dangerous sites as Disneyland, the Rose Bowl, and some college basketball games, which only makes sense since Donald Duck could have an Uzi under his big fiberglass beak and NODODY would be the wiser.

The Times also heard from an EPA employee who’d attended a briefing about the supposed threats to Pruitt:

The employee said the briefing highlighted mostly criticisms of Mr. Pruitt’s policies as having a deleterious effect on the environment, rather than instances of threats to his personal safety.

You know, it’s almost as if the EPA is having a hell of a lot of difficulty justifying all that security.

Yr Wonkette also admires Ms. Faiza Patel, of the Brennan Center for Justice, who offered this dangerously non-panicky reading of social media commentary about Pruitt:

“The fact that 10,000 people say, ‘I hate Scott Pruitt’ on Twitter doesn’t suggest to me there is a threat against Scott Pruitt,” said Ms. Patel, who is co-director of the center’s liberty and national security program. “It suggests there are a lot of people who dislike Scott Pruitt.”

Here is a verified photo of Ms. Patel:

She’s no doubt on a watch list herself now.

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[Politico / NYT / Carper and Whitehouse letter at NYT]

Today’s dose of Gosh How Shocking is brought to us by the Huffington Post, which profiles the adventures in far right politics of one Kristen Walker Hatten, a self-described “feminist” who is also against legal abortions. She was quite the big deal in anti-abortion circles, because how could opposing abortion rights be anti-feminist if this fine young feminist says feminism and lack of reproductive freedom are perfectly compatible, huh? Hatten is a former vice president of a group calling itself “New Wave Feminists,” which — so sad! — wasn’t allowed to partner with the Women’s March on Washington, and wasn’t THAT just terrible for the dozens of feminists against abortion? Hatten was also a contributor to the Dallas Morning News and to anti-abortion website Live Action News, the crowd that brought us the fake videos about Planned Parenthood selling fetus parts at the Babby Meat Swap Meet.

But now Kristen Hatten is alone and friendless after she went all far-right white nationalist after the 2016 election and regular rightwing anti-abortion folks couldn’t accept her Richard Spencerish ass-hattin’, says HuffPo:

Hatten wrote in late 2016 that she found Trump to be so “creepy, gross and tacky” and such a “repugnant chauvinist” during his campaign that she quit the internet for a while to avoid reading about him. But after he won, something changed. Hatten began sharing white supremacist content on social media. She self-identified on Twitter as alt-right and “ethnonationalist” ― the same term used by white nationalist icon Richard Spencer. She mused on Facebook that immigrant “invaders” are replacing white Europeans in their own countries, and shared a post imploring Trump to grant “asylum” to white South Africans.

And just check out her important social media content, which Owns The Libs:

She seems nice.

But before you get the wrong idea, Hatten has this very novel explanation of why she is not a racist, which is precisely the same “I’m not a racist” claim made by every racist we’ve known since the Nazi UFO enthusiast we worked with at McDonalds in 1981. In an email to HuffPo, Hatten explained,

“I admit to being racist by today’s standards, but I also think almost everyone is racist by today’s standards,” she wrote. “Is it racist to live in a majority white neighborhood? Send your kids to majority white schools? When I was a kid ‘racism’ meant hatred for another race and/or acting on that hatred. Now you’re a racist if you touch a black person’s hair because you think it’s pretty.”

We bet she also can’t see why those people object to her handing their little kids a bright shiny penny and asking them to dance. But wait, this isn’t about hating anyone! It’s about love! Love for white people!

“I do see that Europe and the US are becoming… well, not European,” she wrote. “This concerns me not because I hate anyone, but for the same reason Japan would be concerned if the Japanese were becoming a minority in Japan. No people should be excited to become a minority in their homeland. It is contrary to human nature. I wouldn’t expect it of any race and I don’t think it should be expected of whites.”

Oh, we have never heard that one before! We bet if she tried, she could even reduce it to a nice brief fourteen words, too.

Incidentally, Lila Rose, the president of Live Action, said she’s very sad about the ugly turn Hatten’s views have taken, and also points out that the real racists are people who want abortion to be legal, because of course “Institutionalized racism has also contributed to the deaths of millions of minority children in the womb.” Which is why Martin Luther King accepted a “Margaret Sanger Award” from Planned Parenthood that one time, because he was possessed by a pro-abortion three-headed sex dragon.

Anyway, now none of Hatten’s old normal-rightwing friends want to hang with her anymore, she’s been kicked out of New Wave Feminists, and HuffPo’s Laura Bassett informs us that Hatten was forced to take serious measures to protect herself from Basset’s reporting:

After I reached out to Hatten last week, she deleted her Facebook and Twitter accounts. She said she is having a high-risk pregnancy and that the negative attention to her views would cause her more stress. On Saturday, someone identifying himself as the moderator of an “alt-alt-right” Facebook group, Space Right // Meta Future, texted me to say that Hatten had used an alias account to post my phone number on the group’s page and complain that I was “doxxing” her.

Honestly, don’t any of these rightwing dipshits know what words mean? (Answer: Of course they do! That’s why they deliberately misuse them!)

Thank goodness Hatten’s husband has at taken some steps to protect her from all us violent leftsts. He’s in the military and deployed overseas, but he

issued a warning on Facebook “to any of you motherfuckers out in first world Facebook land” who might speak ill of his wife.

“I might be in Africa now,” he wrote, “but I’ll come home soon enough and pull your fucking heart out of your broken rib cage and eat it.”

Sounds like they’re a fun couple.

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[HuffPo]

Yesterday, Axios reported that Facebook was reaching out to some groups in an effort to keep the social media giant from hemorrhaging any more trust, by which we mean money. Worried that they might be the catalyst for degrading public discourse, and to make it seem like Mark Zuckerberg actually gives a fuck, Facebook is bringing in a super powerful law firm and … the Heritage Foundation.

Facebook will be holding a conservative-only bias review led by former Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl. Kyl has a famously loose interpretation of “facts,” once questioning the definition of middle class, and walking back lies about Planned Parenthood made on the Senate floor by saying his comment was “not intended to be a factual statement.”

Klon Kitchen, the Heritage Foundation’s resident right-leaning techie, has already been brought in to lecture Facebook on how to make safe spaces for conservatives on the Internet. Kitchen told USA Today that conservatives deserve to be treated just like every other asshole on the internet (please, don’t send him dick pics or death threats).

If Facebook is doing a reasonable job of that now, it’s up to Facebook to make that case. If there are systemic problems, they should deal with that…

This is all part of the fallout from Mark Zuckerberg coming to DC and pretending to be human. Hardcore conservatives bemoaned a perceived bias against the crackpots and conspiracy theorists they call a constituency. Ted Cruz whined about Silicon Valley “censoring” people who support his brand of hyperbolic malevolent newspeak. A few days later, House Freedom crazies grilled Zuckerberg about “Diamond and Silk,” two pro-Trump windbags who fancy themselves pariahs after their Youtube channel was demonetized for violating Terms of Service. The duo testified before Congress and all but perjured themselves, leaving several members giggling and deriding the hearing as farce.

Facebook might be a horrific shitshow for political speech, but conservatives don’t seem to understand that moderation is increasingly crowd sourced. Earlier this year Facebook tried to control the spread of “fake news” by asking people only two questions about the trustworthiness of a source, and it’s been over a year since it partnered with Snopes and Poynter (a journalism industry ethics org) to fact-check news. Facebook then added the Weekly Standard to the corps. One of those things is not like the others!

And now the Heritage Foundation will be investigating “bias” at Facebook, for Facebook. Sure, our post-truth nation got its kickstart when Facebook kowtowed to Republicans who were mad at its “bias” because the humans who worked there made sure Facebook’s “trending topics” weren’t all Gateway Pundit blowing a goat. So Facebook fired the humans who worked there who kept pointing out Gateway Pundit had a mouth full of goat dick. Get ready to like and share Hillary Clinton murdered Seth Rich with a pizza child sex slave, because you’re about to get Gateway Pundit’s sloppy mouth seconds, again.

[Axios / Media Matters / Thinkprogress / Ars Technica]

Wonkette is ad-free, independent, and lost about two-thirds of its audience with Facebook’s last algorithm change, and we’re fine with that. We kept the good ones. YOU.

Perhaps you remember the biggest American story of the year 2017, which was called #ButtholeGate. Perhaps you recall a Memphis restaurant called Imagine Vegan Cafe, and the way its owners reacted when a customer left an online review that merely pointed out that it’s slightly uncouth for a mom-and-pop vegan restaurant to allow the owners’ toddler children to gallivant around the place au naturel, exposing their buttholes. Also, yodeling.

Vegan Restaurant Owners #Triggered Just Because Diner Didn’t Want To See Their Kid’s #Butthole

Most business owners would say, “We are extremely sorry about the yodels and the B-holes, please accept this gift certificate as a token of apology.” Some customers (not this customer) might say, “Who among us doesn’t occasionally have a Butthole McYodeltown type day” and let it go.

But nooooooooooooooooo. The owners lost their everloving shit and started attacking any and all humans who deigned to visit them on social media, and it went viral, and nary a toddler butthole did yodel ever again at Imagine (at least that we know of).

Wonkette can now exclusively report that whatever Teachable Moment might have come out of that situation has officially expired, and it is all for the sake of homemade vegan ranch dressing, which COSTS EXTRA, GODDAMMIT, DO YOU WANT HOMEMADE VEGAN RANCH DRESSING? THEN PLEASE OPEN YOUR WALLET AND PONY UP!

Someone left a comment on their receipt about the upcharge policy, which apparently is posted on the menu but not so prominently that this person saw it. So Imagine Vegan decided it was time to shame the customer across all social media (screengrabs because they deleted it all last time, and will probably do so again):

Oh my god, why is this worthy of social media? Why is this worthy of ANYTHING? Does somebody need to chill out a tiny bit?

But no, because here we are. Homemade vegan ranch dressing is VERY EXPENSIVE and NOT A CONDIMENT, OK? And how dare the customer WRITE A NOTE?

To be clear, Imagination Vegan Emporium For Free Buttholes But Ranch Is Extra has every right to charge for ranch dressing if they want. We are not here to gripe about that. We are here to laugh and laugh because HOLY SHIT THE OWNERS ARE DOING IT AGAIN.

Like when somebody said, “Really? You are putting one of your customers on blast over a really minor situation, especially after you made the national news for #ButtholeGate?” Yes, really, they are:

And then somebody else said, “NO SERIOUSLY, REALLY? WHY IS THIS WORTHY OF FACEBOOK CONTROVERSY?” to which Imagine replied like “IF WE CAN’T CRY OVER SPILLED RANCH DRESSING ON FACEBOOK, WHEREVER WILL WE CRY ABOUT IT?”

FREEDOM! This is about FREEDOM! (To put your 50 cent vegan ranch problems on InstaFace and YELL ABOUT THEM FOR 24 HOURS.)

And to be clear, Imagine Vegan Cafe knows about speaking out for what really matters in life, because this is not their first vegan rodeo!

The owners note that this is just like that time they spoke out in support of Black Lives Matter, because Black Lives Matter (an actual good thing!) is the exact same as speaking out against the one-two punch of oppression known as #ButtholeGate and #VeganRanchDressingMatters:

As we noted last time, this restaurant is in our neighborhood. We do not remember them taking flak for supporting Black Lives Matter, which we support wholeheartedly. Indeed, there are Black Lives Matter yard signs ALL OVER THE FUCKING NEIGHBORHOOD. But hey, if they did get shit for that, that’s fucked up.

It’s also NOT THE FUCKING SAME AS HAVING A MINOR ALTERCATION WITH A CUSTOMER OVER 50 CENTS WORTH OF VEGAN RANCH DRESSING.

This concludes another edition of “Don’t pull this shit on social media when you know full well, after the whole Yodeling Butthole situation, that Wonkette is watching.”

And LOLing.

OK, Wonkette gotta get back to writing about politics now, please tip your bartenders by clicking the donation buttons below. And if you want extra ranch dressing on top of your Wonkette, we are sorry, that is not on the menu, but anyway, PAY UP, ASSHOLES.

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[Imagination Vegan Emporium For Free Buttholes But Expensive Ranch Dressing]

While trolls have dominated the internet lo the past … forever … they’ve become increasingly confident the last few years. After all, they got Donald Trump into the White House. Emboldened by this victory and others, some even got so confident in their abilities to fool people that they decided to take their antics off of the internet and into the courtroom.

It was not, as it turned out, a good idea. For them, anyway.

Chuck C. Johnson, who already had to pay out some cash last week to the man he falsely identified as the person who ran over Heather Heyer at Charlottesville, lost his lawsuit against Twitter this week. Johnson was suing the company for banning him for a tweet asking people to help him “take out” Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson, claiming that doing so infringed upon his right to free speech and was part of a larger conspiracy to censor conservative voices on the site.

The court was not buying it, and, in a tentative ruling, patiently explained to Johnson that yes, Twitter can ban him. Or anyone. For any reason. Because that is their First Amendment right.

Defendant is a private sector company. Although it does invite the public to use its service, Defendant also limits this invitation by requiring users to agree to and abide by its User Rules, in an exercise of Defendant’s First Amendment right.

The rules clearly state that users may not post threatening tweets, and also that Defendant may unilaterally, for any reason, terminate a user’s account.

The rules reflect Defendant’s exercise of free speech. (See Hurley, supra, 515 U.S. at p. 574.) Plaintiff fails to show that his claims are not barred by Defendant’s First Amendment right to exercise independent editorial control over the content of its platform. Defendant’s choice to close Plaintiff’s account on the ground that Plaintiff’s tweet was threatening and harassing is an editorial decision regarding how to present content, i.e., an act in furtherance of Defendant’s free speech right. Defendant’s choice not to allow certain speech is a right protected by the First Amendment.

The court also sided with Twitter’s anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) motion, deciding Johnson’s lawsuit was not so much about a violation of his freedom of speech (because again, Twitter is a private company) as it was about intimidating, harassing and, yes, trolling the social network.

Of course, according to Johnson’s idiot lawyer, Robert Barnes, this was actually a victory for them because the court called Twitter a “public forum” in the anti-SLAPP ruling:

Johnson v. Twitter Tentative Court Ruling: “Twitter is a public forum” & Twitter’s “control of its platform by allowing or preventing users’ tweets, is an issue of public interest.” Additionally, Twitter can only restrict speech if using “reasonable regulations” to govern access.

— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) June 5, 2018

Except, as Mike Masnick of Techdirt points out, the term “public forum” means something different in anti-SLAPP laws than it does in First Amendment law. DOH!

Ready for your next story? Because also losing a lawsuit this week is Cassandra Fairbanks!

The former “lefty” who turned right-wing nutjob when she couldn’t get the Left to give her the attention she so desperately craved filed a lawsuit against Splinter (formerly Fusion) writer Emma Roller for tweeting a picture of her and Weird Mike Cernovich flashing the “OK” sign at the White House, commenting “just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the White House.”

To explain this as succinctly as possible,  a bunch of idiots over on 4chan and elsewhere decided that it would be super hilarious to start saying that the “OK” was a symbol for “white power.”

Like a variety of other 4chan-style trolls, it was basically the internet version of the “I’m not touching you!” game. Its purpose was to create a dog-whistle that everyone knew about, but which seemed fairly innocuous otherwise, so they could clutch their pearls and go “What are you even talking about? We are just making the gesture for OK! Clearly, the Left has gone TOO FAR!” So they all went about doing the OK gesture in pictures and putting “OK” gesture emojis next to their Twitter names.

Fairbanks decided to take the troll even further by suing Roller for pointing out what she was doing. While lots of people (myself included) pointed out what she and Cernovich were doing, she went after Roller specifically because the “alt-right” has a big beef with Splinter/Fusion/Gawker, etc.

Fairbanks claimed Roller defamed her by saying the gesture was represented “white power,” and also that this was part of a larger plot by “gatekeeper journalists” against “grassroots journalists” like herself:

According to Ms. Fairbanks, gatekeeper journalists like Ms. Roller consider themselves superior to grassroots journalists. At the same time, they fear that grassroots journalists threaten their role as “[t]he primary gatekeepers of news.” Because of their fear, Ms. Fairbanks alleges, some gatekeeper journalists “wage a personal, political war on their ideological adversaries and grassroots competitors.” According to Ms. Fairbanks, this conflict intensified when grassroots journalists received White House press passes.

The court noted that at the time the picture was posted, there was significant public discussion of the “OK” gesture’s adoption by white supremacists and internet trolls — or, rather, “everyone knew exactly what she was doing and so did she”:

“Indeed, the inescapable conclusion one reaches upon viewing the photo and tweets at issue (including Ms. Fairbanks’ tweets) is that Ms. Fairbanks intended her photo and hand gesture to provoke, or troll, people like Ms. Roller. Whether because the gesture was actually offensive or because they would that that it was offensive – not that Ms. Fairbanks was the victim of a malicious attack based on innocent actions.”

However, the primary reason Fairbanks lost the suit is because she is a public figure, and there is a higher bar for defamation of public figures than there is for private citizens. In order to prove defamation against a public figure, there has to be actual malice — proof that the reporter, or whomever, either knowingly lied or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, in order to ruin someone’s reputation. Clearly, that was not what Emma Roller was doing here. Fairbanks performed the gesture for the explicit purpose of getting people to say that was what she was doing, so she can’t really blame anyone but herself for ruining her reputation.

Now, as you may know, one of Trump’s big things is eliminating the actual malice standard in libel suits against public figures — which would be very, very bad for a lot of reasons. In response to the court’s finding, Fairbanks retweeted some tweets from none other than Chuck Johnson’s idiot lawyer Robert Barnes complaining that courts are taking this “actual malice” thing way too far:

Practically speaking, courts are making “actual malice” a near-impossible standard, giving anyone a license to libel public figures. They will need to correct that if they don’t want libel to be a new tool in the adversarial toolbox of opposing political sides.

— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) June 7, 2018

Given that Fairbanks traffics in conspiracy theories, she might want to back off on getting too upset about that “actual malice” standard, lest she end up getting sued by John Podesta or Hillary Clinton for things she’s said about them.

These cases are both very important right now, as are the lawsuits against Alex Jones. The final battles in the War of the Trollses will not be fought online with false pearl-clutching and incorrect readings of the First Amendment, but in the courtroom where that kind of shit is a lot less likely to fly.

This is how we will win. Keep letting them sue. Keep suing them. Force them to keep losing, as publicly and definitively as possible.

The whole point of trolling is being able to pull one over on people, to prove you are more clever than they are. That’s why it’s so appealing to, quite frankly, stupid people. The more these people publicly fail, particularly in the courts, the more their power and appeal is diminished. The more they make fools out of themselves, the less likely they are to fool anyone else.

Bring on the lawsuits!

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[Techdirt / Courthouse News]