You heard right, Devin Nunes is suing a cow
Kaitlyn Lundy, Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com.
This past week, Devin Nunes, a congressman of California, sued Twitter and some of its users on grounds of defamation and negligence.
Nunes is asking for $250 million because he feels insulted by the tweets being put out there by parody accounts about him and believes his reputation is being damaged.
The two Twitter accounts that led Nunes to this lawsuit are @DevinCow and @DevinNunesMom. The latter has since been suspended by Twitter, but the former still remains on the social media network.
Defamation and negligence lawsuits have the ability to be won, but when a social network is involved, the chances of winning slim greatly.
Nunes is claiming defamation due to the multitude of reputation-damaging comments online. This claim presents an interesting legal discussion, but is unlikely to bring any tangible reward to the congressman.
In the case of negligence, Nunes has a good chance of gaining some profit due to the fact that Twitter could not precisely have followed their terms of service according to Nunes.
The lawsuit got the opposite response that Nunes was hoping for, giving the parody account an increased following and providing the congressman with more “slanderous” comments instead of support.
@DevinCow now has 633K followers, having gained many of those since news of the lawsuit broke, surpassing Devin Nunes’ 403K followers.
This surpassing of followers can be partially accredited to Andy Lassner, executive producer of “Ellen” who tweeted to his multitude of followers, “Let’s try and get @DevinCow more followers than @DevinNunes” and continued to promote this goal for the next week.
Typically, in these cases, only the accounts themselves are put on trial, but Nunes is attacking Twitter as a whole as well.
This lawsuit affects Twitter as well because Nunes has been under the impression that Twitter was participating in “shadow banning,” an act of limiting the prominence of a distinct political party online. This was covered by VICE in July of last year, in which President Trump played a large role in the discussion. The Twitter bug has since been diminished, however, Nunes is still expectant for reconciliation.
The Communications Decency Act, specifically Section 230, states that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” therefore exempting any social media network including Twitter from personal responsibility of actions performed by users of the network.
Nunes’ claims against Twitter are still eligible though due to the fact that Section 230 does not completely cover the basis of internet conduct. However, the Internet is definitely rooting for cows more than they are Devin Nunes, simply checking Twitter will tell you that.
The amount of cow puns is endless and this anonymous Twitter account doesn’t appear to be letting up and looks to be on the better end of this lawsuit in terms of support. Currently, @DevinCow has over 9,000 tweets on the parody account.
In this age of social media, where memes and parodies are frequently presented to the public eye, there appears to be a generation gap on the deciding line of severity when it comes to Nunes’ lawsuit.
