Alex Berenson Sued Twitter Over Being Banned and Was Reinstated

So explain the process. So you were, what was the exact definition of what they kicked you off for? Are we live? Yeah, we're live. Oh, good, good, good. Okay. All right. So it was almost exactly this time last year, Joe. It was August 28th, 2021. I wrote a tweet that began, it doesn't stop infection or transmission. And they banned me. I went on to say, this is not a vaccine, or don't think of it as a vaccine. Think of it as a therapeutic, meaning a drug that has side effects and that you have to dose in advance of illness. And then the last line was, and we want to mandate it, insanity. Okay. I would say that that's been pretty well vindicated by events. That's vindication. So they banned me. They said that was my fifth strike and that I was not allowed to tweet anymore. And my account was not available to anybody. All the previous tweets were gone. The 300,000 people, too bad. So I sued them in December. And here's, it gets interesting and tricky. So other people have sued Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Wikipedia, actually all these companies and said, you've banned us. I just want to be able to use your platform. I haven't done anything wrong. And the company say, we can do whatever we want. We can ban you. We can attach labels to your tweets, this, that, and the other. And there's a law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It's a federal law from 1998, I want to say, maybe 96, that basically was intended for two purposes. Purpose one was, we don't want these companies to get sued over stuff that people are saying on them. So in other words, I go on and I say terrible things, defamatory things about Joe Rogan. Or I say terrible things about my ex-wife, whatever. Or I say, go shoot the president. Whatever it is that I'm saying, I'm saying something that's harassing or hateful or illegal, we can't expect a bulletin board or Facebook or Twitter or whoever to police all that stuff. There's too much of it. It's not fair. So we're going to give them complete protection from that. And that makes total sense, by the way. You can't have these people policing everything that's uploaded or downloaded. It's not within their capability. The second idea was, we want these folks to be able to give their users a better experience. And so we're going to give them some protection, limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted. Meaning, let's say I'm posting tons of pornography and I'm posting it to a Christian website that's advertising itself as a family-friendly place. The idea was the 230 is going to allow me to take action against that user in good faith for harassing or objectionable content. So I'm going to be allowed to ban stuff or to age restrict it. And that was really intended, when you look back at the statute, for pornography especially. Okay. So what happened was the companies, with the help of the Ninth Circuit, which is the federal judges in California, which is where most of these companies are based, California and the West Coast, managed to get bigger protection. And this really, this was happening for a while and then it really happened in 2015. There was this case where a group of Sikhs, an Indian minority group, the government of India went to Facebook and said, we don't like these people, they're protesting against us, you got to ban them. You got to ban their group website. And Facebook said, okay. And pulled them. They sued Facebook. They said, this is not right. And by the way, this was a classic example of a government telling, not wanting dissent. The Indian government didn't want to deal with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it. Okay. The Ninth Circuit said, that 230 protection that allows you complete immunity, if Alex Berenson says, here's naked pictures of my ex-girlfriend, that also allows you to ban whoever you want, whenever you want. They called it first party, third party. They said, there's no distinction in the statute between the immunity you get for this defamation that Alex might be doing versus your own decision to ban these people who don't want to be banned. And ever since then, 230 has been a beast. And every time somebody has sued, the companies have said, look at Sikhs versus Facebook, we win. And that's basically been how it's been. They've been allowed to do whatever they want. And so, by the way, I know I'm not even talking about my case yet, but this is the legal background. So sometimes when conservatives say, hey, we need to ban 230, we need to repeal 230, that's actually not true. You just need to have the courts interpret 230 the right way, which is, you don't get to sue Facebook or Twitter for these defamatory or harassing or illegal posts that other people are putting up. But at the same time, they shouldn't have blanket protection for their own decisions. So they've had the best of both worlds. They call themselves publishers when they want. And as a publisher, I have the protection to publish who I like, not publish who I like, but I'm not a publisher from the point of view, I'm more like a telephone company if somebody does something bad over my airwaves. Does that make sense? That's how they've gotten. Okay. Okay. All right. So fast forward. Berenson Sues, Berenson v. Twitter. Here's what I had. I had e-mails from a guy inside Twitter named Brandon Borman, who is a pretty senior executive. He was their vice president of communications, telling me explicitly, hey, we know what you're saying. We are in favor of encouraging debate about COVID. That was in 2020. And then in early 2021, he even went on to say, we're encouraging debate about the vaccines, and we don't think you're doing anything wrong. So I said, not only are they violating my rights as an American and the California Constitution actually has additional free speech protections, and I think they're violating those too. They're specifically, they made these promises to me. They modified their contract with me. And there's a broader point that's important to everybody. When they say we have a COVID misinformation policy, or we have a election misinformation policy, or pretty soon they'll probably have a climate change misinformation policy, whatever these policies are that govern what you can and can't say on their platform, they have to follow those. So even if they say their contract, and if you sign up for Twitter, you click on something at the end and you've signed a contract with them basically, and that contract is written by their lawyers, it's very favorable to them, very unfavorable to you as the user, they're modifying that. That was our argument. They are modifying that when they put out a COVID-19 misinformation policy. They don't have to have a COVID-19 misinformation policy. They could say, hey, we're Twitter, we're going to ban you whenever we want for whatever reason. But they did have that policy. And our argument was they have to now follow it. And the judge, his name is Judge William Alsup. He was in California and he is not a Trump appointee. He's not a George Bush appointee. He is a Bill Clinton appointee, known for being a smart guy who kind of plays it down the middle. In April of this year, just a couple months ago, said, I think Berenson's got a case. I'm going to allow this lawsuit to proceed. I'm not going to dismiss it. And that was a major event in sort of the point of view of internet law. Because again, even though I did have these communications with Borman that other people don't have, this broader issue of whether or not these platforms, when they tell you, we're going to have this strike policy, we're going to do these things, do they have to follow that? That's the question. Again, if the argument is, I'm Twitter or I'm Facebook, I'm all powerful, I operate under 230, and I'm going to kick you off whenever they want, they got to tell people that. Instead, it's like, well, as long as you play within the rules and you color by our guidelines, it's okay. And then they don't even do that. Now you can sue them. So you sue, and then did they settle? So I sue in December. In April, we get this ruling. And the judge doesn't allow everything to proceed, which from my point of view was sort of unfortunate. He didn't allow my big claims on the First Amendment or my California claims to proceed. And frankly, I still think there's a chance, whether it's me or it's not me, but whether it's somebody else going forward might be able to have a good claim on California constitutional law. Because again, Twitter is based in California and the California constitution is even more protective of free speech than the US constitution. It actually says, for example, the way it's been interpreted in California, the California constitution, if you own a mall, you have to let people come in and protest. Even if they're like from the Vietnam war on, even though that's a private facility, because you're running this place that's open to the public and that a lot of people who go to, it becomes almost a public facility for the purposes of the California constitution. And my argument, my lawyer's argument is Twitter is a huge public space. It's referred to itself as a public square many times. It should be forced to do the same thing under California law. And if the federal law, if 230 blocks that, now we have an issue of does the federal law go too far and sort of hurt First Amendment protections? But put all that aside. The judge didn't allow any of that stuff. But what he did allow was my breach of contract claim to proceed. And he did something else, Joe. He said, this guy's going to get discovery. So discovery is a legal term. It means that the two parties have to exchange information in a civil lawsuit. So it's actually kind of amazing if you think about this, that this is how this works. The lawyers for Twitter were going to go to Twitter and say, you got to give us all your documents where Alex Berenson is named, whether that's internal or whether that's Pfizer emailing about him or whatever it is. And we're going to hand that over to his lawyers so he can help sue us. And I had to do the same thing. I mean, for me, it's not a big deal. It's like me and my phone or whatever. And then he said, the judge said, I would get to depose two Twitter executives. And that could be anybody. He didn't put any limits on it. So that could have been like Jack Dorsey. So if you're a big company, that's a nightmare for you. You do not want that. You do not want to have to go through discovery. You do not want to have to go through depositions. You just want a lawsuit to go away. And my position was, look, the judge gave me this stuff. I'm not backing off. I want those depositions. I want this discovery. And I want the right to make it public. And so Twitter, I did not think we were going to be able to settle. But Twitter and I, in June, we had this long mediation. And I can't sort of talk about how that went specifically. But I can tell you that at the end of, well, July 6th, they reinstated me to the platform. We settled. I guess you could argue they didn't apologize, but they acknowledged they were wrong to have taken me off last August. And, and this is the really good part, since then I've been publishing internal documents where Twitter says that they came under pressure from the federal government to ban me. So this, to me, so people said when I settled, and it's funny, it was actually people on the right, they said, this guy, he took all this money to sue Twitter. He didn't care. He just wanted to get back on the platform. He just wanted to be able to tweet. He wanted some money from Twitter. That's what he got. He promised you he'd get discovery. He didn't get it. Nothing's ever going to happen with this. Well, screw those people too, okay? Because I've now been publishing documents that show that the White House wanted me banned. And that is the biggest part of all of this. That's where the story is going now, that people inside the White House, and this is Twitter employees talking to each other about a meeting that they had in April of 2021 before Twitter had ever done anything to me, where they said that the White House said, why is this guy still allowed to tweet? And at that time, they were saying to each other, these Twitter employees, we think he's fine. We don't think he's doing anything wrong. Well, you fast forward to July of 2021, just over a year ago, and Joe Biden says anybody who debates the vaccines, if social media platforms allow that, they are quote unquote killing people. And then less or barely a month after that, four hours after that, I should say, Twitter puts a strike against me. They begin the process of deplatforming me. Six weeks later, they deplatform me.