As every conservative knows, Twitter’s rules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Like most social media, Twitter’s “Rules and policies” are a strictly one-way affair. Only conservatives are ever held to “standards”; the left, not to mention blatant degenerates, are free to do as they please. Milo Yiannopoulos is banned for joking that Leslie Jones is a “black man”; overt paedophiles are not only free to talk up the wonders of child abuse, but anyone who criticises that is immediately banned.
The consequence of this is that the left have come to assume that they can say whatever they want about anyone on the conservative side of politics, without ever being held to account.
Well, that might be true for Twitter’s “code of conduct”, but that doesn’t mean the real-world defamation laws have suddenly been suspended.
Peter Dutton has finally had enough, after years of Twitter abuse. The mooted Defence Minister-in-waiting has revealed he is now ready to go on the attack in court to “sue” anyone who defames him on the social media platform — even those hiding behind fake names and accounts.
“Some of these people who are trending on Twitter or have the anonymity of different Twitter accounts: they’re out there putting all these statements and tweets that are frankly defamatory (and) I’m going to start to pick out some of them to sue,” he has revealed.
Expect a whole lot of tweets to get hurriedly deleted – and accounts turned to private.
But the internet is forever. So are screencaps.
“If somebody printed (defamatory information) in the newspaper, or somebody made these defamatory comments on your program or somewhere else in a public setting, they would be sued. And they should be sued on social media,” he said.
Dutton told 2GB’s Ray Hadley on Thursday that his own personal “red line” was when Greens senator Larissa Waters dubbed him “an inhuman, sexist rape apologist” on Twitter in February.
On the one hand, the Greens are so sensitive that Waters’ fellow Green Sarah “Sea Patrol” Hanson-Young sued former Senator David Leyonhjelm for suggesting that she “stop shagging men”. But, like most pearl-clutching snowflakes, the Greens are as abusive to others as they feel entitled to be.
The first clue that there had been correspondence behind the scenes between Dutton and Waters came on Wednesday night, when two tweets on her account unexpectedly appeared containing a grovelling statement from the Greens Senator under the heading: “Apology to Peter Dutton”.
“On 25 February 2021 I … (made) false and defamatory statements that Peter Dutton is a rape apologist, that he has sought to conceal and dismiss reports of rape, and that he has no sympathy for victims of rape,” she wrote. “I accept that there was no basis for those allegations and that they were false. I unreservedly apologise to Minister Dutton for the hurt, distress and damage to his reputation I have caused him.”
Dutton has confirmed that the Waters apology followed legal correspondence sent to Waters, who also deleted the original tweet: “I have taken action against Larissa Waters because there’s a lot of crap that I cop, my colleagues cop and the Prime Minister cops, that you cop, and you let a lot of it go through to the keeper. But there has to be a floor. There needs to be a red line … I’m not going to be defamed in that way, and people should know that if they want to do that, there’s a price to pay for it.”
The big question now is whether Dutton will next take similar action against Twitter adversaries with fake identities. Get out the popcorn.
The Australian
The handful of academics and PR hacks who constitute Sleeping Bullies Giants are surely going to be kept pretty busy scrubbing their dozens of sock-puppet accounts.
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