Name: Alex Berenson Sued Twitter Over Being Banned and Was Reinstated
Uploaded: 2022-08-26T19:56:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alex Berenson Sued Twitter Over Being Banned and Was Reinstated' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alex Berenson Sued Twitter Over Being Banned and Was Reinstated' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-26. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 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, 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 know, you've banned us.
I just want to be able to use your platform.
I haven't done anything wrong.
And the companies say, we can do whatever we want.
We can ban you.
We can, you know, 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, you know,
terrible things, defamatory things about Joe Rogan,
or I say terrible things about my ex-wife, whatever, okay?
Or I say, you know, 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 gonna give them complete protection from that.
And that makes total sense, by the way, all right?
You can't, you know, you can't have these people policing
everything that's uploaded or downloaded.
It's not within their capability, okay?
The second idea was, we want these folks to be able
to give their users a better experience.
And so we're gonna give them some protection,
limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted.
Meaning, let's say I'm posting tons of pornography,
and, you know, I'm posting it to a Christian website that,
that, you know, that's advertising itself
as a family-friendly place.
The idea was the 230 is gonna allow me to take action
against that user in good faith for harassing
or objectionable content.
So I'm gonna 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,
you know, 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 gotta ban them.
You gotta 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, you know, not wanting dissent, okay?
They didn't Facebook, the Indian government didn't want to deal
with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it, okay?
The 9th Circuit said that 230 protection that allows you complete immunity,
if Alex Berenson says, you know, 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, you know, 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's 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?
Yeah.
That's how they've gotten.
Okay.
All right.
So, fast forward.
Berenson sues.
Berenson v. Twitter.
Here's what I had.
I had emails 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 an
election misinformation
policy," or, you know, "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.
And so even if they say their contract, and you know, if you sign up for
Twitter,
you know, 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 a user, they're modifying that, okay? 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. He, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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's
based in California, and the California Constitution is even more protective of
free speech than the U.S.
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, you know,
like, from the Vietnam War on, even though that's a private facility, you,
because you're running this
place that's open to the public and that a lot of people who, you know, 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, 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, you know, does the federal law go too far and
sort of hurt First
Amendment protections. But put all that aside. 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,
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, so, and it's actually kind of
amazing if you think
about this, that this is how this works. The, the lawyers for, you know, for
Twitter were going to go
to Twitter and say, you got to give us all your documents that, you know, that
where Alex Berenson
is named, whether that's internal or whether that's, you know, 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. You know, it's like me and my phone
or whatever, but,
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.
Okay. 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,
you want a lawsuit to go
away. Okay. So, 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, uh, and I, in June, we
had these, 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, they, they reinstated me to the platform. We settled.
They, 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, it was 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, nothing's ever
going to happen with this.
Well, screw those people too. Okay. Cause 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. Okay. That's
where the story is going now that people inside the white house, this is, and
this is, 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, 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 the vaccine, 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 deplatformed me.

Alex Berenson Sued Twitter Over Being Banned and Was Reinstated

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 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, 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 know, you've banned us.
I just want to be able to use your platform.
I haven't done anything wrong.
And the companies say, we can do whatever we want.
We can ban you.
We can, you know, 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, you know,
terrible things, defamatory things about Joe Rogan,
or I say terrible things about my ex-wife, whatever, okay?
Or I say, you know, 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 gonna give them complete protection from that.
And that makes total sense, by the way, all right?
You can't, you know, you can't have these people policing
everything that's uploaded or downloaded.
It's not within their capability, okay?
The second idea was, we want these folks to be able
to give their users a better experience.
And so we're gonna give them some protection,
limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted.
Meaning, let's say I'm posting tons of pornography,
and, you know, I'm posting it to a Christian website that,
that, you know, that's advertising itself
as a family-friendly place.
The idea was the 230 is gonna allow me to take action
against that user in good faith for harassing
or objectionable content.
So I'm gonna 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,
you know, 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 gotta ban them.
You gotta 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, you know, not wanting dissent, okay?
They didn't Facebook, the Indian government didn't want to deal
with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it, okay?
The 9th Circuit said that 230 protection that allows you complete immunity,
if Alex Berenson says, you know, 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, you know, 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's 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?
Yeah.
That's how they've gotten.
Okay.
All right.
So, fast forward.
Berenson sues.
Berenson v. Twitter.
Here's what I had.
I had emails 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 an
election misinformation
policy," or, you know, "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.
And so even if they say their contract, and you know, if you sign up for
Twitter,
you know, 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 a user, they're modifying that, okay? 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. He, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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's
based in California, and the California Constitution is even more protective of
free speech than the U.S.
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, you know,
like, from the Vietnam War on, even though that's a private facility, you,
because you're running this
place that's open to the public and that a lot of people who, you know, 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, 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, you know, does the federal law go too far and
sort of hurt First
Amendment protections. But put all that aside. 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,
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, so, and it's actually kind of
amazing if you think
about this, that this is how this works. The, the lawyers for, you know, for
Twitter were going to go
to Twitter and say, you got to give us all your documents that, you know, that
where Alex Berenson
is named, whether that's internal or whether that's, you know, 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. You know, it's like me and my phone
or whatever, but,
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.
Okay. 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,
you want a lawsuit to go
away. Okay. So, 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, uh, and I, in June, we
had these, 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, they, they reinstated me to the platform. We settled.
They, 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, it was funny. It was actually people on the
right. They said,
this guy, he t