January 12th, 2021

Trump Dumped by Social Media – No Problem

Picture via CNET

It took a number of years, but Twitter finally dumped Donald Trump from its platform. So too for Facebook. Too much hate. Too much violence. The insurrection at the Capitol was the final straw.

There have been many commentators saying that this is a problem. My opinion, dumping Trump and any others that spew hatred and foment violence is most assuredly not a problem.

First, we will dispense with the First Amendment argument. There is none. These are private businesses and the First Amendment restricts what the government can do. The principles involved for me dumping a comment or commenter are no different than Big Tech. Big Tech and Small Tech have the same fundamental issue, albeit at different scale.

If you spew hate, or spam, or simply write crap I don’t like, then poof, you’re gone. My blog, my rules. If you don’t like it don’t come here. Same with Big Tech.

This deplatforming of a President, however, struck a nerve with folks, for no reason other than he is a President, at least for a few more days.

Over at Bloomberg, Joe Nocera claims that this is as problem, in that a few people in charge of Big Tech have too much power:

Do you really want Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai deciding which speech is acceptable and which is not on their platforms — platforms that are now indistinguishable from the public space. In addition to the problem of having so much power concentrated in so few hands, they are simply not very good at it. Their rules are vague, change constantly and are ignored often if the user is prominent enough.

He comes around to a solution — destroying Section 230 protections:

I have come around to an idea that the right has been clamoring for — and which Trump tried unsuccessfully to get Congress to approve just weeks ago. Eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That is the provision that shields social media companies from legal liability for the content they publish — or, for that matter, block.

He then admits that this would merely result in the problematic posters such as Trump being neutered anyway. After all, without 230 protections, the platform could conceivably be liable for the misconduct of posters. Nocera just thinks the neutering is a good thing:

In fact, once the social media companies have to assume legal liability — not just for libel, but for inciting violence and so on — they will quickly change their algorithms to block anything remotely problematic. People would still be able to discuss politics, but they wouldn’t be able to hurl anti-Semitic slurs. Presidents and other officials could announce policies, but they wouldn’t be able to spin wild conspiracies.

This is a terrible idea for reasons that I discussed last month — Section 230 is the lifeblood of interactive communications. Without 230, you would never read a negative review of any restaurant, hotel or widget. Negative reviews would be met with threats of litigation and the platform is not in a position to determine the truth/falsity of the review. And with politics, there are a bazillion shades of gray all wrapped up in contextual statements.

Twitter and Facebook are hardly the only platforms Trump has to speak on. He has the presidential podium, after all, and can speak freely from it.

And even when he is gone from office — and he will be gone — Trump could call up any journalists in the world and have conversations with them. Who would say no? Whether you love him or despise him you’d certainly like to get answers to questions. Recorded, of course.

And those remarks would get rebroadcast by others. On Twitter. On Facebook. And in a million newspapers, magazines, news shows, blogs, bulletin boards, etc. And it would happen almost instantaneously.

The only difference is that Twitter/Facebook would not be primary sources, but secondary.

Prof. Eugene Volokh, raises concerns in a New York Times op-ed. He writes that while there are plenty of places to speak, Twitter and Facebook are matchless:

there are hundreds of newspapers throughout the nation and several major TV networks. Facebook and Twitter have no major rivals in their media niches. The public relies on them as matchless mechanisms for unfiltered communication, including politicians’ communications with their constituents.

But this likewise misses that social media is, in very large part, about rebroadcasting the thoughts and opinions of others. If Trump (or any other dumped commenter) says anything worth repeating, it will be repeated on those platforms. By someone. Whether the ideas are rebroadcast widely would be determined merely by their level of interest. The same as me. And you.

A final thought: No one claims it is easy to moderate these platforms, or any forum with a lot of discussion.

It’s hard to do and virtually impossible to come up with any kind of objective criteria. The words themselves often obscure the context, as we will see in the upcoming impeachment debate over Trump directing people to march on the Capitol.

Want to know why it’s hard? Consider this easy example. In one context, Trump says “March on the Capitol!” to an angry group of armed insurrectionists. In another, Mahatma Gandhi says “March to the salt flats to make salt.” One is an implicit call for violence, implicit because Trump has a long history of advocating violence. The other comes from someone with a long history of advocating peace.

Context matters. And it defies artificial intelligence decisions that merely look at the words. Let Big Tech (and Small Tech) do as they please with respect to dumping/keeping posters. Keep government out of it.

(Full disclosure: I own stock in Twitter, having bought it after Trump was sworn in, figuring that four years of free advertising couldn’t hurt.)

March 7th, 2017

The Twitter Fail by Trial Lawyers

You may think that there is too much ” advertising or marketing by trial lawyers. And in one sense you are right if you think in terms of subway ads, or worse (ads over urinals or at funeral home web sites).

But you know what? There is one group that does a pretty lousy job of getting its message out, at least insofar as it pertains to Twitter. And that is our trial lawyer associations — those groups of lawyers that have pooled our resources in order to advocate for consumers so that rights are not stripped away.

Despite Twitter being cheap, easy and very effective in getting a message out to the general populace (as should be abundantly obvious now given the recent election), the various trial lawyer associations do a crappy job.

I’ll pick on the American Association for Justice today, of which I am a card-carrying member. With 56,000 members, this is the single most prominent national trial lawyer group in the country that fights for a fair and effective civil justice system.

The group not only lobbies Congress, but has a wide range of sections devoted to different practice areas, and publications to meet most any need. If you represent injured people as part of your practice, there is no doubt you should be a member.

But I am flummoxed by the lack of something so simple – social media outreach to those that aren’t trial lawyers. To “regular people” who very much have a vested interest in the outcome of, say, the attempt to grant immunity to medical practitioners or to knee-cap class action suits.

The AAJ Twitter feed has just 6,000 followers. While a large number of followers isn’t always meaningful, since phony “ghost” followers can be bought, a relatively low number of followers for a large organization is indicative of a failure to adequately utilize the medium.

AAJ’s contribution to the masses via this forum consists of mostly just posting its own stories. There is little engagement with others. No re-tweeting of articles written by others. No responsive public commentary on issues of the day that matter to people likely to be affected.

The AAJ Twitter feed acts, for the most part, as little more than another means of distributing press releases and research reports. But it fails at this.

How do I know it fails? Because few of its tweets have been shared more than 10 times. That is, quite simply, a dreadful track record.

If we are going to put all the time, money and effort into creating research reports — that debunk myths and use empirical data instead of relying on anecdotes — shouldn’t we spend a little time actively promoting those reports and get them out into the public?

The more folks that read them, the more that share them, the more likely it becomes a subject of town hall meetings and additional press. Don’t we want regular folk calling their elected representatives regarding the evisceration of rights?

It takes time to build up relationships with other people, particularly those with a voice likely to rebroadcast messages. The best time to start doing this was a few years ago. The second best time is today.

AAJ should be doing everything it can to encourage, and maximize, the voices of those that are fighting for the same thing — fair access to the courts.

State trial lawyer associations are, for the most part, no better. Every state, to my knowledge, has a trial lawyer association. But few are utilizing a widely used and free platform to get the messages out to those that may lose rights.

Tort “reform” was not part of the election — if it was ever mentioned by Trump or Clinton I missed it.

But with Republicans in charge now of House, Senate and White House, it sure as hell is on the front burner now.

So please, get out there, engage, and be more active in getting the messages out. Today, not tomorrow.

March 15th, 2013

The Death of RSS and the Rise of Twitter

When news broke yesterday that Google was dumping GoogleReader there were two kinds of reactions from bloggers noted Bruce Carton at Legal Blog Watch: Those for whom it was the end of the world and those who shrugged.

Carton was in full panic mode. I was a shrugger. I stopped using my RSS feed about a year or two ago, as it simply died a slow death for me.

And that’s because most anyone that I would have followed on RSS is placing links to their blog posts on Twitter. And Twitter also had the advantage of having (short) comments on those blog posts, which might also give you an idea if something was interesting or contentious. RSS was not just redundant, but inferior. (And, as I noted the other day, it can make you a better writer of legal briefs.)

Between Twitter, RSS, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, blog post comments, YouTube, listservs, all manner of open discussion forums and whatever else is incubating now that I don’t know about, participating online can easily be a 24/7 job/hobby/distraction. But I have a real job and a real family, as most of you do, and I have to pick and choose. RSS lost. I also have an account at LinkedIn that I rarely check/use, I stopped using forums years ago, and I haven’t yet figured out what to do with Google+, or had the time to explore it.

I haven’t always been a fan of Twitter, and ripped it right after it came out. But I’ve come to appreciate its utility, an appreciation that comes only by carefully screening those I might follow.

When someone follows me, I generally look at their last three tweets (or “twits” as Scott Greenfield quite appropriately calls them). If those tweets are about a local accident, in the desperate hope the victim will log on to Twitter and find this brilliance, I know this is not a person to follow. So too with anyone in legal marketing. I need more phone calls and emails from these hucksters like I need a hole in the head.

But worse still are those that respond to an individual with something like “Ha!”, apparently forgetting that many others will see this gibberish, not just the one that sent the message being responded to. And even worse are those that write, “Thanks for the RT!” Thanks for sharing your insecurity with me by noting how important an RT is to you.

Why anyone would want this crap clogging their Twitter feed and rendering it useless is beyond me. Links and short comments on relevant stories are what works.

And you know those folks that are following thousands of others? It’s pretty clear such folks are not reading their own Twitter feeds. I don’t give a damn if they follow me or not.

Last year I spoke at a conference on social media down in Washington DC. And a woman that followed after me was hit by an audience question: If someone follows you on Twitter, are you supposed to follow them back? “Yes!” she cried, as that was the polite thing to do. I almost fell off my chair as I recognized the entire audience had just become dumber for having heard this.

Twitter can be a good tool that certainly replaces RSS. Just be sure to carefully cull the list of those you follow. You can follow me if you want (@Turkewitz) but don’t be upset if I don’t follow back. My brain has a limited capacity.

That’s my two pesos. Bruce Carton’s mileage will vary. And remember that no one will ever put the number of your Twitter follows on your headstone.

Elsewhere on the subject:

Really Simple Sign of the Future (Greenfield)

The End of GoogleReader: A Sign of Blogging’s Decline and Lessons for Lawyers (Elefant)

March 12th, 2013

Legal Briefs, Twitter Style

Lawyers love to write. And write. And write. Some “briefs” go on for dozens of pages, with the author often scrambling around in search of an issue, much to the pain and frustration of the reader.

Does using Twitter help, given that writers are constrained to only 140 characters?

Yesterday I tweeted a story from the NY Post about a lawyer that wanted to exclude all Jews from a jury, claiming that with his militant Islamist client “that there’s going to be inflammatory testimony about Jews and Zionism, I think it would be hard for Jews to cast aside any innate antipathy.”

But despite the limitations of Twitter, and the highly charged nature of the lawyer’s claim, a few lawyers were able to brief the subject anyway:

Max Kennerly took a shot:

Seems to me he could cure most of the assumed problems in voir dire, w/o categorical exclusion RT @bcuban @Turkewitz http://bit.ly/10tvuNP

And then Ted Frank:

@MaxKennerly @bcuban @turkewitz Inducing error at this trial gives client free bite at apple; if guilty verdict, new lawyer gets reversal.

And David Sugerman:

@tedfrank Huh? I’m no crim law expert, but invited error. Def gets reversal for getting relief def sought??@MaxKennerly @bcuban @Turkewitz

And Ted Frank again:

@DavidSug @maxkennerly @bcuban @turkewitz Ineffective assistance; plus defendant has standing to raise constitutional injury to juror.

Of course, because each lawyer was using the @ symbol to copy others, they were each using even less than the full allotment of 140 characters.

Did they do a full and complete job discussing the story? Of course not. But using very few words each of them undertook the most essential part of lawyering: issue identification. Because if you can’t identify issues, you won’t succeed writing any kind of brief.

Twitter, while a pretty big waste of time for many, can also be used as a teaching tool. If you force lawyers to state their case in 140 characters, it forces them to remove extraneous information and argument.

Legal writing guru Bryan Garner teaches lawyers to frame their issues in just 75 words. If you can’t do that, he argues, you haven’t sufficiently identified the issue and simplified your writing. Think of Twitter as a more extreme form of Garner’s 75-word rule.

February 1st, 2012

Trial Prep and Twitter

Last week I was on trial — at three days it was the shortest one I ever had — and my trial prep included this: Deleting any Twitter messages that were political. My first post on Twitter was thee years ago, January 29, 2009. Since then I have made about 800+ posts.

So the few tweets on politics that I’ve made were taken down. None were overboard on anything — regular readers know that ad hominem attack isn’t exactly the way I write — but why take the chance?

The problem is that no matter how many times a juror is told to avoid looking up the people involved, some folks can’t help themselves. They might look up the lawyer. They might see the Twitter stream.

Despite what people think of New York as a bastion of liberalism, we have plenty of conservatives. Our recent past had Rudy Giuliani as NYC mayor and George Pataki as Governor. It doesn’t really matter if you are on the left or right of the political aisle, it is guarnateed that out of a jury pool some will have differing opinions.

And if you are the party with the burden of proof in a personal injury case (me) then you can’t afford to piss anyone off. This is particularly true in a presidential election year when politics dominates the news more so than at other times.

The same problem exists for web sites, of course. I’ve always cognizant of this (see, I Hate My Website from 2009) and try to govern myself accordingly. While there are some folks who take down their websites and replace them when on trial (or so I have heard) that isn’t something I’ve ever done.

Since no one generally cares about any tweet that is more than 10 nanoseconds old, this isn’t really an issue. But one person might care, that being the juror. So down they come.

Of course, the opposite might be true for criminal defense lawyers. With the burden on the prosecution, they need only convince that one lonely holdout. They may have a completely different view of keeping contentious political commentary up in place.