By Aaron Miller-
A Delaware computer repair shop owner sued Twitter, alleging the social network defamed him by effectively labelling him a “hacker” after his business was cited as the source for info obtained from a laptop allegedly owned by Hunter Biden that served as the basis for several New York Post articles published in October.
The lawsuit filed yesterday, Monday, by John Paul Mac Isaac, said he was forced to shut down the Mac Shop, his computer repair business in Wilmington, Del., after Twitter said the NY Post stories violated its “hacked materials” policy and initially disallowed users from sharing the links.
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The Newyork Times claimed the material for its Hunter Biden exposés was supplied by Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who allegedly obtained it from a MacBook Pro that had been abandoned in Mac Isaac’s shop.
Mac Issac is demanding $500 million in punitive damages from Twitter, on top of unspecified compensatory damages and lawyers’ fees. He also wants an order forcing Twitter to “make a public retraction of all false statements.” His lawsuit was filed Monday, Dec. 28, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
“Plaintiff is not a hacker and the information obtained from the computer does not [constitute] hacked materials because Plaintiff lawfully gained access to the computer,” the lawsuit says. As a result of Twitter’s citing its “hacked materials” policy for blocking the Post’s articles, Mac Isaac says he “is now widely considered a hacker,” and received negative online reviews and threats against his person and property. He claims he was ultimately forced to shutter the Mac Shop.
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Block
Twitter on Oct. 14 blocked users from tweeting unconfirmed New York Post articles alleging that Joe Biden and his son Hunter engaged in corrupt business dealing in Ukraine and China.
After first citing its “hacked materials” policy for the URL blocking, Twitter a day later revised that policy to allow tweets that discuss hacked material and that the company would now add labels to (rather than block) posts that link to such content.
In addition, the Post’s previous tweets linking to the Biden stories, which Twitter had disabled, were restored.
Twitter’s blocking of the Post articles sparked new calls from Republicans to revise or revoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives internet companies latitude to remove content that violates their policies while shielding them from legal liability. At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in October, GOP members attacked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for the company’s blocking of the Post stories.
Dorsey denied that Twitter’s enforcement decisions favor Democratic politicians or issues, explaining that the company had blocked tweets with links to the Post articles because, “We didn’t want Twitter to be a distributor for hacked materials.” Dorsey previously acknowledged that blocking the articles’ URLs without context was wrong.
At the same hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company limited distribution of the New York Post’s initial Biden story in part based on an FBI warning about potential “hack and leak operations” that could be “part of a foreign manipulation attempt” ahead of the U.S. election.
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