Can Twitter ban gay people because they're gay if it likes? Or | Alex Berenson

Can Twitter ban gay people because they're gay if it likes? Or women? Or black people? Twitter thinks so.

Some of you have asked about why Berenson v. Twitter matters and why I am spending time on it instead of focusing on vaccines, mandates, and other news.

I promise a full answer soon.

But here’s part of the reason. Here’s how the world’s most important platform for journalism ACTUALLY sees itself, its rights, and its obligations to permit free speech.

The following transcript is from a hearing in the Superior Court of San Francisco in June 2018 on a case called Taylor v. Twitter. Six months before, Twitter had barred a white supremacist named Jared Taylor (can we please not argue if he is a white supremacist? It’s irrelevant to this discussion).

Taylor filed a complaint in California state court. Among other claims, he alleged unfair competition - that Twitter’s terms of service were unconscionable and its business practices fraudulent because it promised users the opportunity to speak freely but did not.

To the obvious surprise of Twitter’s attorneys, Judge Harold E. Kahn showed sympathy to Taylor’s arguments (as opposed to sympathy to Taylor and his views - which is, or at least used to be, the point of having freedom of speech).

At the hearing, Kahn put Twitter’s lawyers to the test. Could Twitter ban gay people, or women, or African-Americans, if it chose?

KAHN: Does Twitter have the right to take somebody off its platform if -- it does so because it doesn't like the fact that the person is a woman? Or gay? Or would be in violation of Title 7? Or would be in violation of the age discrimination laws, or the disability discrimination laws?

Kahn was so certain the question had only one response that he actually answered it himself:

Of course not.

But after a short back-and-forth, Twitter’s lawyer Patrick Carome told the judge he was wrong.

Twitter might call itself a “public square” - as Jack Dorsey would say under oath in Congressional testimony three months later. In reality it had every right to ban a black person, or a woman, or anyone else it liked, for any reason, or no reason at all.