For better and for worse, anonymity has become one of the fundamental tenets of the way we use the internet. Okay, it’s mostly “worse.” If you spend your days being harassed by anonymous trolls on Twitter (we just call that “being a woman on Twitter”), anonymity probably feels more like a curse than anything else. If you had to reveal your actual self online, it’s hard to believe there would be quite so many people hurling around racism and rape threats.
Thanks to actor, Twitter screamer, and general awful person James Woods, that basic premise of protected anonymity might be up for discussion. As an actor, Woods has had a decades-long career, especially in ’80s and ’90s crime dramas, though Mary Sue readers may know him best as voicing Hades in Hercules, Lex Luther in Justice League Action (sorry to ruin those things for you), or himself in Family Guy and The Simpsons.
On Twitter, though, he’s famous for yelling at and about liberals. Take, for instance, this tweet from 2015, which is pretty indicative of his usual tone and subject matter:
USATODAY app features Bruce Jenner’s latest dress selection, but makes zero mention of Planned Parenthood baby parts market.
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 15, 2015
Setting aside for a moment the utter awfulness of both parts of that tweet (the deadnaming and the perpetuating of the lie that Planned Parenthood sells aborted fetuses), this specific tweet is important because it launched an ongoing lawsuit with a now-deceased Twitter user who went by the handle “Abe List” or AL. AL tweeted in response to Woods (also bringing Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro into the conversation), “cocaine addict James Woods still sniffing and spouting.” And with that, Woods decided to sue.
Despite playing a cocaine-loving version of himself on Family Guy, Woods made the case that allegations of drug addiction lost him millions in potential revenue because insurance companies that would have to bond him for film work now see him as a liability. Which, taken at face value, ignoring everything else, sounds like a legitimate concern.
But then Woods goes and does something like this:
The slime who libeled me just dropped his appeal contesting my victorious SLAPP motion. Perennial loser @LisaBloom isn’t yapping so much now
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 21, 2016
Hi James. As you surely know, my client died. Have a nice day and stay classy! https://t.co/WagDlhEcBB
— Lisa Bloom (@LisaBloom) October 21, 2016
Yes, in the months after the exchange with Woods, AL passed away. And how did Woods respond? Did he express condolences, or simply back off silently? No, of course not. In now-deleted tweets, he said, “Learn this. Libel me, I’ll sue you. If you die, I’ll follow you to the bowels of Hell. Get it?” He also said he hoped AL died “screaming [his] name.” That request to stay classy seemed not to have been heard.
Woods also didn’t back off of the lawsuit. In August of 2015, when Woods filed the suit and demanded AL’s identity be revealed, Twitter responded with a big ol’ nope. They cited free speech, saying this “would chill the First Amendment rights of speakers who use Twitter’s platform to express their thoughts and ideas instantly and publicly, without barriers.”
But this past November, Woods moved ahead with the suit, apparently really dedicated to that “bowels of hell” thing, and the judge in the case has demanded AL’s attorney reveal his real name.
In this specific case, this probably feels like a loss. AL’s attorney framed the ruling as “Sometimes in law the bad guys win,” and that doesn’t feel like hyperbole here. But what’s not clear is what sort of precedent this might set for similar lawsuits. If you can sue trolls knowing that their lawyers might have to give up their real names when Twitter has, in the past, had the ability to refuse to do so, suddenly the promise of anonymity isn’t unbreakable.
That has some immediate obvious upsides. If Leslie Jones could sue everyone who sent her racist memes, there might be a lot fewer racist memes sent her way. Women, POC, trans users—everyone for whom harassment is a daily given in online life, might suddenly have even a slight barrier.
But not everyone can afford to sue their harassers, and for sure not everyone could afford to be sued, as this precedent would definitely open up regular non-trolls who value anonymity to frivolous, spiteful suits. Imagine a kind of very expensive doxxing via the legal system.
We don’t know where this suit will head, or how it may change online anonymity. The line here between protecting hate and protecting free speech is a murky one. Valuing the anonymity Twitter and Reddit and the internet in general doesn’t automatically make you a troll, but as Lindy West wrote this week in her painfully articulate article about leaving Twitter, these platforms “may simply be impossible to make this platform usable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators.”
I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how this shakes out for the rest of us.
(via THR)
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