Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson last week settled his federal lawsuit against Twitter, which acknowledged that his tweets should have not resulted in suspension at the time they were posted.
"Shady's back. Tell a friend," Berenson tweeted on July 6.
Berenson sued in April alleging a breach of contract after he was permanently suspended last year over a tweet in which he stated that the COVID-19 vaccine did not stop transmission of the coronavirus.
"It doesn’t stop infection,” Berenson posted in August 2021. “Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity."
Berenson is the author of the COVID book, Pandemia and the Substack series, Unreported Truths.
"The lesson from Alex Berenson's litigation is that a breach of contract claim may be viable for anyone who had their account suspended under Twitter's COVID-19 moderation policy," said Matthew P. Tyson, a San Diego attorney who has also sued Twitter on behalf of three physicians.
The settlement, however, is not deterring Berenson from investigating the government for potentially pressuring Twitter to suspend his account, according to media reports.
“I will have more to say on that issue in the near future,” Berenson said in an official statement.
Among Berenson’s arguments in his complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is that Section 230 of the Communications Act does not shield Twitter from the reach of California’s common carrier statute or the California Constitution.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) is a defense that social media companies often argue in litigation. It protects online platforms from liability for third-party content posted on their site.
"Section 230 immunity should not apply to a breach of contract claim which seeks to hold Twitter liable not as a publisher, but as a counterparty to a contract, a promisor who has breached the very terms it put in place to moderate tweets," said attorney Bryan M. Garrie, co-counsel of Tyson.
As previously reported in the Southern California Record, Garrie and Tyson sued Twitter on behalf of physicians Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, and Bryan Tyson, in California Superior Court in San Francisco County last month after their accounts were permanently suspended based on tweets about COVID-19, which they allege contained factual information.