SLAPP Censorship - Part 25 Out of 200: That Time Matthew J. Garrett Got Temporarily Banned/Suspended From Twitter
His own spouse ("Isis") as recently as weeks ago:
Yesterday we wrote about efforts to thwart our lawsuits against Garrett [1, 2] while he was scheming with a strangler of women to add another lawsuit against us (he admitted they had spoken prior to it when I cross-examined him). The aim was to drain our legal funds and 'win' on financial grounds, not merits of arguments or substance. They tried to settle with us more than half a dozen times. All they wanted was censorship so as to improve their reputation (after begging failed).
What they did was so sinister and really very evil that we must write about it and inform the public in years to come. Someone connected to Brett Wilson LLP was sending me anonymous threats last month and Brett Wilson LLP had two vacancies advertised yesterday in jobsleads.com, representing an ongoing issue of "brain" drain (we assume people not wanting to work there anymore). They operate like some sort of mafia (the SRA calls them "hired guns") on behalf of Americans working for American corporations, including Microsoft. Our barrister said we can write about it once it's over, hence we do exactly that.
Just over a year ago we wrote to our barrister to explain to him some essential background. Today we reproduce the text related to this, as it's still very relevant and it has aged rather well. The outline we gave after they requested documents they already had (and then abandoned their own requests):
Roy’s and Rianne's position: most of these questions, a couple of dozen (or more considering the sub-questions) in total, are bluntly loaded and most likely designed to irritate/provoke/bait us while wasting our time (and thus, our money). This is a budget game rather than a debate of truly substantial arguments. The court’s time could be used for better purposes than this and it is causing unnecessary delays that put down authors – people who would otherwise be productive running their very active news sites.
Worse yet, some rather large portions ask something to the effect of, what exact date 5 years ago did "X" happen? Flirting with infeasible (to fulfil) requests, partly due to age.
This is just an extended version of 9 requests made for documents (based on a letter transmitted days earlier, including of material that had gone years back).
It has become a habit for them to toss literally hundreds of pages at us, most of them consisting of our own writings rather than anything original from them. They did this again, twice even, at the end of October. They throw volumes of paperwork at us.
"N/A" below indicates it is not for us to respond to directly, for various (unspecified herein) reasons.
This is what they asked for and our reply:
Under Paragraph 14 of the Defence and Counterclaim“The Defendants deny that, in their full and proper context, the statements complained of in paragraph 6 conveyed the imputations alleged in paragraph 9 and its subparagraphs or any imputation defamatory of the Claimant.”
Request
1. Please state each of the meanings the Defendants contend the statements complained of bear.
N/A
Under Paragraph 15 of the Defence and Counterclaim“Alternatively, if and insofar as the statements complained of conveyed any of the following imputations, they were at least substantially true. The imputations that follow are statements of fact save for those words underlined which are expressions of opinion: [...]”
Request
2. Please state which, if any, of the meanings set out at sub-paragraphs 15 are accepted by the Defendants to be defamatory at common law of the Claimant.
N/A
Under Paragraph 15.21 of the Defence and Counterclaim“The abusive and unpleasant messages posted by the account mjg59_ led to the Claimant being the first and only IRC user to be ‘muted’ on the First Defendant’s IRC channels.”
Requests
3. Please state the dates and times of the ‘abusive and unpleasant’ messages by mjg59_ relied upon.
4. Please state the date and time when mjg59_ was muted/banned from the Defendant’s IRC channels.
Regarding 3: Hundreds of abusive messages are now dated (both date and time in 2023).
Regarding 4: Muting of M.J.G. (mjg59_) happened around 2020 or 2021 and was done by a moderator after M.J.G. had kept persistently derailing purely technical and amicable (productive) discussions by bringing up sex and changing the subject to sex, using his authenticated – i.e. real - IRC account (he did not deny this was him). His behaviour was deemed obnoxious enough (by a trusted moderator since 2009, which the webhost too very strongly vouched for) and since we stood firm on not banning people – citing a strong free speech policy going many years back - we chose to silence his disruptive messages instead. This happened so long ago (about 4 years) that we lack access to the data which affirms the date (of the “mute” decision being actioned).
We humbly question the sincerity of these two questions because M.J.G. is fully aware of: 1) when this was done (he was there all along); 2) why this was done; 3) it would be immensely difficult to go this far back in time to pinpoint this moment (IRC at Techrights has run 24/7 every day of the year since 2008, yielding close to 70 million messages in total). He is merely hoping to cast uncertainty and doubt on his terrible behaviour, which many in our community can attest to and some expressed eagerness to testify for.
In short, this seems like an exercise in time-wasting, not genuine interest in the answers given by us, with or without testimonies from our online community.
This was also mentioned in Request #2.
This requires going back almost half a decade back in time. It is infeasible now.
In short, the action was warranted and maybe even belated (we were too forgiving and far too tolerant). The decision to mute him came from numerous people, who had endured more than enough. He was clearly misbehaving (provoking, insulting, talking about sex) in IRC.
We did our best to curtail harassment (mitigation) – something that M.J.G. has become infamous for (Twitter also suspended his account, we assume for harassment or abuse, at least once before he left).
In hindsight, we do know for certain he was suspended from his Twitter account (for some time), but the reasons aren't too clear.
That he gets banned from large social control media platform is hardly surprising given his combative communications, e.g. using really bad words and flinging accusations of "rape" at various people without evidence to back those accusations. █