Byline: David Brown
A senior judge has said that the social media site Twitter/X has a reputation for "fostering disinhibition" and "antagonistic group-thinking" after a legal dispute between intellectuals over "trolling".
DC (Daniel) Miller, a writer and Nina Power, a feminist philosopher, sued Luke Turner, an artist, for defamation after confrontations on the site. Turner counter-sued for online harassment.
Mrs Justice Rice Collins described the protagonists at the Appeal Court in London as "active in the world of art and ideas in ways which have attracted high controversy and strong opinion".
Dismissing their legal claims, the judge said X's limitation on characters and anonymity "may well not be conducive to contests of ideas which are sustained, reflective or nuanced".
The dispute originated with controversy around LD50, an art gallery in Dalston, north London, which Turner described as "alt-Nazi". The gallery held a symposium named "71822666", a reference to Donald Trump's campaign for the US presidency. It was advertised with a quote by Hitler.
The symposium led to international criticism and public protests. Miller staged a counter-protest, holding a placard which read "the right to openly discuss ideas must be defended" and "stand up to violence and intimidation".
Meanwhile, Turner created a "durational" artwork called LRT with Shia LaBeouf, the actor, and Nastja Sade Ronkko, a Finnish artist, which after Trump's election was installed outside the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Passers-by were asked to say "he will not divide us" into a camera, which was live-streamed. It was swiftly removed by the museum amid concerns about disorder and violence.
Turner said that as a result of the controversy he spent a month inside his London flat because he was "in terror of the volume and virulence of online abuse directed towards him".
In July 2018 the dispute evolved over a spat on Twitter about a cartoon character called Pepe the Frog. Although generally considered a funny "meme", it has also become associated with antisemitism. Turner, who is Jewish, questioned its display during a Twitter debate. Miller responded with a message describing the artist as "an institutionally supported propagandist [whose] limited intelligence and narrow ethical horizon is circumscribed by a conformist-narcissistic ideology that prevents him [from] participating in any truth."
Miller and Power -- whose books include the recently published What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its Discontents -- claimed Turner posted defamatory messages that suggested they were antisemitic.
The judge said Miller told him that in retrospect "social media platforms of this sort are 'very bad for discussing ideas' and tend to 'derange' those who attempt to do so".
She said X had "a reputation for fostering disinhibition and the consolidation of polarised and antagonistic group-thinking ... it tends to be thought of as largely consequence-free for real life, and so is sometimes described as a playground. But it has given a new meaning to the word 'troll' in the English language. Online behaviour can and does have real life consequences."