(Credit: The Alex Jones Channel screengrab/WikiCommons)
Elham Asaad Buaras
A lawsuit by an infamous far-right conspiracy theorist against the county’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group was thrown out by a judge last month for being “to put it mildly, nonsensical.”
Laura Loomer, a prominent anti-Muslim social media activist. was banned from most major social media platforms beginning last year.
Since then, she has launched a congressional bid, which she acknowledged in a campaign email was at least partially a ploy to have her social media accounts restored. She also filed a lawsuit against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) earlier this year, accusing the civil rights group of plotting to take down her Twitter account.
Her claims in that lawsuit originated from a prank by leftist Twitter users who confessed to the stunt.
Twitter banned Loomer in November 2018, after years of anti-Muslim posts. She is also banned from Uber, Lyft, Venmo, GoFundMe, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms for similar infractions.
But Loomer, who has promoted several conspiracy theories (she made her first headlines attempting to accuse her university of supporting ISIS) soon latched onto an elaborate explanation for her ban.
She tried to overturn the ban by handcuffing herself to the door of Twitter’s New York City offices. Twitter remained unmoved, but the stunt attracted the attention of Twitter users Nathan Bernard and Chris Gillen, who decided to pose as Twitter employees, Right Wing Watch first reported. Beginning in December, the pair sent Loomer messages claiming Twitter had met with CAIR representatives shortly before her ban.
The pair said Loomer did not seek to authenticate any of their claims, including a ridiculous forged calendar they sent her, which appeared to show Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey scheduling two-and-a-half consecutive hours of meditation time every work day.
“We couldn’t have done it dumber,” Gillen told Right Wing Watch in January. “We couldn’t have been less careful. It’s so obviously b**s**t.”
The pranksters also shared audio of a phone call in which Loomer accused Dorsey of “taking money from all these Muslims and implementing Sharia law.”
Loomer passed the allegation to the Wall Street Journal, which implied that CAIR was among “outside groups and individuals [that] had privately lobbied Twitter executives to remove her from the site in late November.” A series of right-wing news sites picked up the story, accusing CAIR and Twitter of conspiring against Loomer.
Although Bernard and Gillen came clean about the stunt in January, Loomer continued to press the conspiracy theory in court. In April, she filed suit against CAIR, accusing it of “tortious interference with an advantageous business relationship” between herself and Twitter.
“Even accepting as true Plaintiffs’ proposition that Defendant reported Loomer’s account and convinced Twitter to ban Loomer, doing so does not create a cause of action for tortious interference with a business relationship,” the judge wrote in a dismissal.
“Plaintiffs’ suggestion that the mere reporting of a Twitter user — however insistent such reporting may be — is sufficient to constitute tortious interference in a business relationship between Twitter and the targeted user is, to put it mildly, nonsensical.”
“In other words, tweeting isn’t a job, and getting banned isn’t the same as getting fired. If Loomer wants to find the culprit behind her ban, she can look in the mirror,” Council on American-Islamic Relations said after the dismissal.
“We are pleased the court recognized that Loomer’s complaint against the Council on American-Islamic Relations was baseless,” CAIR National Litigation Director, Lena Masri, said in a statement.
“Her pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric is what caused Twitter and at least eight other internet platforms to ban her, not any actions by CAIR.”
