Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is suing Twitter for defamation. He's also launched a lawsuit against the Fresno Bee and McClatchy. The Congressman is suing the social media platform for a parody account called "Devin Nunes' Cow." He's going after the newspapers for a story about a yacht party that involved cocaine and prostitutes put on by a winery that Nunes' had invested in -- the story had not suggested that Nunes' attended the party, but the paper is being sued regardless.
On Thursday, the Sacramento Bee published a story chronicling the errors made by the lawyer behind Nunes' lawsuits, a Charlottesville, Virginia solo-practitioner named Steven S. Biss.
When Twitter revealed Biss' identity, the social media platform quickly got to work exposing the many flaws in Nunes' lawsuit.
"In the original version of the lawsuit, Nunes and Biss accuse a Fresno Bee reporter of emphasizing the words “woman,” “Devin,” and “cocaine” with a bold font in a tweet about the story on the winery lawsuit. While a screenshot of the tweet in the original lawsuit showed the words in bold font, the original tweet has text only in plain font," the Sacramento Bee observes.
According to the Bee, law blogs called it an “embarrassing mistake over how Twitter works.” When users search certain words on Twitter the resulting tweets show the words searched for in bold.
Nunes' case is not Biss's first defamation suit. He also sued NPR for a story about a man who's alleged to have promoted Seth Rich conspiracy theories.