Project Veritas’ Defamation Lawsuit Against CNN Can Go Forward
Today’s Eleventh Circuit decision in Project Veritas v. CNN, written by Judge Elizabeth Branch and joined by Judges Andrew Brasher and Ed Carnes, involves CNN’s coverage of Twitter’s suspension of Project Veritas:
On February 11, 2021, Veritas tweeted a video showing its reporters trying to interview Guy Rosen, then a Facebook vice president, outside a residence. Neither the video nor the text of the tweet accompanying the video contained any information related to the street, city, or state where the attempted interview took place. That said, a house number could be seen in the background of the video. That same day, Twitter suspended the official Veritas account on the grounds that the video violated Twitter’s policy against publishing private information (informally known as a “doxxing” policy).
But CNN “suggested on-air that Twitter banned Veritas for ‘promoting misinformation.'” Veritas sued CNN for defamation, and the Eleventh Circuit allowed the claim to go forward (“Taking the allegations of the complaint as true, as we must at the pleadings stage”):
We start by comparing the pleaded truth with the alleged defamation. The pleaded truth is that Twitter suspended the account of Veritas for doxing— publishing “private information [of another] without [his] consent.” The alleged defamation is that [CNN anchor] Cabrera suggested on-air on February 15 that Twitter suspended Veritas’s account for “promoting misinformation.” Recall that Cabrera stated the following on-air:
- That social media companies were “cracking down to stop the spread of misinformation and to hold some people who are spreading it accountable”;
- “For example, Twitter has suspended the account of Project Veritas ….”; and
- “[T]his is part of a much broader crackdown, as we mentioned, by social media giants that are promoting misinformation.” …
[U]nder New York law, a defamatory statement is substantially true [and thus not actionable] if “the overall gist or substance of the challenged statement is true.” Thus, the relevant question is whether the “gist” or “substance” of being suspended for “promoting misinformation” is the same as being suspended for “publishing private information of another without their consent.” We conclude that it is not.
Veritas has plausibly alleged that the average viewer would conclude from Cabrera’s statements that Twitter “cracked down” on Veritas and suspended it from the platform for promulgating misinformation. Cabrera’s statement about misinformation would plausibly “have a different effect” on the mind of the audience than the pleaded truth—that Veritas published accurate but private information.
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