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Thursday, April 8th, 2021

Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump’s empire of disinformation?

Author:     David Smith
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Sun 4 Apr 2021 02.00 EDT
 Link: Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump’s empire of disinformation?
Stephan:   The Dominion story has been out of the U.S. news recently because it has been dominated by Republican scandals, grifts, and corruption. But that does not mean what is going on has stopped happening. Because we no longer have a functioning two-party legislative system, actual policy is increasingly being made through executive action and at the judicial level. The Dominion case is, I think, an example of this in process, as this report lays out.
A Dominion voting machine in Georgia. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims. Credit: John Bazemore/AP

Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against several Trump allies for pushing election ‘radioactive falsehoods’ – could it triumph?

When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.

Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.

But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.

“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”

The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, […]

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