California court sides with Twitter in Meghan Murphy lawsuit who was banned for saying “women aren’t men”

Because of its intensity, it's easy to think that the unprecedented level of censorship on social networks, spreading even to, technically speaking, lower levels of the web like hosting services, is a recent phenomenon.

But it's been almost two and a half years since Meghan Murphy announced she would sue Twitter for permanently banning her account after she tweeted, "women aren't men" and other declarations referring to scientific facts about biological differences between women and men.

This journalist and feminist went on to file her lawsuit in February 2019. In the YouTube video announcing it, she spelled out a policy that would in the intervening years become a runaway train of censorship. "Twitter has begun silencing individuals and political views they don't want heard," Murphy said in November 2018.

And now, a court of appeals in California has ruled that Twitter was right to ban her account. As it often does, the legal battle between tech and social media giants and their censored users came down to Communications Decency Act's Section 230, that provides the former with broad, almost impenetrable protections, while disenfranchising the latter's free speech.

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