[ih] Defamation lawsuit brought by self-proclaimed email "inventor" settles

[Dave Crocker]

> Yeah, Dave’s claim that there was no meaningful campaign to censor 
> Ayyadurai is disingenuous at best. Masnick himself took part in the 
> (successful) campaign to have the Huffington Post series on Ayyadurai’s 
> claims removed or identified as sponsored posts in a very long Sep 2nd, 
> 2014 post on Techdirt.
...
> Dave is inclined to hair-splitting so he’ll want to say “Masnick never 
> actually, literally said ’take down these posts today!’”.
...


Ad hominems notwithstanding, one publication criticizing the merits of 
an article by another is not censorship or attempted censorship.  It is 
dialogue.  And the difference between censorship and dialogue is not 
hair-splitting.

Further techdirt's language you quote is quite mild, given how odd the 
HuffPost article is and given how successful these misrepresentations of 
history have been.  On the other hand, it is also interesting to note 
that the HuffPost series of articles does appear to have been removed, 
and that there are some later HuffPost articles about this topic that 
are not nearly so kind to him.

As foundational material, keep in mind that besides tricking the 
Smithsonian and the Washington Post, there's even been a television 
segment touting the false claim.(*)

In any case, it's clear that the folk making the error did not do even 
basic research.  In some cases, the language seems likely to have been 
provided by the claimant's agents, rather than by independent writers. 
(Catch phrases, excessively lauditory language, simplistic dismissal of 
prior work, etc.)



d/

(*) 
https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/innovation-nation/episodes/inventor-of-email/


-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net