Twitter held in contempt, fined $350K over Trump data delay
Sanctions were applied after the social media platform delayed compliance with a federal search warrant that required Twitter to hand over Donald Trump’s Twitter data without telling the former president about the warrant for 180 days.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At first, Twitter resisted producing Trump’s data and argued that the government’s nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act.
However, US circuit judge Florence Pan wrote that the court was largely unpersuaded by Twitter’s arguments, mostly because the government’s interest in Trump’s data as part of its ongoing January 6 investigation was “unquestionably compelling.”
The government then took the extra step to apply for a nondisclosure order, which was granted because “the district court found that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that disclosing the warrant to former President Trump ‘would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation’ by giving him ‘an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates.’”
The court checked with Twitter and confirmed that it was capable of meeting a rapid deadline and turning over the data by 5:00 pm that evening.
The court rejected Twitter’s “good faith” arguments, mainly because the company blew past the original deadline and repeatedly failed to raise concerns at earlier opportunities.
While Twitter appealed the decision, the company “paid the $350,000 sanction into an escrow account maintained by the district court clerk’s office.”
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I fully agree with this, I’m just not sure what form this would take.
For execution, a dissolution of all properties, patents, inventory, and all assets seized and sold, followed by barring at least the C-suite from working in the same field ever again?
In my mind, incarceration would be a freeze on all their assets and business operations for a fixed period of time. Execution would mean full liquidation as though they were bankrupt, all their IPs become public domain, like you mention.
I imagine a C-suite that caused either of these outcomes wouldn't be popular with the investment class since it would cost them meaningful amounts of money. A ban might not even be nessicary.
Bro, Elon gutted Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have the right people to get this information. I wonder if it sat in a mailbox for a day before they even had someone look at it.
Twitter isn’t a well run company anymore. This could be pure incompetence.
It was doubling every day. They were scared of day 15 where it would’ve been 780mil for the day and over 1.562billion total.
Every day doubling is a really good consequence, the fact that it only took twitter 3 days to comply once the penalty started actually hitting should confirm that
To avoid a fine, all they had to do was tell the court they needed more time before the deadline*
*Because Space Karen fired all the people who knew how to look this up
Thier only issue was with not telling him about it.
That was a legal tactic. It doesn’t mean that was their actual concern. It means it was the best counterargument they could come up with.
The judge laid out a formula for "sanctions that would accrue at a geometric rate: $50,000 per day, to double every day that Twitter did not comply." At that time, Twitter did not object to the sanctions formula
In particular, by day 5 it’s over a million dollars per day, and by day 15 it’s over a billion dollars per day.
If they sat on it for a month, it’d be a ~50 trillion fine that day.
There’s a reason it only took them 3 days to comply.
The government immediately tried to serve Twitter with the search warrant—which required Trump's data to be shared within 10 days—but the website where Twitter gathers legal requests was "inoperative."
Did they auto-reply to the request with a poop emoji?
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