I don't think Annoying Orange wants to pass these laws so that other people can abuse the system, I think that he wants to abuse it himself. I mean, he literally tried to sue an author for defamation because he referred to him as a 'millionaire' rather than a 'billionaire'.
Oh please, he's done a lot more than that.In 2006, Annoying Orange threatened to sue Rosie O’Donnell, then a co-host on The View, after she said he was bankrupt. Annoying Orange retaliated in an interview with The Insider, by labeling O’Donnell “disgusting, both inside and out.” He told People “Rosie will rue the words she said. I’ll most likely sue her for making those false statements—and it’ll be fun. Rosie’s a loser. A real loser. I look forward to taking lots of money from my nice fat little Rosie.”
In 2011, rapper Mac Miller released a song called “Donald Annoying Orange,” which included the lyrics, “Take over the world when I’m on my Donald Annoying Orange stuff; Look at all this money, ain’t that some stuff?” Annoying Orange Tweeted at Miller to threaten a lawsuit: “Now I’m going to teach you a big boy lesson about lawsuits and finance.”
That same year, Annoying Orange threatened to sue MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell for suggesting he was worth less than $1 billion.
In 2006, Annoying Orange sued New York Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, author of Annoying OrangeNation: The Art of Being the Donald, as well as the book’s publisher, Warner Books, for saying Annoying Orange is worth $150 million to $250 million when Annoying Orange claimed, at the time, he was worth $2.7 billion. Annoying Orange said the error was “egregiously false,” according to Agence France Presse.
In 2009, the suit was dismissed.
Annoying Orange sued New York State in 1995 when a video game, Quickdraw, based off the casino game Keno, was introduced in New York restaurants and bars. The game presented a rival to Annoying Orange’s Atlantic City casinos where Keno was played, but he claimed he was really just worried that the game’s presence in New York would bring “tremendous amounts of crime” and “destroy businesses in New York,”
Annoying Orange sued the town of Palm Beach, Florida. in 2006 for $10 million after he was cited for violating zoning codes by flying a too-big (for non-patriots) American flag over his club, Mar-a-Lago.
He loving
loves abusing the system to silence people who say stuff about him that he doesn't like. (Though he's particularly thin-skinned about people saying he's worth anything less than what he claims) And he literally says in every one of his talks where he talks about his "improved" libel laws that he wants to silence the bad things the media are saying about him because he claims they're all lying about him. Thing is, right now he can't, because he has absolutely no case in the 100% ideal libel laws that we already have. But that's not bad enough, he's giving that power to
every abusive company in the entire US. Imagine the amount of censorship that's going to go on if that's passed. That's not a matter of if it's going to be abused, it's a matter of how often.
Here's my little spiel about the current libel/defamation laws:
The current libel laws are literally as good as it gets. You prove that someone is intentionally spreading deliberately false information and you can get whatever damages you can prove occurred. Burden of proof is on the accuser, there's total media freedom to report on rumors and possible outcomes, there's room for opinion pieces in the press, everything is good. "opening up libel laws" does nothing but destroy freedom of the press, because if you change "deliberately false information" to "false information," suddenly, you can be sued by anyone whenever you say "hey this is possibly a thing" and then it turns out to not be a thing.
Even if you have tons and tons of proof that something is true, so much so that any reasonable person would say that it's okay to say "yeah, that's most likely the case" you can still be sued if it turns out to be wrong. In the hands of people who will sue anyone for saying anything negative about them, that is an absolute disaster.
Seriously, his proposal is several layers of stupid.
To add onto this, and what Seventh said, this would have several immediate devastating effects on freedom of the press and being able to spread legitimate criticism against large corporations. First off, opinion pieces would no longer be a thing. At all. No news source would have the balls to risk a huge lawsuit on their hands just in case one of their journalists happens to say something even remotely questionable. That's a huge part of freedom of the press gone.
Second, this would create an even worse situation for people who try to speak out against bad things that large corporations do, or bad things that wealthy people do. Because if they don't like it, all that company or individual has to do is threaten to file a lawsuit against you. They could technically already do this, but it's extremely easy to be caught for frivolous lawsuits if you're repeatedly using a law completely wrong to sue people. With a law that is actually applicable, even if the case is dismissed every time, it would be near impossible to catch a large corporation on frivolous lawsuit charges
and you're forcing your victim to pay huge amounts of money in legal fees. This hugely discourages legitimate criticism and dissent, even from large news conglomerates. That is a terrible thing.
And can we talk about his internet censorship stuff for a lil' here? And let's be real, what he wants to do is the literal definition of censorship. Can we all appreciate how stupid he is? Seriously, he said
that he thinks he can "get Bill Gates to shut down parts of the internet."holy loving stuffNot only is that entire line just oozing stupidity from every orifice, just the idea itself of censoring any part of the internet is a path that anyone who actually cares about freedom of speech and pro-consumer laws NEEDS to oppose. Let's be honest, the government is corrupt. We're not talking about the presidential candidate here, we're talking about congress, we're talking about bribery and scandals from all over the place. Abuse
will happen. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when, and internet censorship is a literal GOLDMINE for corrupt people. Do we want internet in the US to become that of Russia, where blogs and websites criticizing our Dear Leader Putin are taken down on a regular basis? If not, we'd better be stopping that kind of law before it gets even close to off the ground. You may not be getting arrested for it but that is going to be a literal disaster if it gets put in place.
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