The hilarious case of a parody account on Twitter that took pleasure in trolling Republican California Congressman Devin Nunes has (probably) come to a close over a year after Nunes filed one of many frivolous lawsuits claiming defamation.
Like so many Republicans these days, Nunes is thin-skinned and can't take any of the jokes or needling that occur every second on social media. And thus when several parody accounts popped up on Twitter like @DevinCow (Devin Nunes' Cow) and @DevinNunesMom with the sole intention of mocking him and his blind loyalty to President Trump, he decided to sue Twitter and three of its users last March for $250 million.
Late last week, as the Fresno Bee reports, Nunes lost that suit, at least as it pertains to Twitter. Judge John Marshall of the federal circuit court in Henrico, Virginia, writes in his decision that Twitter is immune to Nunes' claims under the Communications Decency Act. And that Nunes "seeks to have the court treat Twitter as the publisher or speaker of the content provided by others based on its allowing or not allowing certain content to be on its internet platform,” but, "The court refuses to do so."
Marshall was only ruling that Twitter should be removed from the suit, and Nunes can continue to pursue legal action against the anonymous owner of the @DevinCow account — though Twitter has refused to reveal who that is. Nunes had also named Republican strategist Liz Mair in the suit as well, and it remains to be seen if he'll press on with the suit.
Nunes was mocked further following the lawsuit because he had apparently never heard of the Streisand Effect — the viral phenomenon in which a person inadvertently calls attention to something embarrassing or private (like Barbra Streisand did when she sued an aerial photographer in 2003 for publishing photos of her Malibu home) that not many people would have ever seen if they hadn't made a fuss over it. The @DevinCow account only had around a thousand followers before Nunes filed his lawsuit, and these days it has over 736,000.
As the New York Times noted at the time the suit was filed, Nunes' legal complaint cited jokes about the congressman being voted "Most Likely to Commit Treason" in high school, and a cartoon image of himself in a sexual act with Trump and Vladimir Putin, as examples of "defamation." Nunes called the mockery, dramatically, something "that no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life."
He also had a bunch of drivel in there about "shadow bans" — the popular term among conservative hyenas on Twitter for their unproven conspiracy claim that Twitter hides and de-emphasizes their content out of a liberal bias.
In a statement in response to the suit, a Twitter spokesperson said, "Twitter enforces the Twitter Rules impartially for everyone who uses our service around the world, regardless of their background or political affiliation. We are constantly improving our efforts to serve the public conversation and will continue to be transparent with the public."
Nunes, meanwhile, has spent the last 24 hours on Twitter trying to promote conservative social platform Parler. In one all-caps example that received over 40,000 retweets, Nunes screams, "IS THIS MYSPACE? NO ONE IS RESPONDING TO MY TWEETS!!! IS EVERYONE AT PARLER ???"
Nunes is aping what President Trump was already discussing a month ago as he has begun to sour on Twitter and its crackdown on his behavior — though he will never leave because he's a narcissist and Parler only has 1 million users, per the Wall Street Journal. Also this week, Senator Ted Cruz announced he was starting a Parler account.
Nunes' continued war on everyone who dislikes him also isn't over. As New York Magazine notes, he has "not yet lost his ongoing lawsuits against CNN, the Washington Post, Hearst, McClatchy, and Fusion GPS."
Related: Devin Nunes Is Suing Twitter and Two Parody Accounts And It's Hilarious