bill ackman – Techdirt (original) (raw)

No One Cares That Bill Ackman’s Wife May Have Plagiarized; They Care About Ackman’s Hypocritical Double Standard

from the the-rich-play-by-different,-censorial-rules dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about outspoken financier Bill Ackman’s threat to sue Business Insider over articles regarding accusations by the publication that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, had plagiarized parts of her dissertation years ago. The timeline and context of what happened here is important because Ackman continues to ignore it.

Ackman got upset about activity by students at his alma mater, Harvard, in response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th. He then helped orchestrate a campaign to oust Harvard’s new President, Claudine Gay, because of what he viewed as her insufficient response to antisemitism on campus. While those initial efforts went nowhere, the situation gained more attention when some nonsense peddlers of the grifter class found examples of what they called plagiarism, but which many academics felt were inadvertent errors in weak paraphrasing, or inadvertent failure to properly cite sources.

For example, one of the people Gay was accused of plagiarizing came to her defense, noting that while it may have been technically improper, it was over minor bits and not the heart of what she was writing:

The plagiarism in question here did not take an idea of any significance from my work. It didn’t steal my thunder. It didn’t stop me from publishing. And the bit she used from us was not in any way a major component of what made her research important or valuable.

So how serious a violation of academic integrity was this?

From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her.

This effort continued for some time, with Ackman again being a leading voice, perhaps recognizing that what he failed to accomplish by complaining about her handling of antisemitism, he could eventually accomplish through piling on and promoting the claims of plagiarism. And it worked. Soon after, Gay lost her job as President of Harvard.

Around that time, Business Insider published its first piece about Neri Oxman, Ackman’s wife, noting that her dissertation at MIT was also found to contain some plagiarized passages. The article was pretty explicit that it was not accusing Oxman of some inherent unethical behavior, but rather noting the similarities between what she had done and what Gay had done:

Like Oxman, Gay was found to have lifted passages from other academics’ work without using quotation marks while citing the authors.

Gay’s plagiarism was seen by some academics, including many of those she plagiarized, as relatively inconsequential.

George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the people Gay plagiarized, told the New York Post that what Gay did “happens fairly often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism.”

That is, the entire point of the article was to highlight the parallel situations between Gay and Oxman. It was to emphasize that inconsequential copying or inadvertent failure to properly cite something minor in an academic paper happens all the time.

The point was not that Oxman was terrible. The point was to highlight Ackman’s double standard. Indeed, Business Insider wrote an entire article comparing the accusations against both Gay and Oxman while highlighting Ackman’s noticeably different approach to each.

“Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote in a post on X following Business Insider’s report on Oxman’s plagiarism.

That’s a starkly different approach from the one he took toward Gay after she stepped down as president earlier this week. At the time, Ackman said she should be fired from Harvard’s faculty entirely because of what he called “serious plagiarism issues.”

“Students are forced to withdraw for much less,” he posted on X. “Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”

However, the instances of Oxman’s and Gay’s plagiarism have more similarities than differences, according to experts and an internal analysis.

At no point that I’ve seen in this ongoing ordeal has Ackman acknowledged that. Rather, he has gone on rant after rant after rant, combined with threats to sue people for their free speech (while pretending to be a free speech absolutist), pretending that the point of the Business Insider articles was to smear Oxman to punish Ackman for his support of Israel.

A few weeks ago, Ackman promised to sue and has hired Libby Locke of the firm Clare Locke to issue a massive (and massively ridiculous) threat letter to Axel Springer/Business Insider, demanding corrections and retractions of various articles. It’s a Gish gallop of a threat letter. Responding to every single bit of nonsense in the threat letter is beyond the scope of my time, and even so this article is going to be ridiculously long.

Just as an aside, no one who hires Clare Locke is a “free speech absolutist.” Clare Locke (and especially partner Libby Locke) are immensely proud of their ability to threaten media outlets to kill stories (and they’re not as effective as their media portrayal would have you believe). That’s the opposite of free speech absolutists. They are speech suppressors. Their website kinda brags about this:

Sending a 77-page “demand letter” is ridiculous and suggests that you don’t have a clear ask or a clear explanation. Ackman, over on ExTwitter, admits that the letter was written on purpose to be turned into a complaint:

It will not go unnoticed that the demand letter reads remarkably similarly to the pleadings of a lawsuit. If needed, we can convert the demand letter into a complaint and file a lawsuit, which I hope is unnecessary

The letter is long, repetitive, and silly. It does not engage with the actual purpose of the Business Insider articles, to compare Gay’s inadvertent failures to cite with Oxman’s similar mistakes in a manner that highlights how Ackman’s freakout over Gay suggests a huge double standard. Instead, it opens by arguing that Business Insider and the reporters and editors who worked on these articles are antisemitic and targeted Ackman because of his pro-Israel views.

Ackman’s criticism, particularly of Claudine Gay, the former president of his alma mater, Harvard, did not sit well with Katherine Long (an Investigative Reporter at Business Insider), John Cook (Business Insider’s Executive Editor), and Henry Blodget (Business Insider’s Founder and Chairman), who have publicly expressed anti-Zionist and purportedly antisemitic views.

It then goes on at great length (and great repetitiveness) to claim that it’s not plagiarism if it wasn’t done on purpose. Really.

As confirmed by Business Insider and the common definition of plagiarism, plagiarism requires an intent to steal or defraud. Unintentional citation mistakes and honest errors are not considered plagiarism as the word is commonly understood

Now, there are two major problems with this. First of all, as noted here (but not in anything from Ackman), if that’s the case, then it appears Gay did not plagiarize either. And, again, that was the whole point of the Business Insider articles.

But, secondly, yes, you can absolutely plagiarize without intent to do so. The letter plays a very sloppy game of “use the definition we want at different times throughout our argument.” Note that even in the quote above, Locke’s letter says “as the word is commonly understood.” But… that’s not true. As commonly understood, inadvertent plagiarism… is still plagiarism. It might not be as serious. But it’s still plagiarism.

And the most incredible bit is that the letter admits that itself. Much later in the letter, it argues that Oxman couldn’t have done anything terrible because of MIT’s guidelines on plagiarism at the time. The letter, early on, states the following:

As MIT itself plainly explains in advising students of its academic standards, plagiarism “does not include honest error.” MIT also recognizes that “unintentional” plagiarism is not considered academic misconduct. In other words, honest mistakes happen, but those simple errors do not count as academic misconduct.

But, again, the whole point was that Gay appeared to have committed similar unintentional acts of plagiarism, yet Ackman demanded her head over them.

Either way, later on in the complaint letter, they show snippets from MIT’s guidebook which… read quite differently in context. They do not at all seem to be suggesting that unintentional plagiarism is not plagiarism. Rather, they seem to be stating that unintentional plagiarism is still very much plagiarism, and that’s why one should be very careful to not even engage in unintentional plagiarism. Here’s page 12 of the letter, in which it seems pretty clear that MIT is saying “don’t plagiarize, even if it’s unintentional,” but where Oxman/Ackman/Locke seem to be pretending it’s saying “meh, as long as you didn’t mean it, you’re fine.”

Notice, clearly in there, that MIT is not saying that “accidental” and “unintentional” plagiarism is fine. Both of the clips above are trying to help students understand why accidental plagiarism is still wrong and how they need to learn how to properly do academic writing by citing sources and writing up things by yourself.

Page 13 of the letter provides even more examples of this, where they seem to think it is absolving Oxman and revealing Business Insider’s ill-intent, when it really just seems to show that Oxman/Ackman/Locke don’t understand what they’re looking at:

Those are all clearly explanations for how to avoid that kind of “botched paraphrasing” which it appears both Gay and Oxman may have engaged in.

Notably, this demand letter leaves out the line right after those two screenshotted selections above, which proves that Libby Locke is omitting important context. Here, see it for yourself:

“In any event, even if the plagiarism is unintentional, the consequences can still be very painful.”

And then it explains why it might be painful:

Plagiarism in the academic world can lead to everything from failure for the course to expulsion from the college or university.

Plagiarism in the professional world can lead, at the very least, to profound embarrassment and loss of reputation and, often, to loss of employment. Famous cases of plagiarism include the historian Stephen Ambrose (accusations about six of his books have been made, most famously about The Wild Blue) and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (who ended up asking the publisher to destroy all unsold copies of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys). Such plagiarism may be accidental, but its consequences are the same as for intentional plagiarism.

The threat letter leaves out all of this context and seems to pretend that MIT is suggesting that such unintentional plagiarism is fine. When the very document they’re quoting from says the exact opposite.

And what’s funny is that throughout the 77-page letter, Locke keeps insisting that omissions by Business Insider that distort the meaning of things are clearly defamatory and/or evidence of actual malice. Yet Locke engages in identical behavior.

The next page of the letter actually drives this point home (though again, the letter’s author does not appear to recognize this) by including a screenshot of the MIT Academic Integrity handbook that explains how to avoid “inadvertent plagiarism.”

All of that undermines Oxman’s argument, but the letter seems to think it boosts it. That’s because it confuses what counts as “research misconduct” with what counts as plagiarism. Looking at the MIT documents in context suggests that they are talking about two different things: what counts as plagiarism (which could include accidental or inadvertent copying and missed citations) and what counts as misconduct for which sanctions make sense, which requires intent.

But none of that really matters for the point that the Business Insider piece was trying to make: comparing Gay’s conduct (which Ackman insisted was a horrible, fireable offense) to Oxman’s (which Ackman continues to insist was no big deal).

On the very next page of the letter, it (falsely) suggests all this proves that Oxman’s “inadvertent” failure to properly cite somehow was not problematic. Even as the very documents they screenshot say the literal opposite. It also claims that “quoting one part of an article without quoting another part which might tend to qualify or contradict the quoted part is evidence of actual malice” even though that’s the same thing this letter does in this very section.

Business Insider’s purpose in excluding references to these portions of MIT’s Academic Integrity Handbook and academic misconduct policies in its articles on Dr. Oxman is clear: Including them would have debunked the notion that Dr. Oxman had committed intentional plagiarism and academic fraud, and Business Insider wanted to create the false impression that Dr. Oxman committed intellectual theft.

Business Insider’s wholesale omission of MIT’s policies and procedures contradicting its preconceived narrative was deliberate, and it is further evidence of Business Insider’s actual malice towards Dr. Oxman and Ackman. Indeed, the law holds that “quot[ing] one part of an article without quoting another part which might tend to qualify or contradict the part quoted” is evidence of actual malice. Goldwater, 414 F.2d at 336; see also Eramo, 209 F. Supp. 3d at 872 (“[D]isregard[ing] contradictory evidence” is supportive of actual malice.); Murray, 613 F. Supp. at 1285 (“It would be unjust and nonsensical to allow the defendant to rely on the report for certain purposes and to ignore it for others.”).

Once again, it’s unlikely that anyone with half a brain reading the BI pieces would think they were accusing Oxman of anything particularly nefarious. They were simply comparing what she had done to what Gay had done and noting the similarities.

There’s so much more that’s silly about this threat letter that there’s no way to go through it all, so I’m going to skip some of it and give highlights of other parts.

There’s an entire section whining about the use of the word “marred” in one of BI’s headlines, claiming that because it was only inadvertent, it couldn’t have been “marred.” I shit you not:

Given that the only instances of alleged plagiarism Business Insider identified in this article were only four paragraphs with eight missing quotation marks and one instance in which Dr. Oxman failed to cite an author she cited extensively elsewhere in her 330-page dissertation, it is wildly inaccurate to characterize her dissertation as “marred” (i.e., ruined or spoiled) “by plagiarism.”

Except they’re using a… weird definition of marred. It’s most commonly “damaged or spoiled to a certain extent; made less perfect.” As such, even small defects (such as those described) sure would seem to count as marred. My articles are often marred by typos, but that doesn’t mean that every word is a typo. And, either way, the use of the word “marred” is, in no world, anywhere close to the standards of defamation.

Then we get to the whole “citing Wikipedia” nonsense. Ackman had argued on ExTwitter back when this first came about that at the time of Oxman’s dissertation Wikipedia was still new and there weren’t general agreements on citing it, but that’s… nonsense. On multiple levels. First off, it wasn’t that new. Wikipedia was widely known and widely used at that point. Second, even if there wasn’t agreement on how to cite Wikipedia, that did not change the simple fact that it was still very much widely considered plagiarism to copy directly from it without citation/quotation. The lack of understanding of how to cite Wikipedia is a separate issue from the question of copying without attribution.

I had thought that once a lawyer got their hands on this fight, this argument would die a sudden death, but apparently the law firm of Clare Locke has no problem pushing totally specious arguments, because that makes it in here too:

Business Insider, however, intentionally omitted that MIT’s Academic Integrity Handbook at the time Dr. Oxman wrote her dissertation in 2009 and 2010 did not address—much less require— citation to Wikipedia, which itself is a collaborative resource with no single author to whom ideas could be attributed, and which at the time of her dissertation was of relatively nascent origin. In fact, Wikipedia was so inchoate that MIT had not yet developed or published any guidance on how researchers should use Wikipedia. Only later—several years after Dr. Oxman’s dissertation was published—did MIT revise its Academic Integrity Handbook to include a prohibition on citing Wikipedia for academic work. In 2009 and 2010, when Dr. Oxman wrote her dissertation, no such prohibition existed.

Note the shift here between citing and copying without attribution. Those are two separate things that this letter seeks to conflate. Even if MIT hadn’t published policies on how to cite Wikipedia, it has zero impact on whether or not copying directly from Wikipedia might be considered plagiarism. It still was. And it’s ridiculous to suggest that people didn’t think that to be the case in 2010.

There’s a whole section complaining that BI could not possibly call out Oxman for plagiarism unless it did an “inquiry or investigation into Dr. Oxman’s mental state to support such a finding.” To which I will just say… did Bill Ackman conduct such an “inquiry or investigation into Dr. Gay’s mental state” to support the many statements he made about her alleged plagiarism?

Or do we just admit that the billionaire gets to live by different standards than he seeks to impose on others?

After BI published its initial article, Oxman posted some tweets admitting that she had failed to properly put quote marks in certain sections:

Any reasonable read of this is that Oxman is admitting to not quoting things she should have quoted, which… is plagiarism, even by the definitions that were quoted earlier in the threat letter. Thus, BI published a new article saying that she admitted to plagiarism. The threat letter is apoplectic in insisting that she didn’t admit to plagiarism, and only to omitting quotation marks, which is fucking crazy.

Shortly after the first article was published at 2:28 PM on January 4, Dr. Oxman acknowledged in a post on X that, in “four paragraphs” of her 330-page dissertation, she did not “place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting work,” and in one sentence she paraphrased an author but inadvertently did not cite him. She apologized for these errors. She did not, however, admit to plagiarism, intentional or otherwise. Three hours and 30 minutes later, Business Insider published a follow up article falsely claiming in its inflammatory headline that “Neri Oxman admits to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation after BI report.”91

Business Insider knew that when it published this article that its statement was false— Dr. Oxman had not admitted to plagiarism. Business Insider read and included a link to Dr. Oxman’s post in the article, but it purposefully mischaracterized Dr. Oxman’s post in the headline creating the false impression that Dr. Oxman had admitted to intellectual theft.

I’m still amazed at the chutzpah here. I’ve read Oxman’s tweet multiple times, and it’s pretty clear that she is admitting to plagiarism, though saying it was inadvertent. But, again, (1) inadvertent plagiarism is still considered plagiarism (including by MIT) and (2) it’s the same sort of thing that Dr. Gay was accused of, which was the whole point of BI’s efforts.

There’s another whole section on all of the Jeffrey Epstein stuff which I won’t get into (Oxman had a very, very distant connection to Epstein via the MIT Media Lab where she worked, and which Epstein infamously had donated money to, though apparently unrelated to her work). But the letter (which I’ll note claims to be on behalf of Oxman and not Ackman) whines quite a bit about BI stating that Ackman had sought to “pressure” then Media Lab director Joi Ito not to name Oxman in response to a media inquiry. It also whines about BI’s claiming that the Boston Globe had “uncovered” emails between Ackman and Ito, when (according to this letter) Ackman had sent them willingly to the Boston Globe.

But, the emails he forwarded sure do look like “pressuring” Ito. I guess it depends on your definition of “pressure” but the entire point of the email was asking Joi not to name Oxman and giving a bunch of reasons why he shouldn’t. That sure sounds like it meets one of the common definitions of pressure: “the act of trying to persuade or force someone to do something.” The threat letter, instead, seems to think “pressure” must involve threats of some kind, which… is not what the word means. And, remember, the threat letter itself talks about the use of “common definitions” (quoted above).

The letter says that Business Insider “falsely” claimed that Oxman and Ackman (who again, the letter does not purport to represent) “did not dispute the facts” in the BI articles, and then points out that this is false, because… of Ackman’s silly rant about citing Wikipedia:

In just one example, at 9:57 PM on January 5, just a few hours after Business Insider published its article falsely accusing Dr. Oxman of plagiarizing from Wikipedia and other sources, Ackman posted on X disputing that using Wikipedia for definitions is plagiarism. He asked rhetorically, “How can one defend oneself against an accusation of plagiarizing Wikipedia … Isn’t the whole point of Wikipedia that it is a dynamic source of info that changes minute by minute based on edits and contributions from around the globe? Has anyone (other than my wife) ever been accused of plagiarism based on using Wikipedia for a definition?” 110 Among other challenges to Business Insider’s reporting, Ackman directly disputed the notion that Dr. Oxman’s inclusion of definitions from Wikipedia in her dissertation was plagiarism.

But… that’s not disputing the facts. That’s disputing the interpretation of the facts (it’s also silly).

Much of that section is just a hilarious list of Bill Ackman not refuting any of the facts to the actual reporters or editors of the piece, but reaching out to various super rich executives somewhat associated with Business Insider, who assured him they were looking into things. That is not the same thing as “disputing the facts” to the actual journalists. That’s whining to the rich in hopes they’ll smack down the poor reporters who dared to make you look silly.

There are five (five!) pages that are just screenshots of Ackman’s (again, not officially represented in the letter) WhatsApp messages to Axel Springer boss Mathias Dopfner “disputing” the stories, but basically none of what is disputed is actual provably false statements of fact. They pretty much all appear to be differences of opinion on how things were portrayed in the BI stories. That’s not defamation. And it’s not even disputing the underlying facts — which is all BI claimed.

Hilariously, the only response from Dopfner to Ackman is a short email, which does not agree to anything that Ackman claimed. It just says “Thanks for your e-mails. Very helpful input to clarify things during the investigation” and then notes that because Ackman had announced plans to sue BI, his general counsel had (correctly) told him not to communicate with Ackman anymore:

Then we get to “actual malice.” On its website, Clare Locke declares itself “the leading defamation law firm in the United States.” I guarantee you that Libby Locke knows what “actual malice” means in the context of a defamation lawsuit. And it is not “they didn’t like the plaintiff” or “they were biased against the plaintiff.” Yet, Libby Locke seems to not care what the legal definition of actual malice is in their laughably wrong section on actual malice.

Business Insider never had any interest in journalistic integrity or the truth when reporting on Dr. Oxman. From the outset, its reporting was tainted by its progressive political bias and the desire of its anti-Zionist reporters and editors to smear a prominent, Jewish advocate and his family for speaking up against former Harvard President Gay. The Business Insider employees primarily responsible for this attack have a history of unethical conduct and have publicly expressed their anti Zionist and/or purported antisemitic views.

Beyond being fucking ridiculous, it’s also got nothing to do with actual malice. Actual malice means that the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false.” Also, “reckless disregard” doesn’t mean that you were just sloppy or lazy. It means that the speaker had serious doubts about the truth of the statements but published them anyway. The Supreme Court has been quite clear that it doesn’t mean biased reporting. And it doesn’t even mean mere negligence in reporting.

For there to be actual malice, BI’s reporters would have to fundamentally know (or have very strong beliefs) that what they were publishing was false, and then publish it anyway. But, they’ve (rightly) stood by their reporting. And Ackman, repeatedly, is only complaining about their interpretation of the facts, not the underlying facts themselves.

The letter then goes on to trash the reputation of Henry Blodget, BI’s founder, who had talked to Ackman early on when Ackman was first freaking out about the stories (hilariously, Blodget suggested Ackman could write for BI at one point, and in return he gets trashed). Blodget is, of course, easy to trash. He somewhat infamously settled with the SEC for publicly pumping up dot-com era stocks, while privately trashing those stocks. Some of us still remember all that.

The letter also tries (pathetically) to trash the reputations of the reporters and editors who worked on the BI stories, including digging editor John Cook’s self-admitted story about how as a teenager in the 1980s he was suspended from high school for publishing an obnoxious underground newspaper (I too published an underground newspaper in high school, and it was also obnoxious, but also I didn’t get suspended, in part because I wrote the back page of the first issue that was an entire article about how the First Amendment works, citing numerous Supreme Court cases on why the school couldn’t take action against those of us who wrote the paper… which was, perhaps, a preview of what my life was to become).

But what does that have to do with actual malice? Fuck all! It’s just Ackman burning bridges for show — and potentially as a threat to try to convince others not to report on his wife, or he’ll trash your reputation too (come at me, Bill).

The letter then moves on to misleadingly claim that Business Insider was trying to get Oxman fired. Again, this misunderstands what seemed pretty obviously to be the point of the articles: to compare Ackman’s response to the accusations around Gay as compared to his wife. The letter makes a big deal of Insider’s reporter, Katherine Long, asking in her initial email to Ackman if he expects Oxman to lose her job (Long, at the time, mistakenly believed that Oxman was still at MIT, when she had left a few years earlier):

In context, it’s obvious why Long asked this question. Since Ackman had pushed so strongly for Gay to lose her job at Harvard, it’s a kind of obvious question for a reporter to ask about Ackman’s wife (who they thought was still at MIT) given the whole point of the exercise was to showcase Ackman’s selective outrage and differential treatment of Gay compared to his wife.

But the letter treats this as an attempt to make Oxman lose her job and seems outraged. Which is fucking hilarious given Ackman’s tirades trying to get Gay fired from her job.

Business Insider’s Coverage Of Dr. Oxman Was Motivated by Its Desire To Get Dr. Oxman Fired by MIT.

Almost no one could possibly think this is what Long was trying to do. It seems blatantly obvious that she was simply seeing if Ackman felt his wife should face the same treatment that he helped engineer for Gay.

There’s also some just incredible hubris in the letter, in that it reveals Ackman petulantly demanding in text messages to Blodget that the articles be taken down while the promised investigation on the reporting occurred (which would be an extraordinary step that would have brought Streisand Effect levels of extra attention to the claims) and Ackman seems to think that BI’s refusal to accede to his demands when Blodget promised he was “working” on the issue is somehow more proof of malice (when the more sensible, and likely accurate, reason is that BI investigated, found that the story still held, and there was no reason to take it down).

There are also about eight whole pages of the letter going on (at ridiculous length) about what an amazing, brilliant, and famous person Neri Oxman is, which is hilarious since when all this started and people pointed out to Ackman that defamation against public figures involves a high bar (that high bar being the real actual malice, not the pretend one in this letter) Ackman tried to argue she wasn’t a public figure:

So, according to Bill Ackman, she’s not a celebrity academic or a public figure, but the threat letter on her behalf has eight pages lauding all of her accomplishments, awards, public exhibitions including at top museums around the world, the description in the NY Times of how she’s “a Modern-day da Vinci” and more. So, I guess they’re not even going to try to argue that she’s not a public figure.

There’s also a ridiculous number of words describing the alleged “harm” all of this has had, failing to recognize that if Ackman hadn’t made such a big deal of all of this, the story likely would have died out after a day or two as people got a good laugh at Ackman’s hypocrisy and moved on. Instead, his continued talking about it, and now sending this letter have only guaranteed that many more people are aware of all of this. If there’s any harm (and that seems unlikely) much of it should be pinned on Ackman’s inability to let this go.

On the final page of this opus, we get the “demands.”

Axel Springer and Business Insider must mitigate the damage they have caused by correcting their libelous reporting, issuing statements setting the record straight, making a sincere and meaningful public apology to Dr. Oxman and Ackman, and creating a fund to compensate other victims of Business Insider’s libelous reporting and to discourage their inappropriate conduct in the future. (Dr. Oxman is seeking no compensation for herself to make available additional resources for other victims.) Failure to take these steps will expose Axel Springer and Business Insider to substantial legal liability and will be further evidence of actual malice directed toward my client.

This is nonsense. I’m quite sure BI’s general counsel is not worried about this. Nothing in the letter indicates anything close to the level that would be defamation. The only real question — and the likely real intent of the letter — is whether or not all the rich folks that Ackman called up and texted during this whole mess, including Dopfner, Henry Kravis, and Axel Spring board member Martin Varsavsky, decide to just go along with this to hush up the mouthy rich guy so they won’t have to deal with more of this nonsense.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that Oxman (and Ackman) have no actual defamation case here. They have a lot of noise and bluster. And sometimes that’s enough to get a publication to back down (which Clare Locke seems to want you to believe they can produce in every case). But it would be a fucking shame and an embarrassment if Axel Springer/BI caved here, and would put all of its future reporting in question by showing that they could be bullied by specious, vexatious legal threats.

In Ackman’s tweet revealing this letter, he claims that he hasn’t sued first because “people we highly respect” had told him that Axel Springer was “perhaps the strongest long-term supporter of the state of Israel of any media organization, and also an important advocate against antisemitism.” What that has to do with anything in the letter, I do not know.

In the end, this is just more censorial bullshit. It’s hilarious that Ackman presents himself as a “free speech absolutist” when he’s doing this shit to seek to pressure (as it’s commonly defined!) BI into removing these stories. It misses the entirety of the point of these articles and pretends they’re about attacking Oxman, when it’s obvious to anyone outside of Ackman’s immediate sphere that the intent was to highlight the very, very different treatment Ackman gives to the accusations against Gay and Oxman.

Indeed, this very letter demonstrates that point to a much greater level. All this letter does is call that much more attention to Ackman’s disgusting double standard. When it’s someone he doesn’t like for other reasons, he’s willing to play up the plagiarism claims and push for them to lose their job. When it’s his wife, he tries to burn down an entire media outlet.

All this letter shows is that Bill Ackman is a censorial hypocrite.

Filed Under: actual malice, bill ackman, defamation, gish gallop, henry blodget, libby locke, neri oxman, opinions, plagiarism, reporting, wtf is this i don't even
Companies: axel springer, business insider, clare locke

Bill Ackman: Nazis On ExTwitter Are Just The Price Of Free Speech; But Marxist Theory Or Anti-Israel Claims On Campus Are Beyond The Pale

from the selective-free-speech dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about about another “free speech absolutist” and Elon Musk buddy (and investor in ExTwitter), Bill Ackman threatening to file a SLAPP suit over reporting he didn’t like. He’s still promising such a lawsuit against Business Insider, and when it comes, it seems unlikely to succeed. He’s yet to show any actual false statement of fact made about his wife Neri Oxman, he just doesn’t like the way she was portrayed.

Earlier this week, NY Mag’s Intelligencer published quite a massive profile about Ackman, that has quite a few eye-opening stories in it, including one in which his wife had asked him to stop tweeting about her, and he pushed back by pointing to the memes which are mocking him for being the ultimate “wife guy” online.

Oxman, for her part, wasn’t sure what to make of her husband’s chivalrous tweeting, which had drawn even more attention to the allegations. (Through Ackman’s spokesperson, she declined to comment for this story.) Ackman wrote on X that the pressure from the Business Insider stories “could have literally killed her” and that he had seen others commit suicide in similar circumstances. “She was in a pretty dark place,” Ackman told me, adding that he tried to nudge her toward finding a silver lining: “I’m like, ‘Look, you didn’t do anything wrong; we’ll get this fixed,’ and ‘Actually, the more negative press, the -better. Once we turn this around, it’ll be good for your company.’” He wasn’t sure the pitch had landed — “There were times when she said, ‘Please don’t tweet anymore’” — but he defended himself by pointing to memes online suggesting he had become a hero to wives everywhere. “There’s a meme going around that apparently I’m causing a lot of marriages to have trouble,” Ackman said. “Like this one where a husband emails his wife, ‘Honey, I did the dishes.’ And she’s like, ‘Big fucking deal. Did you see what Ackman’s doing for his wife?’”

But for this article, to keep it relevant to Techdirt, I wanted highlight how Ackman’s “absolutist” support for free speech seems (how shall we put it?) highly selective.

When asked about antisemitic content on ExTwitter, he seems to brush it off as unimportant, and a tradeoff of enabling more speech:

This past September, Ackman, who invested $10 million in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, defended Musk against accusations that X had become fertile ground for antisemitism. “Elon has basically opened up Twitter,” he said. “The downside to a very open format is there’s gonna be some hate speech.”

And, like, that’s a perfectly reasonable and defendable stance to take. If you’re consistent about it. Platforming more speech does mean more hate speech will get platformed. It’s a tradeoff, and there are reasons why some will say that tradeoff is worth it. But, again, if you’re going to support that in the name of free speech, at least be consistent about it.

But Ackman is not. Because, the article highlights how his shitfit that helped lead to the resignation of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay was… because he could not stand the fact that there were protests on campus against Israel.

What launched Ackman’s crusade was an open letter signed by more than 30 student groups at Harvard that began with the sentence “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

And, again, I can understand how this letter could upset people (I find it pretty naïve, given the details of what happened on October 7th, but also, the fact that some college students are naïve and prone to over-simplifying complex world situations is… not new or surprising?). But there seems to be a disconnect in claiming that it’s somehow okay for there to be “some hate speech” on ExTwitter, but that it’s unacceptable for some students to (misguidedly) wish to blame the entirety of October 7th on Israel.

Are you okay with some hate speech in the process of “opening up” speech? Or are you going to go nuclear when there’s some hate speech that you, personally, dislike? Ackman seems to think it’s totally okay for there to be hate speech on ExTwitter, but simply cannot forgive naïve youthful protests on campus.

Of course, some of this seems even more personal, in that his main complaint is that while he went to Harvard and came out a stereotypical “greed is good” capitalist, his daughter (having grown up with him as her father) at least dabbled in learning about Marxist theory in college:

His nephew enrolled at Harvard, as did his eldest daughter — which, Ackman told me recently, is where the trouble started.

“She became, like, an anti-capitalist. Like practically a Marxist,” Ackman said in January, leaning across a large conference-room table at the offices of his hedge fund, Pershing Square. “We’d talk about capitalism, and she would freak out at the table.” His daughter was in the social-studies department just like her father, and rowed crew, too, but she had chosen to write her thesis on “The Concept of Reification in Western Marxist Thought,” having come to very different conclusions than her father had about how the world should work. Ackman said it felt as though she “had been indoctrinated” into a cult.

So… when he went to Harvard and came out as someone who would do anything to make money, that was all good and natural and the way the world works. When his daughter came out of Harvard exploring Marxist theory and pushing back on his views of capitalism, he freaked out and insisted it must be “indoctrination” and such free speech on campus must be stopped.

Even more telling, he then read a book by grifter-extraordinaire, Chris Rufo, who believes in indoctrinating kids in extremist right wing ideology, and, suddenly, Ackman was totally on board… and getting his info… from ExTwitter:

Someone else sent him the book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Christopher F. Rufo, the conservative activist who led the effort to stigmatize critical race theory before turning his sights on DEI. Then came the deluge. “I started following various people on Twitter,” Ackman told me. “I started getting the download.”

Again, he’s allowed to have these opinions, but it really says something when you claim that hate speech is fine on ExTwitter because “free speech” but you go nuclear and try to burn down an institution like Harvard because your daughter is at least marginally interested in Marxist thoughts and some other students have slightly naïve theories about middle-east policy.

Some might call it hypocrisy.

And, it’s the kind of hypocrisy we’ve been seeing a lot of over the past few months. The infamous congressional hearing that has already resulted in two university presidents getting fired (for which Ackman likes to take credit) clearly involved those presidents awkwardly trying to get across the nuances of how they try to support free speech on campus, by looking at the specifics of any specific example of hate speech to see if it actually violates their policies.

But, almost immediately, the “free speech brigade” who all seem to support Elon Musk platforming neoNazis in the name of free speech, took huge offense to the idea that universities might allow people on campus who protest loudly against Israel. Such people do not support free speech. They support some speech that doesn’t much bother them, but will embrace a form of “cancel culture” of their own to oust those they dislike.

Filed Under: bill ackman, free speech, hypocrisy, marxism, neri oxman, selective free speech
Companies: harvard, pershing square, twitter, x

‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Temporarily Bans Journalists, As ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Bill Ackman Threatens SLAPP Suit Against Journalists

from the free-speech-only-for-my-friends dept

On Tuesday morning, former politician Tulsi Gabbard, who had to have the 1st Amendment clearly explained to her by a judge after she filed a ridiculous lawsuit to restrict the free speech of others, announced that she had cut a deal with Elon Musk to bring a “news show” to ExTwitter. Hilariously, she claimed that she did this because “freedom of speech is a fundamental right in America” (again, a court had to teach her what that meant not that long ago).

At around the exact same time, “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk was busy banning a bunch of reporters from ExTwitter for saying things that upset him and his pal Bill Ackman.

The social media platform gave no explanation for the sudden purge, saying only that the accounts “violate the X rules.” The X rules prohibit violent or hateful speech, child exploitation, private information sharing, and fake information.

But the accounts in question do not post that kind of content. The reporters who were banned include Steven Monacelli, a journalist at the Texas Observer who covers extremism, and Ken Klippenstein, who covers national security for The Intercept. Last year, Klippenstein published a piece on the errors with Tesla’s self-driving feature, and Monacelli noted that X shadow-banned the Intercept author since then.

MintPress News reporter Alan MacLeod, who recently has extensively covered Israel’s approach to the war in Gaza, and leftist podcaster Rob Rousseau were also suspended Tuesday.

The accounts for @liamnissan, @zei_squirrel, and the TrueAnon podcast were suspended, as well. The @liamnissan account posts mostly comedic commentary, including criticisms of Musk. The TrueAnon podcast provides left-wing analysis of current political events and conspiracy theories.

The @zei_squirrel account is another left-leaning commentator who has been critical of Musk in the past. In a post on their Substack Tuesday, the @zei_squirrel writer noted that they had recently begun to criticize Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire and friend of Musk’s who helped lead the campaign against former Harvard University President Claudine Gay. Ackman’s wife was recently accused of plagiarism, the same charge that brought down Gay.

For what it’s worth Ackman has been going on a bit of a bender lately following the accusations of plagiarism against his wife. He’s been making up nonsense about how in the “early days” of 2009 no one thought there was anything wrong with straight up copying Wikipedia without attribution, which is just wrong. Wikipedia uses a CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which means it expects “attribution.” And was not, in any way, in the early days in 2009.

Still, Ackman, who helped push the witch hunt against Claudine Gay over her speech, and who is now threatening to file a laughably bogus SLAPP defamation suit against Business Insider for reporting on his wife’s alleged plagiarism — suggesting his support for “free speech” is a bit questionable as well — also falsely claims that Elon Musk is somehow a supporter of free speech. I mean, the content excerpted in two separate tweets just days apart is something else (I’d post screenshots of the tweets, but Ackman uses ExTwitter like it’s a blog and posts what appear to be trillion-word tweets.)

So, first he claims (falsely) that because MIT’s integrity handbook didn’t explicitly call out Wikipedia until 2013, it was okay to copy text directly from Wikipedia until then, and that this might somehow be defamatory (it is absolutely not):

To be clear, Neri did not use Wikipedia as a source, but only for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms for her dissertation.

While there was no way for us to do this research in the 91 minutes we were given before Business Insider published its story, our lawyers found it in about 24 hours.

This finding wipes away 15, or more than half of the plagiarism claims made by Business Insider at 5:19pm last Friday night.

According to the Cornell Law Legal Information Institute: In order to prove “prima facie defamation,” “a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.”

This leads me to a few question for the @X legal community. If you look at all of the evidence that has emerged over the last few days, do you think Neri has been defamed under the four factor test above?

As multiple people pointed out to him in response, the actual standard for defamation of a public figure is actual malice, and he claims (again, not understanding the law) that because his wife is “an intensely private person” that makes her not a public figure, which is also… not how any of this works.

Anyway, just days earlier, Ackman went on a different rant (also about his wife) in which he concludes two ponderously long tweets that no one actually read in full with:

Lastly, if X was not independently controlled and governed by a free speech absolutist, Neri and I would not have had the ability to respond in a rapid fashion in a public forum where free speech is allowed, encouraged, and respected. I would also not have had the ability to reach millions of people with what I believe are important messages.

And I would not have been able to be nearly as effective in my campaign to help save the higher education system in our country, and I represent just one of hundreds of millions of grateful users.

So thank you @elonmusk !!! and thank you @lindayaX for holding strong

And, the two “free speech absolutists” are pushing each other to file a lawsuit to silence free speech they dislike:

Eventually, Elon unbanned the accounts after a nonsense peddler asked him what was happening, and Elon promised “to investigate.” He later claimed that they “do sweeps for spam/scam accounts and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them.”

Of course, this is what plenty of people (such as myself) pointed out about mistakes that were made in the past under Twitter’s old management, and people like Elon insisted that it couldn’t possibly be mistakes, and was all about ideological censorship.

The simple fact is, any platform has to do some level of moderation, and as soon as you do that, you’re going to make mistakes. I’d give Elon and ExTwitter the benefit of the doubt that this was just a mistake if (a) he had done that to previous management, though he did not and (b) if the accounts in question weren’t all found to have recently criticized Elon and/or Bill Ackman.

Given Elon’s own unwillingness to give the benefit of the doubt to others, why should we give him the benefit of the doubt here?

Either way, Elon is free to do whatever he wants on his platform. But absolutely no one should be under the illusion that what he’s doing has anything even remotely related to “defending free speech.” He is making decisions based on his own personal whims and foibles, which includes an extraordinarily warped sense of free speech that permits suing critics.

Filed Under: bill ackman, content moderation, defamation, elon musk, free speech, journalists, neri oxman, slapp suits, tulsi gabbard
Companies: twitter, x