Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down
Trump's empire of disinformation?
A Dominion voting machine in Georgia. Last month
Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News,
accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims.
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Sun 4 Apr
2021 07.00 BST
When Donald
Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election,
it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.
Politicians
and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked
in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.
But now a
little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy
theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for
billions of dollars.
“Libel laws
may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of
massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all
these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work,
so maybe this will.”
The David
in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine
company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices
are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US
election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with
customers in 28 states.
But the
2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and
Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and
cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe
Biden.
Among the
more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through
algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig
elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.
The truth matters. Lies have consequences
Dominion Voting Systems
It was
laughable but also potentially devastating to Dominion’s reputation and ruinous
to its business. It also fed a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fuelled
Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, as Congress moved to
certify the election results. Five people died, including an officer of the
Capitol police.
The company
is fighting back. It filed $1.3bn defamation lawsuits against Trump lawyers
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, for
pushing the allegations without evidence.
Separately,
Dominion’s security director, Eric Coomer, launched a suit against the Trump
campaign, Giuliani, Powell and some conservative media figures and outlets,
saying he had been forced into hiding by death threats.
Then came
the big one. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert
Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the
bogus claims.
“The truth
matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Lies have consequences.
Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial
purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise
to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”
The suit
argues that Fox hosts and guests “took a small flame and turned it into a
forest fire” by broadcasting wild assertions that Dominion systems changed
votes and ignoring repeated efforts by the company to set the record straight.
“Radioactive
falsehoods” spread by Fox News will cost Dominion $600m over the next eight
years, according to the lawsuit, and have resulted in Dominion employees being
harassed and the company losing major contracts in Georgia and Louisiana.
Fox
fiercely disputes the charge. It said in a statement: “Fox News Media is proud
of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of
American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit
in court.”
Other
conservative outlets have also raised objections. Chris Ruddy, chief executive
of Newsmax, said: “We think all of these suits are an infringement on press
freedom as it relates to media organisations. There were the years of Russian
collusion investigations when all of the major cable networks reported
unsubstantiated claims. I think Fox was reporting the news and certainly
Newsmax was.”
But some
observers believe Dominion has a strong case. Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution, said: “Dominion has an outstanding prospect in its
litigation against Fox for the simple reason that Fox knowingly broadcast over
and over again the most outrageous and clear lies.
You should not have a major television outlet that is
a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods about the election
Norman Eisen
“Certainly
there are protections under the first amendment and otherwise but this is so
far outside the bounds, such a clear case, that I think Fox is looking at a
very serious legal exposure here and that’s the way it should be.
“You should
not have a major television outlet that is able day after day to provide a
megaphone for outrageous falsehoods having to do with the election, one that
helped trigger a violent insurrection on 6 January. They should not be able to
feed a steady stream of those pernicious lies into the body politic without any
legal consequences.”
‘A real
battleground’
Eisen, a
former White House “ethics czar”, suggests that the Dominion case could provide
at least one model for dealing with the war on truth.
“The United
States and the world need to deal with disinformation,” he said.
“There can
be no doubt that every method is going to be required but certainly libel law
provides one very important vehicle for establishing consequences and while
there’s no such thing as a guarantee when you go to court, this is an
exceptionally high risk for Fox with a large price tag attached as well.”
There are
signs that the legal actions, and their grave financial implications, have got
reckless individuals and outlets on the run.
Powell
asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit against her, arguing that her assertions
were protected by the right to free speech. But she also offered the unusual
defence that she had been exaggerating to make a point and that “reasonable
people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims
that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.
Two days
after voting machine maker Smartmatic filed a $2.7bn defamation suit that
alleged TV host Lou Dobbs falsely accused it of election rigging, Fox Business
abruptly canceled Lou Dobbs Tonight, its most viewed show. It has also filed a
motion to dismiss the Smartmatic suit.
Meanwhile
pro-Trump outlets have begun using prepared disclaimers or prerecorded
programmes to counter election conspiracy theories spouted by guests. When
Lindell launched into an attack on Dominion on Newsmax in February, co-anchor
Bob Sellers tried to cut him off and then walked off set.
RonNell
Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the Washington
Post: “We are seeing the way that libel has become a real battleground in the
fight against disinformation.
“The threat
of massive damages for spreading probably false conspiracy theories on matters
of public concern could turn out to be the one tool that is successful in
disincentivising that behaviour, where so many other tools seem to have failed.”
The
defamation suits will provide another test of the judiciary as a pillar of
American democracy. The courts’ independence proved robust regarding dozens of
lawsuits by Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the election outcome.
Larry
Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the
University of Minnesota, said: “It is such an under-appreciated illumination of
the multiple avenues for pursuing politics. Sometimes we get understandably
absorbed by what Congress can do, which is obviously significant at times, but
mostly fairly kind of deadlocked.
“But we’re
going to see the legal system prosecuting the 6 January perpetrators,
prosecuting Donald Trump and prosecuting these libel charges by Dominion over
the monstrous lies that were told after the election.
“Thank
goodness for the courts because the elected branches have really botched it.”
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