The US congressman Devin Nunes sent the Twitterverse spiraling into hilarity late on Monday with his lawsuit listing the purported crimes of Twitter users āDevin Nunesā Momā and āDevin Nunesā Cowā.
In the lawsuit against Twitter and a handful of users, the California Republican claims to be the victim of vicious internet trolls, as well as the victim of selective censorship by the social media company. He is alleging that by āshadow-banningā his account, Twitter allowed for the selective amplification of ādefamersā such as āDevin Nunesā Momā and āDevin Nunesā Cowā.
(Shadow-banning, a term used for when certain users are not visible in automatic search results, has repeatedly been debunked as an effort to silence conservatives. Twitter has changed the way it algorithmically ranks users, based on their behavior, but the company has maintained that it is content-neutral.)
But in filing the lawsuit, Nunes ultimately fell victim to the Streisand effect: when an attempt to censor something ends up bringing more attention to it.
In suing these Twitter users, Nunes listed some of their tweets, thus ensuring thousands, if not millions, more people saw what the lawsuit characterized as ādefamationā. By the time Nunes filed the lawsuit, Twitter had already suspended Devin Nunesā Mom. Devin Nunesā Cow had more than 1,200 followers.
Devin Nunesā Cow now has 107,000 followers. āDevin Nunesā Alt-Momā, a new user purporting to be the same account as Devin Nunesā Mom, was created and now has more than 8,000 followers. Other accounts include Devin Nunesā Goat, with 240 followers, Devin Nunesā Lawyer, with 1,120 followers, Devin Nunesā Grandma with 1,160 followers, and Devin Nunesā Cock ā a rooster with 590 followers.
It didnāt help Nunesā case that his attorneys never found the true identities behind āDevin Nunesā Momā and āDevin Nunesā Cowā, so pieces of the complaint read as if Nunesā actual mother and his cow were the perpetrators, turning the lawsuit into a parody of itself.
āIn her endless barrage of tweets, Devin Nunesā Mom maliciously attacked every aspect of Nunesā character, honesty, integrity, ethics and fitness to perform his duties as a United States Congressman,ā the complaint states.
āDevin Nunesā Mom stated that Nunes had turned out worse than Jacob Wohl; falsely accused Nunes of being a racist, having āwhite supremist friendsā and distributing ādisturbing inflammatory racial propagandaā; falsely accused Nunes of putting up a āFake News MAGAā sign outside a Texas Holocaust museum; falsely stated that Nunes would probably join the āProud Boysā, āif it werenāt for that unfortunate āno masturbatingā ruleā.ā
Twitter has declined to comment on the lawsuit. On Tuesday, Donald Trump tweeted his support for Nunes.