Fake News About Daisy Cousens Spread By Twitter Troll Account
It is not uncommon for conservative media personalities to find themselves under attack online for expressing their beliefs. Unlike leftists online conservatives are not snowflakes and take online attacks and abuse as part of the rough and tumble of online discourse.
However they do have a right to be angry when their detractors promote outright lies about them and attribute fake quotes to them. Prominent anti-feminist commentator, YouTuber and Sky News Contributor Daisy Cousens has had to endure such slander and defamation on Twitter this week.
A leftist troll twitter account OzProtectionistParty, which calls itself a parody account attributed completely fabricated comments from Cousens about the conviction of Cardinal George Pell of child sexual abuse, the conviction occurred last December but a suppression order was only lifted this week after the prosecution decided not to proceed with further charges.
OzProtectionistParty claimed that Cousens said on the Bolt Report this week that third wave feminists who criticized Pell were hypocrites because they were “slut-shaming” the cardinal, a practice feminists claim to be against.
If you look through the OzProtectionistParty’s twitter feed it has attributed false statements to other prominent Australian conservative commentators such as Chris Kenny and Rita Panahi, but those were not defamatory in nature.
This fake comment attributed to Cousens is defamatory in multiple ways. First, it suggests that Cousens is okay with child sexual abuse, and then that she believes that feminists should be supportive of child sexual abuse.
This false statement was immediately believed by Cousens’ social media detractor in an obvious example of confirmation bias, that they were wanting to see a statement (false as it was) from Cousens that was unsound enough to discredit her.
Because Cousens’ own Twitter account was tagged in the original tweet Cousens responded in the Twitter thread to state the comments were fake.
Despite Cousins stating that these comments were falsely attributed to her, her attackers continued as if she had made statements in
Cousens’ boyfriend Calum Thwaites, has been a victim of fake news and rumors as well .He was one of the students from Queensland University of Technology who was hauled before the Australian Human Rights Commission. Thwaites was brought to the commission under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
He and Cousens repeated that the comments were falsely attributed to Thwaites.
Yet the OzProtectionistParty account thought this was all still a bit of a joke and thought it was their free speech right to attribute false comments to someone on a topic as sensitive as child sexual abuse.
Because of the account’s arrogant attitude Cousens and Thwaites called out its cowardice hiding behind anonymity and warned if they continued Cousens would take legal action for defamation.
The account offered a somewhat sarcastic apology, trying to argue that Cousens was trying to restrict their free speech. Cousens wasn’t buying it vowing to still serve them legal docuements and unmask them.
Cousens to prevent further damage to her reputation due to the false statements the account attributed to her pinned a tweet stating so to the top of her Twitter feed.
The OzProtectionistParty account again demonstrating its lack of contrition continued to target Cousens albeit this time tweeted statements she had actually said.
Cousens told the Unshackled “Normally I really do not care about what people say about me on the internet. But when they’re completing making stuff up, especially around something as serious and awful as the Pell stuff, and people are 100% believing it, that I take issue with”
Certainly the actions of the OzProtectionistParty account prove once again how easy it is for fake news and defamatory statements to spread around the internet