https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210904/17070647503/computer-repair-shop-owner-has-to-pay-twitters-legal-fees-over-bogus-slapp-suit-regarding-hunter-bidens-laptop.shtml

At the end of last year we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous SLAPP suit filed by John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a computer repair shop whose name became somewhat famous after the NY Post ran a story regarding what was apparently Hunter Biden's laptop that had been abandoned at the shop, which eventually found its way to Rudy Giuliani. When the initial story broke, both Twitter and Facebook moved to limit the spread of the article as there were some initial concerns about the veracity of the story. In Twitter's case, it said that the story violated its policy on "hacked materials" (a policy that we've argued was problematic for journalism).

Isaac then argued that because of Twitter's moderation decision over "hacked materials" that it had defamed him in calling him a hacker. Consider this the precursor to a flurry of other lawsuits we've seen recently of mostly bad faith actors arguing that the reasons they were moderated are defamatory, which is not how any of this works. The initial lawsuit was tossed the same day it was filed on jurisdictional grounds, but a substantially similar lawsuit was filed a couple months later that solved the jurisdiction question by adding Madbits as a defendant. Madbits was an image search startup that Twitter acquired many years ago and shut down. Isaac argues in the complaint that Madbits still exists (even though Florida records show the company was shut down after the acquisition) as a way for Twitter to somehow skirt Florida employment laws. Either way, the addition of Madbits provided the kind of diversity jurisdiction necessary to keep the case alive, unlike the initial version that got tossed.