Exactly a year ago he reported on the U.S. State Department's funding of the Global Disinformation Index, a revelation that now informs an entire subfield of journalistic inquiry into the private sector's role in federal government censorship strategies.
Perhaps the most dramatic news event this week was the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.
Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, sued Steyn in 2012 over a blog post published on the National Review's website, in which Steyn called Mann's research "Fraudulent" and blamed him for having popularized the so-called "Hockey-stick graph" of global temperature rise.
Mann had initially filed suit against Steyn, National Review and two other parties; National Review maintained that Steyn's comments were protected under the First Amendment, and the outlet was dropped from the lawsuit in 2021.
This week the plaintiff, Mann, rested his case against Steyn.
Steyn's defense also called their first witness, a statistician at Wharton who characterized Mann's climate temperature reconstruction methodologies as "Manipulative" and his conclusions "Misleading." National Review supplied their own coverage of the trial this week as well, noting that Mann had expressed his hope to "Ruin this pathetic excuse for a human being," referring to Steyn, in a 2012 email.
Over the next few weeks, we can hope to see more attention to the current Supreme Court docket, which includes at least two cases pertinent to social media, censorship and the First Amendment.
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