Judge questions if Musk may blow up Twitter free-speech case – POLITICO

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hasn’t yet assumed ownership of Twitter — and the attorneys noted they’re representing Twitter’s position as a public company. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter tried to fend off a free-speech lawsuit on Thursday even as a federal judge asked if Elon Musk’s takeover might make the whole case moot. “Your company has been taken over by a new owner, and your new owner may disagree with your position,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup told Twitter’s lawyers on Thursday. “And I don’t want to have to spin my wheels and do a lot of work for nothing. So when is your new owner going to decide whether to continue with this lawsuit?” Independent journalist Alex Berenson, a vocal critic of the government’s pandemic response, sued Twitter after the company kicked him off the site for describing Covid vaccines as an advance therapeutic with risky side effects. The complaint, which got its first preliminary hearing in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, could be a test case for how the social media company will handle content moderation under the ownership of Tesla’s headline-driving CEO. It’s also a Venn diagram for the online debate that’s…
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