Two days after the helicopter collided with the passenger’s beam in Washington in January, he killed 67 people, Jo Ellis woke up to a rush of text messages.
Mrs. Ellis, 35 -year -old helicopter pilot in Virginia Army National Guard, learned from friends that her name and photographs were throughout the social media. Users were falsely named it as a pilot that came across a beam for passengers on January 29 – in the eyes of the online crowd that the initiatives of the diversity played a role in the accident because Mrs Ellis is Transgender.
Has published Video “Evidence of Life” On Facebook – emphasizing that it was very alive and well in an effort to slow down spread, but it seemed that the claim was growing.
“My life was turned upside down at that moment,” Mrs. Ellis said in an interview, adding that her employer had sent armed bodyguards to protect her family and that she began to wear a charged weapon as a preventive measure. “Forever, I’m known as” the trans terrorist. “”
On Wednesday, Mrs. Ellis filed a lawsuit against Matt Wallace, influence on X with more than two million followers. Mr. Wallace was one of the more prominent people who spread the deception in a number of posts that contained photos of Mrs Ellis and details of her life.
Mr. Wallace deleted his posts about Mrs Ellis after her Facebook video began to spread online. In the afternoon of 31. January of the “important update” and writes that Mrs Ellis “piloted a helicopter who hit the plane and was still alive”.
The submission claims that Mr. Wallace “invented a destructive and irresponsible gossip campaign”. He was filed at the US District Court in Colorado, a state where Mrs Ellis’s lawyers said Mr. Wallace is based and seeks money to be set before court.
Mr. Wallace did not answer the comment immediately.
It is difficult for people to focus on digital misinformation, find disabilities after online lies have expanded. Social media companies have alleviated their attitude to content moderation in recent years, as well as misinformation pedestrians have become more prominent and closer to power centers.
At the same time, the idea that social media could be personally and financially responsible through the Act on the spread of apparently false statements online grew as one potential way to fight misinformation.
“This suit is placed in a clear growing trend,” said Ronnell Andersen Jones, Professor of Law to the University of Utah, who focuses on defamation. “It is all a relatively new and complicated use of the defensive Act: people are seen by viral conspiracy theories are increasingly trying to use the law on defamation not only to correct their own reputation, but to remedy a wider social lies.”
This approach has been supported in recent years by successful cases of defamation against much larger groups: in 2023 Dominion systems have achieved voting systems of $ 787.5 million settlement with Tech Word News accused of spreading lies on its voting machines after elections by 2020. Infowars, for defamation, and in 2022, they received damages more than $ 1 billion.
There are fewer examples of such court disputes against independent creators or influencers of social media.
Mrs Ellis’s lawsuit has been filed Fund of equality of equalityA group of predominantly volunteer lawyers defending people of LGBTQ against defamation and harassment.
Such litigation faces a number of constitutional and legal obstacles. The laws on free expression are wide, making it difficult to prove defamation, even if the deception is shared. In most cases, it is up to the people who are defamated to prove that the speaker is acting with intentional anger instead of making a mistake.
Mrs. Ellis said that any financial compensation she could receive will be devoted to the families of victims in the accident.
“I believe in freedom of expression, but I also believe in the consequences of freedom of expression,” Mrs. Ellis said. “If you can wake the crowd because you say something that is not true, that’s your right. But once the crowd comes to someone, you have to have some consequences.”
Speculation that Transgender Pilot could have caused a collision on January 29, appeared as a conspiracy theory almost immediately after the Black Hawk helicopter knocked down the passenger river through the Potorac River during training exercise. Just a few days earlier, President Trump signed an executive order that tried to prevent Transgender people from the Army, which made some users speculate that the accident was a terrorist act of a damaged transgender pilot. Mr. Trump continued to combine the accident with policies related to diversity, justice and incorporation or dei a few days later.
Mr. Wallace was not the first person to focus on Mrs. Ellis on X, according to the review of The New York Times. The conversation around Mrs. Ellis began on January 30 and exploded until 31 January and, according to the second day, became a trend topic X with more than 90,000 posts, according to Trends24, a website that monitors social media.
“During the combat zone I was a door shooter in a helicopter in Iraq and was shot in the same combat zone,” Mrs. Ellis said. “But even for me, having a magnifying glass placed on my personal life after this reputation had a real impact.”
