Editor’s note: The following is the second instalment in a three-part series. To read Part 1, click here. 

Depending on who you talk to, social media is either a great equalizer or a great menace.

Some folks believe it’s a great equalizer because it can give a platform to every voice.

Others think it’s a great menace for the same reason.

Essentially devoid of rules, restrictions or any code of conduct, social media can be a battleground — divisive, antagonistic and intolerant.

Linda Myles is the administrator of a Facebook group called Engaged Residents of Oro-Medonte (EROM), a private group of about 550 members that discusses the comings and goings in Oro-Medonte Township.

She said her experience being a victim of harassment, bullying, and misleading and false posts has made her more cautious about how she administers the EROM group.

“I don’t want anyone to be subjected to that in our group,” Myles told BarrieToday. “We have a zero-tolerance policy on abuse, personal attacks or false or misleading information about anyone.”

She said the group has removed and blocked 11 profiles in two years.

“Most of those were because the person engaged in ongoing personal attacks and/or disrespectful language,” she said.

Myles said some were removed when administrators discovered they were not using their real names.

Fake profiles and false identities are an ongoing challenge on social media. Creating one requires little effort. Googling ‘create a fake profile on Facebook’ generated about 158 million results in less than a second.

“I suggest there exist those who are emboldened by the faceless, anonymous and remote nature of social media that behave far differently online than they do in their daily face-to-face interactions,” said George Cabral, Springwater Township’s deputy mayor.

“One way to deal, as an individual, with this type of distortion is to tune it out and avoid participation as much as possible.”

In “real life,” Cabral said, people talk behind others’ backs all the time, but, for the most part, the person who is being talked about remains unaware because people are too polite to mention whatever the slight might be to their face.

On social media, though, not only do people comment, but they go out of their way to ensure the person who the comment is about knows the comment exists.

“Folks feel emboldened to write/say whatever they might normally only say in private or behind one’s back,” Cabral said, “but there it is, completely out in the open for anyone’s eyes to see or ears to hear, including the individual to whom the comment was directed.”

Don Lewis is the administrator of a Facebook group called Oro-Medonte Community Matters. The group features new posts almost daily, many of them pointedly critical of members of Oro-Medonte council. The group has almost 1,000 members.

A number of Oro-Medonte councillors called the site out for distributing misinformation, posting personal attacks on council members and generally stirring the pot.

They claim Lewis is not a real person — that it’s a fake profile being used to conceal the identity of a disgruntled resident.

“I’ve been called Don Lewis all my life. I live in Oro-Medonte,” Lewis said during an exchange on Facebook with BarrieToday.

“I hear all the accusations made against me, but I just don’t care.”

According to Lewis, the Oro-Medonte Community Matters page allows anonymous contributions because there are ratepayers who are afraid to speak publicly due to having been bullied and having lost business due to their companies having been targeted by people whose opinions differed from theirs.

“This is a way to allow freedom of expression without exposing people who are at risk,” he said.

Lewis also claims some of his group’s members have had anonymous, defamatory letters sent to their employers.

When asked to provide specific instances or names of people who have been bullied or lost business due to their comments, Lewis didn’t provide any.

He said the issue is not about who is doing the posting, but rather what is being posted.

“Simply posting facts is not bullying,” he said.

But the root issue, according to some township councillors, is the veracity of those facts. They point out municipal politics is filled with moving parts; some decisions are made in public and some are made in closed session. Unless you’re privy to all of those conversations, any speculation is just that.

“The opportunity to disseminate distortion, perpetuate false narratives and create controversy, to my mind, anyway, weaponizes social media far too easily, taking it far from the good, valuable communications tool it was meant to be,” said Cabral.

“That is the difficulty. And while I do believe it’s a small percentage of users, the numbers don’t matter when their frequency and reach can be so vast digitally. With one post followed by a click of a button, a comment — good or bad — can be instantaneously posted to a myriad of social media accounts.”

‘Russ Logan’ is the administrator of the Springwater Ontario Discussion Group, which has about 1,000 members. He is quick to point out Logan is not his real last name. He said he’s a Springwater resident who uses a ‘nom de plume’ because of his job.

He said set up the group page to get people engaged and hopefully get some feedback local politicians would consider when making decisions for the community.

“I try not to censor too much unless it is completely rude and unhelpful,” he said during a Facebook chat. “To be mad is OK. To be insulting or threatening is unacceptable and will not be approved.”

Back in Oro-Medonte, Myles said Facebook needs to take an active role in controlling the online environment. She said she’s reported harassment and bullying to Facebook, but with no results.

“In my experience, Facebook does nothing,” she said. “There are far too many harassing, slanderous and defamatory posts allowed on Facebook.”

BarrieToday reached out to Facebook to find out how the social media giant defines harassment, bullying and intimidation, and what steps it takes when a complaint is made. Despite repeated requests, Facebook didn’t respond.

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Twenty years ago, Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky met Donald J. Trump as contestants on his reality TV show, “The Apprentice” — a connection that led them to help launch the former president’s social media platform, Truth Social, with his blessing.

Now, they might as well be starring in an episode of “Family Feud.”

For weeks, Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky have been fighting with Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, over their roughly 8 percent stake in the company. In February, they sued the company, claiming that Trump Media — which made its trading debut last month at an $8 billion valuation — was trying to deprive them of the full value of their shares. Now they also claim the company is trying to prevent them from selling those shares.

In a separate lawsuit that followed, Trump Media claimed that Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky should forfeit their shares because their poor decision-making had contributed to a yearslong delay in its merger with Digital World Acquisition Corporation. Trump Media agreed to merge with Digital World, a cash-rich shell company, in 2021 as a way to go public, but the deal closed only in March.

The pair’s stake is worth more than $220 million based on the current $26 share price of Trump Media, compared with $2 billion for Mr. Trump. Overall, the stock has fallen about 62 percent from where it began trading on March 26.

The litigation provides a portrait of some of the chaos that has bedeviled Trump Media since its inception. The lawsuits are also a distraction for the fledgling company, which is struggling to show that it is a viable business rather than a money-losing entity whose value is derived solely from Mr. Trump’s presence on its flagship platform. On Tuesday, the company announced plans to launch a streaming video service to draw in more users.

Mr. Moss, now an Atlanta financial planner and radio host, and Mr. Litinsky, a conservative media personality, met Mr. Trump during the second season of “The Apprentice,” which ran for 15 episodes in 2004. Mr. Trump “fired” the two men in Weeks 11 and 12. Mr. Litinsky would later take a job as president of Mr. Trump’s television production company.

Just weeks after Mr. Trump left the White House in early 2021, Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky pitched him on creating a social media company. They came up with the idea after Twitter, now X, and other social media platforms barred Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The two men convinced him that if he started his own company, he wouldn’t have to worry about being censored and his supporters would follow him to the new platform. Mr. Trump was intrigued enough to lend his name to the effort in exchange for a majority stake in the company. He didn’t invest any of his own money.

The parties drew up an agreement that authorized United Atlantic Ventures, a company set up by Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky, to put the plan in motion. In return, they were promised an equity stake in Trump Media.

Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky, who were on Trump Media’s board, were instrumental in negotiating the October 2021 merger agreement with Digital World, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that had raised $300 million in an initial public offering. SPACs raise money in an I.P.O. in order to buy an existing company like Trump Media, allowing the operating business to go public.

In February 2022, Truth Social made its debut, quickly becoming the former president’s main online megaphone.

Things soon began to go south, not long after Mr. Trump appointed Devin Nunes, the former Republican congressman from California, as Trump Media’s chief executive. By that summer, Mr. Moss had resigned from the company’s board; Mr. Litinsky had done so earlier.

In their lawsuit, filed in Delaware Chancery Court, the two men claimed that their relationship with Trump Media had soured after Mr. Litinsky refused Mr. Trump’s request to give some shares to his wife, Melania, long before the company began to trade.

Trump Media has claimed in its lawsuit, filed in March in Florida state court, that Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky “failed spectacularly at every turn.” The suit blamed the men for the poor rollout of Truth Social, which was marred by technical glitches that Trump Media said had generated “hostile” press coverage. Trump Media also said some of the actions of Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky had contributed to an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission that delayed the merger.

Christopher Clark, a lawyer for United Atlantic, said Trump Media’s lawsuit against his clients was “meritless.” He said that if Trump Media had any claims against his clients, it should bring them before the Delaware court rather than in a separate lawsuit in Florida.

This month, the judge in the Delaware proceeding, Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock III, questioned the rationale for filing a suit in Florida, saying he was “dumbfounded.”

Samuel Salario, a lawyer for Trump Media, said that the company’s “complaint speaks for itself,” and that Trump Media would prevail in court.

In their lawsuit, Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky claimed their right to 8 percent of Trump Media’s shares and the ability to sell them immediately. They alleged that Trump Media had unfairly barred their company, United Atlantic, from selling any shares for six months, just as the merger with Digital World was being completed. The timing of the action was punitive and “retaliatory,” Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky alleged.

Trump Media has argued that the lockup is consistent with how other large shareholders are being treated and that, in any event, the two men forfeited their rights to those shares. The six-month lockup imposed on United Atlantic is similar to a share-selling restriction that also applies to Mr. Trump and investors who backed Digital World before the SPAC went public in 2021.

Legal experts said it was not unusual for founders of a company that went public to become embroiled in a battle over who should get the most shares.

“It’s all about dividing the pie but not about the fate of the pie itself,” said Usha Rodrigues, a professor of corporate law at the University of Georgia School of Law. “Donald Trump is still going to be in control. It’s just about sorting out the pieces.”

Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky aren’t the only ones fighting in court over their equity stake.

Patrick Orlando, the former chief executive of Digital World, is also suing to get more shares of Trump Media, claiming the SPAC’s board wrongly cast him aside a year before the merger was completed.

Mr. Orlando was pushed out in the middle of the S.E.C. investigation, in which regulators said early merger negotiations between Digital World and Trump Media had violated federal securities laws. The S.E.C. did not charge him with any wrongdoing, and Digital World eventually reached an $18 million settlement with regulators.

Mr. Orlando and his lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

In claiming that Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky’s actions contributed to the regulatory investigation, the Trump Media lawsuit said the two men were apprehensive of how Mr. Orlando was conducting the merger talks but continued to negotiate with him anyway.

The suit noted that after one meeting with Mr. Orlando in April 2021, Mr. Litinsky wrote in his notes: “I get scared, is he wearing a wire?”

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Opinion | How to Regulate Social Media Without Hurting Free Speech  POLITICO



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