Issue and Opponent: Devin Nunes has boasted to California voters that he is a Central Valley farmer in the past. However, in 2018, it was discovered that Nunes did not own a farm in California, and worse yet, that his entire family had moved out of the state to a farm in Iowa. To save face, Nunes later claimed he owned a farm in Tulare County, but several reports found that it was worth less than $15,000, generated no income at all, and had never been claimed by Nunes as one of his assets.
Dilemma Action: Activists, who remain anonymous, created a parody Twitter account with the user @DevinCow, claiming to be one of Nunes’s unhappy cows living on his farm, to draw attention to Nunes’s alleged lies. The account would go on to call him a “treasonous cowpoke” and claim that Nunes was “Udder-ly worthless”. However, the parody account did not draw major traffic until Nunes launched a lawsuit aimed at Twitter for not policing the account, claiming it defamed him and distracted him from his House investigation on Russian election meddling. After Nunes’ actions, which included a demand of $250 million in damages from Twitter, the account’s following grew from just under 1,000 to over half a million, reaching 735,000 followers at its peak. Thus, the account was able to expose Nunes and his lies to his voters while being protected by a parody account.
Outcome: Twitter did not take down the parody account, nor did it police its tweets, as it claimed it did not violate its rules. In 2020, a Virginia judge said Nunes could not sue Twitter over posts from a parody account, as federal laws cannot hold social media companies liable for content posted on their platforms. Nunes has since declared he will resign from Congress by the end of 2021 and serve as CEO of Donald Trump’s new media company.