In Johnson v. Griffin, No. 23-5257 (6th Cir. Oct. 31, 2023), the Sixth Circuit holds that by targeting an individual living in Tennessee in a Twitter campaign to get them fired from their job, and specifically tagging the Tennessee-based employer, the defendant subjected herself to personal jurisdiction in that state.
“Kathy Griffin, a California-based celebrity and social activist, sent a series of tweets to her two million Twitter followers asserting that Tennessean Samuel Johnson, the CEO of Tennessee-based VisuWell, had engaged in homophobic conduct. She encouraged her followers to make him ‘online famous’ and tagged his company. She then asked his employer to ‘remove[]’ him from the Board of Directors and threatened that the ‘nation
w[ould] remain vigilant’ if it did not. Within a day of her first tweets, the company fired
Johnson and removed him from the Board. Johnson and his wife sued Griffin in federal court in Tennessee, claiming (among other things) that she tortiously interfered with his employment.”
The district court dismissed the lawsuit for lack of personal jurisdiction over Griffin, but the Sixth Circuit reverses.
Under the precepts of due process, tortious conduct may satisfy the requirement of “suit-related conduct” with a “substantial connection with the forum State” when the defendant “intentionally cultivates contacts with the forum State.” The panel holds that the defendant did so by focusing her social-media campaign on Tennessee. “Griffin’s repeated emphasis of Johnson’s residence in Franklin and the company’s home base in Nashville hammers that home. She ‘undoubtedly knew’ that the ‘focal point’ of her tweets concerned Tennessee . . . . Confirming the point, Griffin’s initial tweet ‘cop[ied] VisuWell directly’ at the same time that she threatened Johnson and identified him as based in Tennessee—indeed more specific than that, as she told people his wife’s name and that they lived in Franklin, a suburb of Nashville. Following VisuWell’s tweet that it had fired Johnson, Griffin inquired whether it had removed Johnson from its Board, cautioning that ‘the nation will remain vigilant’ if it had not . . . . These intentional threats to VisuWell’s Tennessee-based business plainly affected Tennessee.”
The key to the outcome here was targeting the employer via tagging, which constituted a communication directed straight at them. “Griffin directly communicated with VisuWell in her first tweet and, after that tweet prompted his firing, she followed up directly with VisuWell to urge it to dismiss Johnson from its Board of Directors, all while promising more harassment if the Tennessee company did not bow to her wishes. Unlike Griffin’s tweets that affected Kentucky after its students returned home, her contacts with VisuWell went beyond targeting the Johnsons to affecting ‘the state’ and indeed its ‘economy,’ ‘more broadly.'”
The opinion thereby suggests that simply tweeting to her (reportedly) two million followers without such targeting might have changed the result, citing another case (also involving Griffin and tweeting), Blessing v. Chandrasekhar, 988 F.3d 889 (6th Cir. 2021), where personal jurisdiction was denied. “The tagging . . . did two things: It directly communicated with the company’s decisionmakers about firing Johnson, and it facilitated her speech by simplifying the process of allowing her followers to chime in about Johnson’s conduct.”
Concurring, Judge Cole also places special emphasis on the act of tagging, because of the way Twitter (now X) operated in 2021. “[P]urposeful availment is satisfied here because of Griffin’s direct communications with VisuWell about Johnson’s employment, but the ever-changing mechanics of social media platforms might make this inquiry in other cases more difficult . . . . Excluding the VisuWell tag is only a minor, nine-character deviation from the original tweet, but—without the tag—the tweet would no longer be a direct communication with VisuWell by Twitter’s specifications.”
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