The man behind bogus lawsuit against Techdirt is running for Senate – how's that possible?

Usually I'm not surprised by politicians being horrible human beings and criminals. But this time I got a small WTF?!-feeling when I realized that Shiva Ayyadurai (aka V.A. Shiva) is running for the Senate as Republican party candidate in Massachusetts.

If you don't know who the guy is, he is a con artist who has been claiming for years to be "the inventor of email". His story of email has been proven false by extensive research by many people, so there shouldn't be any doubt that he has been lying.

Instead of admitting that he has lied, he has taken totally different path: he sues everybody who publicly questions his claims. He creates a shilling effect that prevents most people publicly standing up against him. The best tech news site Techdirt has been fighting against him because of this.

In the time of internet this shouldn't be possible anymore. There are many ways to spread the message and one guy can't control them all. But in this case this guy has been surprisingly effective. Instead of being laughed at for claiming to invent something he clearly hasn't invented, he is running for the Senate.

A big part of the problem is USA where this kind of bogus libel lawsuits can be made quite freely. Abusing the law is so easy that many scammers do use the opportunity to make money. And of course, the US Constitution is like a joke nowadays, it doesn't protect the freedom of speech anymore.

Freedom of speech means a freedom to say something that others don't want to be said. Exposing scam artists is very important part of well-functioning society. We need freedom of speech to do that because otherwise scammers can prevent everybody hearing the truth.

But what if we don't have the freedom of speech? Fortunately there are alternative solutions. Great example is of course the Steem blockchain. It's really easy to record messages into it. Once the message is in the blockchain, nobody can't take it off. It will be there forever. When you are reading this text, it has been permanently stored to the Steem blockchain and not even Shiva Ayyadurai and his unethical lawyers can remove it.

Recently Mike Masnick, the CEO of Techdirt, gave a keynote talk about the experience of being a victim of this horrible bogus lawsuit. He gets pretty emotional about it but it's worth watching.

I would have thought that in this point there should be quite a lot of Shiva Ayyadurai haters out there, who would be protesting everywhere he goes. But apparently he can do his election campaign pretty freely without any problems. Are you Unitedstatesians just pussies who are afraid that he will sue you or have you become totally uninterested in opposing scammers and bullies?