There are defamation lawsuits designed to win, and then there are defamation lawsuits designed to generate headlines for your fans on social media, punish journalists, and maybe — if you’re lucky — force a settlement or intimidate future reporting. FBI Director Kash Patel’s brand new defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic is very obviously the second kind.

On Friday, The Atlantic published a truly devastating profile of Patel, reporting that “more than two dozen” current and former officials described a director who shows up to Ned’s in DC and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas to drink until he is visibly drunk, and who has been difficult to wake on occasions when his security detail needed him. There’s also this fun anecdote in the opening, talking about a time, earlier this month, when Patel had trouble logging into his computer:

He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

That’s just kinda amusing, but there are a lot more serious concerns, such as the fact that the nation’s top cop is (according to the article): “often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations.”

The article included a response from Patel, attributed to him by the FBI: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court — bring your checkbook.”

On Monday, represented by MAGA-world’s go-to lawyer Jesse Binnall, Patel did exactly that, filing a 19-page complaint in federal court in DC seeking $250 million in damages.

The complaint is, to put it charitably, not great. To put it less charitably, it reads like a press release with a case caption stapled to the top.

Let’s start with the central legal problem, because it’s kinda fatal. Patel is indisputably a public official — he runs the FBI — which means under New York Times v. Sullivan, he has to plead and eventually prove that The Atlantic published with “actual malice,” meaning with knowledge that the statements were false, or with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity — a legal term of art that requires showing the publisher actually suspected the statements were false and deliberately avoided finding out, not merely that they moved quickly or relied on anonymous sources. This is a very high bar. It’s been a high bar since 1964. Every lawyer who files a defamation case for a public figure is supposed to know that this is the hill they have to climb.

Here is how the complaint attempts to plead actual malice:

Defendants’ conscious decision to ignore the detailed, specific, and substantive refutations in the Pre-Publication Letter, and their refusal to give a reasonable amount of time for the FBI and Director Patel to respond, is among the strongest possible evidence of actual malice.

In other words: Patel denied it, The Atlantic published anyway, therefore actual malice. There is no real attempt to plead actual malice beyond that.

That’s not actual malice. That’s just how journalism works. Every news story that anyone has ever complained about in history has been published after the subject denied it. If “the subject denied it and you published anyway” were sufficient to establish actual malice, the First Amendment would be a dead letter and every investigative story ever written would generate a winning lawsuit.

Yes, those filing SLAPP lawsuits often claim that their subjects’ denials constitute actual malice — but that’s not how it works in court, and it never has been.

And we know this argument doesn’t work because we just watched a judge throw out Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal for making essentially this exact argument. That was all of a week ago. A public figure’s denial, followed by publication, is not actual malice. A court said that a week ago. This is well-known, settled law. Binnall surely knows this. Patel’s filing this suit anyway.

The complaint does gesture weakly at some other theories — that the anonymous sources were “partisans with axes to grind,” that The Atlantic imposed a two-hour comment deadline, that there was “editorial animus” evidenced by prior Atlantic coverage. But even stacked together, these don’t get you to actual malice. Relying on anonymous sources isn’t reckless disregard—it’s how journalism works. Short deadlines for comment aren’t evidence of malice either; they’re standard operating procedure for breaking news. Prior negative coverage doesn’t even come close to the legal standard, since public figures doing controversial things tend to get criticized.

There’s also the fact that the complaint tries to twist statements by anonymous sources which the Atlantic reported on as The Atlantic’s own speech. Almost every one of the 19 allegedly defamatory statements enumerated in paragraph 18 is, on the face of the article, attributed to anonymous sources. For example, count 18(e) claims that a request for ‘breaching equipment’ — “normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings” — was made because Patel was unreachable. The complaint states:

Fitzpatrick knows that her anonymous sources, unwilling to go on the record, are partisans with axes to grind and are not in a position to know the facts.

“Partisans with axes to grind” is not relevant to the actual malice standard. And, come on. Anonymous sources not willing to go on the record accusing a man who runs the FBI and is famously vindictive toward his perceived enemies… is not exactly a shocking revelation.

Almost all of the claims are like this. “According to multiple people familiar with the request.” “According to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials.” “According to the more than two dozen people I interviewed.”

The Atlantic’s defense (if it even gets that far) is therefore not going to need to be “we can prove Kash Patel was drunk at Ned’s.” It’s going to be “multiple credible sources told us this, we reported what they said along with corroborating evidence, and we have our notes, emails, and recordings to prove that’s what they told us.” That’s a fundamentally different — and far easier — thing to defend. Publishers aren’t required to prove the absolute truth of everything their sources say. They’re required to not publish with reckless disregard for the truth, which requires evidence about what the publisher knew or suspected, not what turned out to be the ultimate truth of the matter.

The Atlantic had multiple sources for each of its claims. It has corroborating evidence to support the claims. That is not a situation that says actual malice. It’s a situation that says “we did careful reporting.”

The complaint doesn’t grapple with this distinction at all. It just keeps repeating that the FBI told The Atlantic the claims were false before publication, as if that’s the end of the story. It isn’t. Subjects of investigative reporting deny things all the time. Publishers weigh denials against their sources and decide whether to publish based on all of the evidence they’ve collected. The First Amendment protects that decision-making process precisely so that powerful officials can’t just deny critical stories into non-existence.

In theory, there’s also the issue of discovery. Whenever cases like this get filed, people on social media say things like “can’t wait for discovery.” But cases like this rarely even get to the discovery stage. The Atlantic will almost certainly file for a motion to dismiss, which almost always happens pre-discovery, and a failure to competently plead actual malice is a good reason for the case to be tossed at that stage, without any discovery.

But also, given that Patel was famously seen on video chugging a beer at the Olympics in the Men’s Hockey locker room, it seems like Patel himself might not be all that interested in discovery either.

Of course, the goal was never to win. The goal was to file. And, sure some people will point to Trump’s settlements with news orgs, but those were to the president himself, and quite clearly designed to curry favor. As powerful as the FBI director is, it’s doubtful that the Atlantic is looking to curry favor with the FBI director via a settlement.

And that brings us to the other tell: the Streisand Effect. The complaint itself complains how much attention the article — again talking about how various officials in the FBI were concerned about situations where the FBI director appeared to be blackout drunk — got some attention on the internet.

The Article was widely disseminated on the internet, through AMG’s magazine and associated platforms, and was foreseeably republished, summarized, and discussed throughout national and international media.

Ya think?

Patel’s response to this alleged injury was to file a $250 million lawsuit — an action guaranteed to drive far more traffic to the very article he says is destroying his reputation. Every news outlet that covers the lawsuit links to or summarizes the original piece. Every social media post about the suit reintroduces the allegations to people who had never seen them. If your complaint is that too many people read the story, filing a splashy nine-figure lawsuit is a strange way to handle it.

None of this is an accident or a rookie mistake. This is how Binnall — and his predecessor in this particular niche, Steven Biss — have always done it.

Long-time Techdirt readers may recall that we first covered Kash Patel filing a SLAPP suit all the way back in 2019, when he was a White House staffer and former Devin Nunes aide. He used Steven Biss — Nunes’s own go-to lawyer for suing critics, satirical Twitter cows, and journalists — to sue Politico over accurate reporting about Fiona Hill’s congressional testimony. That complaint, like this one, read more like a press release than a pleading, opening with a tirade about “weaponized media” and “partisan hacks and character assassins who work to advance the interests and agendas of dark money.”

Biss specialized in filing SLAPP suits for MAGA figures. Most of them lost. He filed so many of them that when he had a stroke in 2023, his law license was eventually suspended on impairment grounds, and a bunch of his cases had to be handed off to someone else. That someone else was mostly Jesse Binnall, who promptly continued the losing streak. The Flynn family’s SLAPP suit against CNN? Tossed. Patel’s own 2024 threat letter to MSNBC commentator Olivia Troye? Answered with a Monty Python reference.

Filing is the point. Winning is beside it. These suits generate favorable headlines in friendly media, signal aggression to critics, raise the cost of covering the subject, and — if everything goes perfectly — get a defendant to settle just to make the expense go away. Whether they actually prevail on the merits is beside the point for the filer. Binnall has built a practice around this model. Patel has used that practice repeatedly across multiple roles over the last few years.

This is a textbook SLAPP, and it’s a good reminder of why we need anti-SLAPP laws to begin with.

Which brings us to a frustrating final wrinkle: the case was filed in federal court in DC, and while DC has an anti-SLAPP statute, the DC Circuit ruled a decade ago that it doesn’t apply in federal court. On top of that, the DC Court of Appeals more recently invalidated part of the law’s fee-shifting provisions. So even though DC ostensibly has protections against exactly this kind of lawsuit, The Atlantic basically can’t use them here. This is a pattern repeated across the country — patchwork state laws, some strong, some weak, many with large loopholes, and many federal circuits have barred their use in federal courts.

This is why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law, and why we need strong anti-SLAPP laws in every state and territory. The people who file these lawsuits know exactly which jurisdictions lack them, and they file accordingly. The asymmetry — where the cost of filing a meritless suit is minimal for the plaintiff, while the cost of defending it is substantial for the defendant — is exactly what makes the SLAPP tactic work. Anti-SLAPP laws with robust fee-shifting flip that equation, making bad-faith plaintiffs think twice.

Absent that, we’re left with the situation we have now: the head of the nation’s federal law enforcement agency uses a $250 million defamation suit as a political messaging tool, filed by a lawyer whose track record of losing these cases is long and detailed. The Atlantic will likely win on a motion to dismiss. Patel will get his headlines. And a lot more people will have read about Kash Patel’s alleged drinking habits than ever would have otherwise.

For the supposed “free speech party,” filing vexatious SLAPP suits against investigative reporters has become a rite of passage — a way of making clear there’s a price for making the people in power look bad.

A couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids’ lives. This one was a victory lap titled “Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media,” treating recent developments — including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are misunderstanding — as vindication of his thesis.

Part of the evidence he marshaled was Pew polling showing that parents are worried about their kids’ social media use. Which, fine. Parents worrying about what their kids are up to is as old as the human species, and usually about as productive as yelling at the wind. It’s kind of what parents do. It’s why every generation has its own series of “the kids these days!” moral panics.

But then something inconvenient happened for Haidt’s thesis: Pew went and did a brand new study exploring teens’ experiences on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This one asked the kids themselves.

The results are awkward for the panic narrative.

For years now, I’ve been pointing out that the social-media-is-destroying-kids narrative — which Haidt has done more than anyone else to popularize — has never had the empirical backing its proponents claim. Multiple major studies have failed to replicate the harm claims. When researchers have looked carefully, they’ve often found the causal arrow pointing the other direction: kids who are already struggling with mental health issues and not getting adequate support tend to spend more time on social media, rather than social media causing the mental health issues.

Indeed, the research repeatedly suggests that for the very small number of kids who are facing mental health problems and overrelying on social media in response, the answer is a targeted intervention to help those individuals — not a broad “ban kids from social media” program.

The new Pew data does more than nudge that picture along; it gives it a massive shove.

Let’s start with the finding that should end this debate on its own. Pew asked teens how what they see on each platform makes them feel about themselves. Here’s what the kids reported:

About six-in-ten teen TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat users say what they see on each makes no difference in how they feel about themselves. And about a quarter say it makes them feel about equally better and worse.

When teens say these platforms do make them feel better or worse, it leans more positive. For example, 15% of TikTok users say what they see there makes them feel better, while 3% say it makes them feel worse.

The bar chart showing just how few kids claim that TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram make them feel worse about themselves is quite telling:

Just look at those numbers. That tiny green bar? That’s the percentage that says these services make them feel worse about themselves. On TikTok — the platform most frequently cast as an unusually dangerous self-esteem killer for teen girls — 15% of teen users say it makes them feel better about themselves, and just 3% say it makes them feel worse. That’s a 5-to-1 ratio in the wrong direction for the moral panic narrative.

The numbers on the other platforms follow the same script. On Snapchat, 13% say it makes them feel better, just 2% worse. On Instagram — the platform Haidt has singled out for particular damnation, building much of his case on leaked Meta internal research he insists proves it’s poisonous — 10% say it makes them feel better, just 3% say it makes them feel worse.

Three percent. That’s not a signal of a generation-defining mental health catastrophe. That’s barely distinguishable from a rounding error.

And even these small numbers overstate the harm, because the vast majority of kids—around 60% on each platform—say these apps make no difference at all to how they feel about themselves. Add the quarter who report “about equally better and worse,” and you’re left with a tiny minority on either side of the ledger, tilted toward the positive.

Overall experience tracks the same way:

All told, teens tend to have a mostly positive experience on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. About seven-in-ten teens on each platform say this. Very few – just 3% on each – say it’s mostly negative.

Seven-in-ten teens report a mostly positive experience. Three percent report a mostly negative one. These numbers are not ambiguous. If social media was so inherently harmful to kids, the numbers would not — could not — look that way.

Separately, Pew also asked parents how much time their teens spend on these platforms — and the disconnect between what parents believe and what their kids report is massive:

28% of teen TikTok users report spending too much time on the site, and that jumps to 44% when parents were asked about their teen’s use of the platform.

Parents think their teens are spending too much time on TikTok at a rate nearly 60% higher than the teens themselves report. That gap is the entire moral panic, distilled to a single data point: worried adults constructing a portrait of a crisis that the people supposedly living it mostly don’t appear to recognize.

And there’s a class dimension to this worry that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Dig into the survey on what parents say about their teens’ uses of social media and you find that wealthier, more educated parents are significantly more convinced that social media is harming their kids than less affluent parents are.

This is exactly what you’d expect if the panic is being driven top-down by elite media and political discourse rather than bottom-up by actual observed harm. The audience buying Haidt’s books, reading his Atlantic pieces, listening to NPR segments about the teen mental health crisis — that audience skews wealthy and educated. And it’s precisely that demographic whose anxiety is most out of step with what kids themselves report.

I’ve written before about how the addiction narrative itself may be doing more damage than the thing it claims to describe — teaching kids to interpret normal experiences as pathological, making them feel broken for doing what basically everyone around them is doing. The socioeconomic breakdown in the Pew data fits that framing.

The panic is a panic of privilege, boosted by institutions that shape how the professional class thinks about everything from parenting to policy.

Now, to be fair, the Pew data isn’t uniformly rosy. Around 40% of TikTok users say it hurts the amount of sleep they get, and a meaningful percentage report productivity impacts. These findings deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved away.

But context matters here. Teenagers doing things late at night that hurt their sleep is not exactly a new phenomenon. Parents were convinced television was destroying their kids’ sleep and rotting their brains in the 1960s. Video games were going to create a generation of zombies in the 1980s and 90s. Before that, novels were going to warp young women’s minds. Pinball machines were banned in New York City until 1976 in part because they were thought to corrupt youth. The “this new thing is ruining our kids” script is older than any of the things it has ever been used to describe.

And even if you want to focus specifically on “sleep” we can go back to articles from the 19th century about how reading in bed was harming sleep.

None of which means sleep impacts don’t matter. They do. But “some kids report this activity affects their sleep” is a very different claim than “this activity is causing a generational mental health crisis requiring sweeping bans.” And notably, the self-esteem and overall-experience numbers I quoted above are measuring exactly the kind of mental health harm the panic is supposedly about. Those numbers don’t show what Haidt needs them to show.

Which brings us back to Haidt’s seven lines of evidence. I’m not going to rehash every point here, because several are variations on the same methodological moves I and others have addressed at length elsewhere — cherry-picked correlational data that Haidt and his collaborators desperately want to treat as proof of causality. Some people will argue that his lines 5 and 6 rebut the directionality critique; I don’t think they do, but unpacking why would take us pretty far afield. The larger pattern is what matters: when researchers ask the kids themselves, across study after study, the apocalyptic picture doesn’t materialize.

None of this means social media is harmless for every kid. It clearly isn’t. For a very small minority of teens, it appears that they are unable to handle these services in a healthy manner. Some kids experience harassment. Some kids lose sleep. Some kids who are already struggling find that social media makes the struggling worse. These are real issues that deserve real attention.

But the policy response that actually fits the data isn’t banning social media, criminalizing its use by minors, or building elaborate age verification regimes that compromise privacy for everyone. The response that fits the data is identifying the small percentage of kids who are actually having trouble and getting them real help: mental health resources, school counselors, and easier access to therapy. It also means giving parents and teachers better tools for understanding how to recognize when a kid is actually struggling. The boring, unglamorous, underfunded work of actually caring for kids who are struggling — not sweeping policy gestures that make worried parents feel like something is being done while the kids who actually need help go without.

The moral panic response is the lazy response. It treats every teenager as presumptively damaged by the same thing, ignores what teenagers actually report about their own experiences, and papers over the reality that the kids who need help will still need help after social media is regulated into oblivion — because for those kids, social media overuse usually signals existing distress rather than causing it.

Haidt is doing a victory lap. The kids Pew just surveyed didn’t get the memo that they’re supposed to be miserable because of TikTok. Fifteen percent of them say TikTok makes them feel better about themselves. Three percent say it makes them feel worse. Seven-in-ten report their overall experience on these platforms is mostly positive.

At some point, the people telling us there’s a generational catastrophe are going to have to reckon with the fact that the generation they claim is in catastrophe keeps telling researchers something very different. That reckoning doesn’t seem to be coming from Haidt anytime soon. But the data keeps piling up anyway.