A judge has put a stay on his temporary orders requiring online platform X to reinstate the account of a cryptocurrency analyst and to take down about 400 accounts allegedly impersonating him.
The interim orders, returnable to next week, were granted by the High Court’s Mr Justice Max Barrett on Thursday to Eduaordo Jardel Furlan Farina.
On Friday, senior counsel Michael Howard asked that they be stayed for reasons including that X was concerned some of the alleged impersonator accounts may be genuine.
X was being asked to make a value judgment about those accounts on the assumption of the existence of a legal right not yet established and it is entitled to be protected pending the hearing of the case, he said.
A solicitor for X had set out the basis for the July 17th suspension of Mr Farina’s account in an affidavit, he also said.
Barrister Michael O’Doherty, for Mr Farina, argued X has still not provided any evidence or correspondence to support what it said was the basis for the suspension of Mr Farina’s account.
X’s objections could be addressed by a rewording of the interim orders, he said.
His side had had to come to court because X failed to engage with Mr Farina’s complaints and its only responses until now had come from robots, he said.
Having heard both sides, Mr Justice Barrett said he was reserving his ruling on how the matter should be addressed but he would stay the interim orders pending that ruling.
In seeking the orders on Thursday, Mr O’Doherty said Mr Farina, an Athens-based content creator, cryptocurrency expert and analyst, estimated he was losing up to $20,000 monthly due to the suspension of his account.
Mr Farina, with 170,000 followers on X, was also concerned some of his followers have suffered financial losses from engaging with some imposter accounts in the mistaken belief they were dealing with him.
The court was told Mr Farina’s account was suspended on July 17th without any prior warning for “ban evasion”, a platform rule which prohibits account holders from circumventing X enforcement actions.
Mr Farina’s solicitor Rory Knight said his client immediately tried to contact X to appeal the suspension, which he believed was done in error, perhaps in the belief his account was an impersonation account, but X responded to him and his solicitor with automated replies.
Mr Farina had in 2012 set up an account with the defendant, then known as Twitter, and known as X from July 2023. XRP is a cryptocurrency used by a platform called the XRP Ledger and Mr Farina used his X account to provide advice to would-be investors in XRP.