Former US President Donald Trump is filing class-action lawsuits against tech giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google subsidiary YouTube, as well as their CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai respectively. The lawsuits allege the companies of violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution by “unlawfully” silencing people’s voices on their respective platforms.
Trump’s lawsuits are more or less his response to the aforementioned three platforms suspending his accounts permanently or temporarily some six months back. However, he is now also representing other users who have had their accounts “wrongly restricted or curtailed” or posts deleted by these companies, thus suppressing their viewpoints. The former President is seeking damages on behalf of all those people.
According to Trump, these lawsuits are “a very important game-changer” for the US and its citizens. “We will achieve a historic victory for American freedom and at the same time, freedom of speech,” he said at a news conference. The suits were filed in US District Court for Florida’s southern district. The America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group that has former Trump administration officials as the CEO and Chair, has supported his efforts.
Trump sues Facebook, Google, and Twitter alleging unlawful censorship
Following his defeat to Joe Biden in the US presidential elections last year, Donald Trump took to social media to spread false claims of mass voter fraud. He claimed that he had won the elections, despite every available official data proving otherwise. His false claims though incited his supporters to attack the Capitol building days before Biden swore as the new President.
Twitter permanently banned Trump following the riots. He will never be able to return to the platform, even if he holds office again in the future.
Facebook also suspended his account on the platform. In June, the company announced that Trump would remain banned for two years. YouTube, meanwhile, banned new uploads through his channel for seven days and issued a “strike” against the account.
All these measures by the social media biggies mean Trump couldn’t connect to his supporters. He even launched his own blog-style platform called “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” but failed. The former President is now taking the court route to try and lift those bans. He claims that he has been unlawfully censored by these companies.
Trump wants the court to dismiss Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This law protects companies from being liable for content posted by users. The same law also allows social media platforms to remove posts or accounts that violate their community guidelines.
However, Trump alleges that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube abusing that law to suppress certain viewpoints. As such, he wants those companies to lose that protection. “We’re not looking for a settlement. We don’t expect a settlement,” Trump said during the news conference.
However, he will most likely fail again. The First Amendment that Trump has accused Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube of violating by banning him, only limits censorship by the government, not private companies. It will now be interesting to see where things go from here on.