Trump sues Twitter, Google and Facebook alleging 'censorship'

Trump sues Twitter, Google and Facebook alleging 'censorship'
Published2 hours ago

Former US president Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against tech giants Google, Twitter and Facebook, claiming that he is the victim of censorship.

The class action lawsuit also targets the three companies' CEOs.

Mr Trump was suspended from his social accounts in January over public safety concerns in the wake of the Capitol riots, led by his supporters.

On Wednesday, Mr Trump called the lawsuit "a very beautiful development for our freedom of speech".

In a news conference from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Mr Trump railed against social media companies and Democrats, who he accused of espousing misinformation.

"We are demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and cancelling that you know so well," he said.

The suit requests a court order to end alleged censorship. Mr Trump added if they could ban a president, "they can do it to anyone".

None of the tech companies named have yet responded to the lawsuit, which was filed to a federal court in Florida.

Mr Trump was joined at the announcement by former Trump officials who have since created the not-for-profit America First Policy Institute.

The former president called the post that got him banned from Twitter, "the most loving sentence".

According to Twitter, the tweets that resulted in Mr Trump's ban for "glorification of violence" were from 8 January, two days after the rioting in the nation's capital. The riot followed his repeated claims, without evidence, that the election was rigged in Joe Biden's favour.

He wrote that the "great patriots" who voted for him will have "a giant voice" and "will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form", and in another post said he would not attend President Joe Biden's inauguration.

At the same time on Wednesday, Mr Trump's Republican allies in Congress released a memo describing their plan "to take on Big Tech".

The agenda calls for antitrust measures to "break up" the companies, and a revamping of a law known as Section 230.

Section 230, which Mr Trump tried to repeal as president, essentially stops companies like Facebook and Twitter from being liable for the things that users post. It gives the companies "platform" rather than "publisher" status.

"It's a liability protection the likes of which nobody in the history of our country has ever received," Mr Trump said, criticising the law on Wednesday.

He added that the law invalidates the companies' statuses as private companies.

The lawsuit has been criticised by legal experts, who pointed to Mr Trump's habit of issuing lawsuits for media attention but not aggressively defending the claims in court. His argument of free speech infringement has also been questioned by analysts, as the companies he accuses have those same First Amendment protections in determining content on their sites.

Trump struggles to be heard:
Analysis box by James Clayton, North America technology reporter

Donald Trump's muzzling on social media has been extremely effective.

His megaphone removed, Trump has struggled to be heard at times.

His plans for his own social media platform have so far come to nothing.

This lawsuit illustrates, if it were needed, just how important the big social media companies are to him.

A key strategy of Trumpism is being able to speak directly to voters - bypassing traditional media.

Facebook proved particularly important to Trump - giving him access to millions of Americans at the click of a button.

Experts believe the lawsuits are unlikely to succeed.

Mr Trump will argue that his First Amendment rights have been violated. But tech companies will say that, as private companies, they have the right to decide who uses their platform - an argument that is likely to succeed.

House Republicans, too, want to introduce legislation that will "break up" Big Tech. However, without a majority in either house they will struggle to do so.

Trump desperately wants to get back into your newsfeed, but that may not be likely to happen anytime soon.

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Trump sues Twitter, Google and Facebook alleging 'censorship' 1Qk4U7p

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7-9-2021

Trump can’t beat Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in court – but the fight might be worth more than a win

From condo salesman to reality TV host to leader of the free world, Donald Trump has occupied several lifetimes' worth of identities over a remarkable career of reinventions.
Even so, the billionaire mogul's latest metamorphosis – into a consumer-rights plaintiff seeking to regulate big business – is a peculiar one.

With a volley of lawsuits against the operators of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, former President Trump is asking the courts to do what tycoon Trump once would have denounced: tell some of America's most powerful corporations that they have no choice who they do business with.

As a First Amendment and media law scholar, I believe the former president knows he can't win in court.
Here's why – and why even his most ardent supporters don't really want him to.

Content moderation rules;
After the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by rioters bent on preventing Congress from certifying President Biden's electoral win, all of the major social platforms – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – pulled the plug on Trump's accounts.
The companies cited internal rules about misuse of their platforms to spread misinformation and incite violence.

Trump's lawsuit barrage seeks not just to overturn his own bans but to invalidate a 1996 federal statute, Section 230 of the

Section 230 has been called the law that “created the internet," as it enables anyone who operates or uses a website – not, as Trump claims, only social media behemoths – to disavow responsibility for what outsiders come onto the site and say.

The law does enable YouTube to deactivate videos,
or entire accounts, without assuming “ownership" of anything libelous that remains viewable.

Social networks have enforced their “content moderation" rules spottily and without much transparency. That's a bad business practice, and it's arguably unfair.
the Constitution doesn't offer a remedy for all of life's adversities. It certainly doesn't offer one for Donald Trump here.

Social media isn't government;
Court after court has rejected the argument that because social networks are widely considered –
in the Supreme Court's words –
“the modern public square," speakers are entitled to demand access to their platforms just as they are entitled to use a physical public square.
That's not how the First Amendment works.

The protections of the First Amendment are triggered when a public agency exercises governmental power to restrict people's speech – what is known as “state action."

On rare occasions, private organizations can be considered “governmental" – for instance, when a private hospital or university is given police power to make arrests on its premises.

But operating a video-sharing platform is not a
“governmental" function –
and judges have said so, unanimously.

Conservatives, including Trump, cannot possibly want private businesses to be governed by the same constitutional standards that apply to cities and counties.

If courts started applying the Bill of Rights to Walmart or McDonald's just because they are large and powerful entities that control a lot of property, those establishments would be forced to welcome even the most disagreeable speakers –
let's say, a diner wearing a “F*** Trump" T-shirt – no matter how many offended customers complain.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other Big Tech leaders testified virtually at a congressional hearing in October 2020 regarding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
which guarantees that tech companies cannot be sued for content on their platforms.

Upending conservative gospel;
For decades, conservatives have fought –
quite hard and quite successfully in court –
to establish that corporations have First Amendment rights equivalent to those of living, breathing people. That includes the corporations operating social media channels.

In a recent essay about democracy in the social media age, I explain how the Communications Decency Act has evolved into the near-impenetrable liability shield that it is today.

Today, the law unmistakably entitles the Twitters of the world to do just about anything with their customers' posts:

Take them down, leave them up, add warnings or modifiers. If users are aggrieved by the way they're treated, they can do exactly what they'd do in the offline world: Take their business somewhere else.

Old news;
The Supreme Court already decisively dealt with this issue a half-century ago, when newspapers and television stations held power over political discourse comparable to that of Facebook and Twitter today.

In the case, Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, the justices rejected a state legislative candidate's insistence that he was entitled to space in the local newspaper to respond to criticism in two editorial columns.

While the justices acknowledged that a big-city newspaper might have a near-monopoly over information about local elections – sound familiar? – they agreed that the First Amendment would not tolerate commandeering the presses of a private publisher in the interest of government-enforced “fairness."

A federal judge in Florida, relying on the Tornillo case, just ordered the state not to enforce a newly enacted “anti-deplatforming" law enabling any Florida political candidate whose social media posts are hidden, modified or deactivated to sue the platform.

The judge concluded that the law violates the First Amendment rights of the platforms by (for example) compelling platforms to let candidates post anything they want, without moderation. “Balancing the exchange of ideas among private speakers," the judge wrote, “is not a legitimate governmental interest."

'The Supreme Court,' writes the author, 'already decisively dealt with this issue a half-century ago, when newspapers and television stations held power over political discourse comparable to that of Facebook and Twitter today.

No one involved with this case could be serious about winning in federal court. But that is not the “court" to which the former president is playing.

Tilting at Silicon Valley appeals directly to Trump's populist followers, many of whom probably suspect that their own clever tweets failed to go viral only because the system is rigged against them.

But even if, as experts suggest, Trump's case is destined to fail, dismissal would be yet another headline and fundraising hook.

And even if Trump were ordered to pay Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's attorney fees, they'd have to queue up behind decades' worth of unpaid Trump creditors.

Frank LoMonte, Director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Trump is a bonified '''Karen""
hell yeah, he is the king of the Karnes!!

BWAHAAA-- King Karen!!

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Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

10-26-2021

Trump's lawsuit against Twitter dealt another
major blow by federal judge

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump was dealt yet another blow in his lawsuit against Twitter for banning him from their platform, as a federal judge in Florida ruled that his attorneys could not
file their claim in the state.

The issue turned on the so-called "forum selection clause" in Twitter's Terms of Service, requiring that any lawsuit against the company be heard in the Northern District of California, where the company
is headquartered.

"The Court finds that Trump's status as President
of the United States does not exclude him from the requirements of the forum selection clause in Twitter's Terms of Service," concluded Judge Robert Scola.

A case in a California district court would fall under the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is broadly considered to be a more hostile venue to the former president because it has far fewer Republican judicial appointees than the Eleventh Circuit, which oversees district court rulings in the state of Florida.

However, experts have suggested Trump's lawsuit, which seeks to find Twitter in violation of his free speech rights by deplatforming him, is unlikely to succeed in any venue.

This is the second ruling that Trump cannot sue Twitter in Florida instead of California.
A similar ruling was issued by Miami-based federal judge Kevin Michael Moore,
an appointee of President George H. W. Bush, three weeks ago.

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