Trump’s social media lawsuits feature a mashup of arguments courts have already rejected
Former president Donald Trump’s latest attempt at getting back on mainstream social media platforms came in the form of lawsuits on Wednesday against Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — each featuring a series of claims that multiple courts, including the US Supreme Court, have rebuffed.
Trump was suspended from Facebook and Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots at the US Capitol and blocked from YouTube a few days later; all three companies cited posts that encouraged or supported the violence. He’d previously had messages that promoted baseless claims of voter fraud flagged as misleading or in violation of platform rules. He remains banned from posting on all three sites for now.
On Wednesday, Trump filed lawsuits against each company, joined by co-plaintiffs who claimed they were also banned from posting or had their content — largely posts about the coronavirus pandemic, vaccines, and mask-wearing rules — demonetized, removed, or flagged as misleading. Each case raises the same two core claims: that the social media giants were operating as a “state actor” and had violated the First Amendment when they restricted certain speech, and that the federal law that immunizes these companies against being sued for how they moderate content, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, was itself unconstitutional.
Trump isn’t the first person to try to apply the First Amendment — which deals with government regulation of speech — to a private company or even the first conservative to go after these specific social media companies. But similar efforts have failed to gain traction in court. Caitlin Vogus, deputy director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said she wasn’t aware of any court that had found the First Amendment applied to the editorial judgments of private companies.
“The lawsuits are claiming that the former president’s First Amendment rights were violated by the decision to suspend his account, when in fact that is exactly backwards,” Vogus said. “The First Amendment strongly protects the decision by these companies to make content moderation decisions.” [Continue reading…]