Trump announces lawsuit against Facebook, Google and Twitter
(www.youtube.com)
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Here are the actual lawsuits in case anyone wants to read them. Trump v. Facebook, Trump v. Twitter, and Trump v. Youtube. The TL/DR of them is that Trump is alleging that he and the various co-plaintiffs were removed from the respective platforms at the behest of various government actors (including Michelle Obama and the CDC) in violation of the First Amendment and that these tech companies are using § 230 as cover.
Legally, its not a bad argument. However, it is going to be very hard to prove and because these suits were written so broadly, its going to be hard to survive summary judgment or possibly even a 12(b)(6) motion. All bets are off if it gets to discovery however. In particular with the COVID censorship, I bet that there is evidence of censorship on behalf of the government by those platforms.
The Twitter and Facebook cases have been assigned to Obama appointees and the Youtube suit has been assigned to a W Bush appointee.
Exactly. All the generic “free speech big tech censorship” stuff will just be shot down as it has multiple times in the past. I also think that the argument that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were goaded by House Dems and Michele Obama into censoring users probably won’t fly either.
I do think that the best argument that they made is the one that these companies worked with government agents to block specific topics. We know that this happened thanks to the Fauci emails. I also don’t think that this has been litigated before. However, it’s going to be very hard to prove and that may be the suit’s downfall.
But ultimately, just like you said, they’ll just stop working so closely with the federal government since they like banning the same people and topics anyways.