Trump sues tech firms for blocking him, and fund-raises off it.
- 3 years ago
Former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday sued three tech giants — Facebook, Twitter and Google — and the firms’ chief executives after the platforms took various steps to ban him or block him from posting.
Mr. Trump, speaking from his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, announced that he would serve as the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, arguing that he has been censored wrongfully by the tech companies. Speaking about “freedom of speech” and the First Amendment — which applies to the government, not to private-sector companies — Mr. Trump called his lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, a “very beautiful development.”
His political operation immediately began fund-raising off it.
At the event and in court documents, Mr. Trump’s legal team argued that the tech firms amounted to state actors and thus the First Amendment applied to them.
Legal experts said similar arguments had repeatedly failed in the courts before.
“Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t work for the government, Jack Dorsey doesn’t work for the government,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and a co-director of the High Tech Law Institute, said of the Facebook and Twitter chief executives. “The idea that somehow, magically, we can treat them as an extension of the government is illogical.”
Twitter declined to comment. Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
To some extent, the lawsuit appeared to be as much a publicity play — Mr. Trump used the opportunity to once again attack some of his favorite political targets that were unrelated to the lawsuit — as an actual legal gambit. Mr. Trump also said on Wednesday that he would pursue his anti-tech company agenda in Congress, state legislatures and “ultimately, the ballot box.”
Source: NY Times
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