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President Trump has filed a lawsuit against Twitter with the intention of getting his popular account back. It was banned on January 8 following the Capitol Building entry by patriots as well as Antifa provocateurs that had infiltrated the group. Coincidentally, the NOQ Report Twitter account was banned an hour before the President’s.
According to Kyle Becker:
On Friday, Donald Trump filed a suit against Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey with the aim to restore his massive and influential Twitter account. Failing to restore it is a violation of his First Amendment rights, the suit argues, and is tantamount to interfering in political elections. The suit reads:
“Coerced by members of the United States Congress, operating under an unconstitutional immunity granted by a permissive federal statute, and acting directly with federal officials, Defendant is censoring Plaintiff, a former President of the United States. On January 8, 2021, Defendant indefinitely banned Plaintiff from its platform, a major avenue of public discourse. Defendant’s censorship and prior restraint of Plaintiff’s speech violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and likewise violates Florida’s newly enacted Stop Social Media Censorship Act (“SSMCA”). Defendant exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate. Defendant not only banned Plaintiff from its platform, but also extended its prior restraint to innumerable Users who post comments about Plaintiff. As Professor Alan M. Dershowitz opines: ‘[p]laintiff’s right to speak freely has been seriously compromised by… Twitter. Moreover, the rights of his audience to have access to his views have also been curtailed’.”
Defendant’s censorship of Plaintiff became state action for First Amendment purposes when it resulted from “the State’s exercise of ‘coercive power,’ . . . when the State provided ‘significant encouragement, either overt or covert’” in Plaintiff’s censorship, or when Defendant acted as a “willful participant in joint activity” with the state in censoring Plaintiff. United Brentwood Acad. v. Tenn. Secondary Sch. Athletic Ass’n. 531 U.S. 288, 296 (2001) (Thomas, J., dissenting) (citations omitted). All three factors—coercion, significant encouragement, and willful participation in joint activity—are in operation here. Defendant’s censorship of Plaintiff evidences a pattern of content and viewpoint-based prior restraint, carrying the heaviest presumption against constitutional validity, and violates Florida’s newly enacted SSMCA. Thus, on both constitutional and state law grounds, Plaintiff is entitled to an injunction requiring Defendant to reinstate Plaintiff’s access to his account(s) with Defendant.”
The lawsuit then enters into the record several statements of fact before providing its conclusions:
“Defendant is liable for its own speech as well as its own actions. When Defendant works as a partner with the government to censor its Users’ First Amendment rights, Defendant is legally accountable for its deeds. … Defendant’s false statements posted on Plaintiff’s Twitter account are unfair trade and deceptive practices, as Users joined Twitter with the expectation that they would be treated fairly and without slander,” read the filing.
“While government officials are permitted to express their, or the government’s, preferences about what a private company should or should not do, they cannot exert coercive pressure on private parties to censor the speech of others,” Trump’s filing read, adding that Democratic members of Congress and President Joe Biden “have subjected social media companies and their CEOs, including Defendant, to increasing pressure to censor speech disfavored by them, and to promote their favored speech, or else face catastrophic legislative and/or regulatory consequences. … As such, Plaintiff’s censorship was an unconstitutional deprivation of Plaintiff’s free speech, in that the censorship was in response to government coercion.”
Social media companies are interfering in U.S. elections by suppressing, censoring, and silencing politicians that administrators disagree with politically. They should not be given liability protection from the federal government while continuing to engage in speech that violates the U.S. Constitution.
Donald Trump’s lawsuit would thus set a precedent that would benefit all Americans: If you are a forum for public speech, then you should have to abide by the United States’ constitutional laws.
My initial reaction was negative. Granted, I hate Twitter even if I realize it is unfortunately still a valid place to find news and communications with fellow patriots. Perhaps it was this hatred for the social media giant that made me wish the President would reconsider.
Then, I remembered two things. First, it may behoove someone like me to instantly rebuke the platform because I do not have the type of reach President Trump had on it, but Trump could use the platform to spread his message far and wide. His account was exceptional; every Tweet was newsworthy to some extent. Even if the platform hates conservatives and Christians and does everything within their power to make our lives harder, there are ways to use the enemy’s weapon against them. Nobody does that better than Trump.
The second reason I decided it may be okay for the President to get back on Twitter is if he plans to finally launch his own social media platform. It’s a longshot; there seems to have been a couple of starts and stops in that arena and nothing appears to be brewing right now. But if he does make his own platform, there would be no better place to draw users in than by Tweeting about it.
I don’t believe this is the case, but one can hope. Either way, I do hope he gets his account back for the precedent it sets, but I hope he then allows his account to go dormant shortly after he’s back on. It would be a huge symbolic victory of he gets his account back, only to abandon or even delete it. They do not deserve the attention he brings nor the financial benefits Twitter received by growing the number of conservative users.
Neither a new platform nor a Trump middle finger to Twitter is likely, but one can hope. Then again, I do miss having his Tweets in my feed. Maybe getting his account back wouldn’t be so bad after all.
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