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“Former President Donald Trump has filed suit against three of the country’s biggest tech companies, claiming he and other conservatives have been wrongfully censored… Trump announced the action against Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube, along with the companies’ Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai, at a press conference Wednesday in New Jersey, where he demanded that his accounts be reinstated.” AP News
Here’s our recent coverage of Trump’s Facebook suspension. The Flip Side
Both sides agree that the lawsuits are unlikely to succeed:
Regarding Trump’s claim that the tech firms are effectively acting on behalf of the government and thus bound by the First Amendment, “It wasn’t long ago that the Supremes opined on when and whether a private entity in the communications industry might operate as a state actor for purposes of the First Amendment. None other than Brett Kavanaugh, in his first year on the Court, wrote the majority opinion in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, a 2019 case about a private company operating public-access television for New York City. Was the company a state actor under those circumstances? It was not, said Kavanaugh, speaking for the Court’s conservative majority…
“The Court looks skeptically at attempts to convert private entities into state actors. And it’s hard to imagine them making a sharp break from the logic above with respect to an industry worth many hundreds of billions of dollars. If social media is to be overhauled, Congress is the proper venue.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
“Like it or not, private companies can do whatever they want when it comes to making rules and tossing off incorrigible miscreants. Like, of course, Mr. Trump, who appears to have a comprehension issue when it comes to reading our Constitution. ‘Congress shall make no law,’ the First Amendment says, ‘abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ Congress, not Facebook. Congress, not Twitter. Congress, not YouTube. In fact, a government forcing these platforms to host people they don’t want to host is a violation of their First Amendment rights…
“A better route of attack for him and others bellyaching about their being made irrelevant by our digital overlords is to perhaps pass the wide range of bipartisan legislation slowly coalescing in Congress to deal with a wide range of issues such as monopoly power and the lack of resources for regulators who have to monitor powerful corporations.”
Kara Swisher, New York Times
Other opinions below.
Former President Donald J. Trump writes, “Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations. The internet is the new public square. In recent years, however, Big Tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media—banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends…
“Big Tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true…
“In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post—America’s oldest newspaper—for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden’s family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute. Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social-media accounts of the sitting president. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you—and believe me, they are.”
Donald J. Trump, Wall Street Journal
Many note that “Conservatives lost their best chance to move the needle six months ago. So long as Trump was the president, he had the ability to act unilaterally to protect political speech on social media. He could, at the very least, have forced the debate over common carriers or Section 230 up to the Supreme Court. He also had the world’s largest megaphone and largely unified conservative support, and would even have had the tentative backing of some liberals such as Elizabeth Warren on the issue…
“Why did President Trump wait until he had ceded power to begin actually attacking the tech monopolies? It seems that even the man himself is not entirely sure. According to a statement issued by Trump last month after Nigeria banned Twitter, the former president considered a similar ban in the U.S. while he was in office, but he decided against it because ‘Zuckerberg kept calling me and coming to the White House for dinner telling me how great I was.’ Now Zuck and his fellow CEOs are the ones running the show.”
John Jiang, American Spectator
“This flurry of activity reveals conservatives don't yet have a workable solution to their complaints about the biggest social media platforms. Efforts to create a friendly alternative like Gettr or Parler have thus far failed… Handing more power to regulatory agencies that conservatives will only intermittently control — and whose permanent employees may lean left even when Republicans run the executive branch — also seems problematic and could easily backfire…
“There is also the subtlety of the problem: conservatives mostly operate with ease on Facebook and Twitter, sharing content freely. But when these companies have acted heavy-handedly against them, with the suppression of the Hunter Biden and the possible COVID-19 lab-leak stories being the two most commonly cited examples, it has been more consequential than the millionth ‘socialism sucks’ meme, with no obvious comparable errors against liberals… The first Republican who can solve rather than fundraise off this dilemma may be the party's next leader.”
W. James Antle III, The Week
“[The complaint argues] that dominant platforms such as Facebook have become, in essence, organs of the state, especially when they act to suppress speech deemed harmful by the government. A judge probably won’t buy that, but it resonates with many people’s fears about social media giants’ vast reach and power — and not exclusively on the right. Governments around the world have indeed pressured social media platforms to censor speech those government do not like, and you don’t have to be a wild-eyed conspiracist to imagine it happening in the United States as well.”
Will Oremus, Washington Post
“Trump’s first response to being blackballed was to bluster about how he didn’t need those platforms, anyway. He would create his own, and make a fortune in the process. He would start a blog. His fans would find him. Not much has come of those boasts. Trump abandoned his lightly read blog after 29 days… The fact that Trump failed so miserably to find alternatives to these platforms reinforces the common-sense feeling that they are not ordinary private businesses…
“Most people understand that they are private companies but also that, in today’s America, if those three are silencing you, you are being excluded in a serious way from the public square. And many understandably wonder: Why should they get to make that call?…
“It just doesn’t feel right, in other words, that company CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai get to decide which politicians Americans can hear and which ones we can’t. Everyone mocking Trump’s misreading of the First Amendment would be foolish to dismiss that feeling.”
Fred Hiatt, Washington Post
At the same time, “It may be that getting thrown out of court could be the best thing that happens to Trump and the other plaintiffs, while the worst thing for them could be winning the case. If Section 230 were declared unconstitutional and disappeared, social media companies would be exposed to massive civil liability for the content on their platforms…
“In response, social media companies would then immediately start censoring any speech that might remotely cause them liability. They might face more lawsuits like this one by plaintiffs claiming their free speech rights were denied. At that point, social media companies might be sued out of existence, and the platforms would disappear entirely. The internet could be reduced to kitten videos and ‘have a nice day’ memes. And that’s about it. Clearly that’s not the internet Trump and his fellow plaintiffs want, but if they win and Section 230 goes away, that might be what they get.”
Danny Cevallos, NBC News Think
“As if Trump’s overriding motives weren’t clear, there were occasional moments of unintentional revelation in his latest public address. ‘Big tech happened to choose the wrong side,’ said Trump. ‘And they banned the right side.’ In his mangled locution, what that means is not that we need better legal rules of the road or more tech competition or a devolution of power away from corporate giants and toward users. It’s something much simpler, a purely Manichean judgment: Big Tech is the enemy because it doesn’t serve Trump.”
Jacob Silverman, New Republic
