Former US President, Trump Sues Twitter, Facebook, Google And Their CEOs
Former US President Donald Trump has said that he will file class-action lawsuits against Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, respectively.
They censor users, according to the former President.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Trump announced the suits. The news was initially reported by Axios.
The complaints were filed in the Southern District of Florida after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the January 6 insurgency due to the potential of violence. They’re an outgrowth of the right’s continuing battle on Big Tech, which claims that internet companies restrict conservative perspectives.
“I’m filing as the lead class representative a major class-action lawsuit against the big tech giants, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter as well as their executives,” Trump said.
According to Business Insider, he is asking the court to impose punitive penalties on the tech corporations, and that further lawsuits are likely to follow.
“Our case will prove that this censorship is unlawful, unconstitutional, and un-American,” he stated.
In recent decades, the former President has threatened a large number of lawsuits, but just a few have been brought.
A request for comment from Facebook was not immediately returned. Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
The epidemic, social instability, and the 2020 presidential election have increased public pressure on social media platforms to tighten their content policing.
When Twitter put warning labels to his tweets challenging the legitimacy of mail-in voting for the 2020 presidential election in mid-2020, companies began cracking down on Trump’s posts.
He and other Republicans have been increasingly critical of mainstream digital platforms for allegedly having a liberal agenda and discriminating against conservative users, despite the fact that this assumption is unsupported by data.
Right-wing content thrives online, according to data. The right’s claims of censorship, according to a group of NYU researchers earlier this year, are simply a sort of deception.
Things got even worse when he was suspended by Twitter and Facebook for his role in the January 6 violence. Even if he decides to run for government in 2024, Twitter has banned him indefinitely, and Facebook has announced he will be barred until at least January 2023.
Experts told Insider in January that the firms have the legal authority to do so because “the First Amendment is a constraint on the power of government, not the private sector.”
As a result of the right’s battle with Big Tech, alternative platforms to mainstream services have sprung up. Parler, a social media platform with loose guidelines regarding what users can post, gained traction in late 2020 and swiftly garnered a following among conservatives, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
After Stripe and PayPal banned Trump for his role in the January 6 violence, Fox News host Dan Bongino announced earlier in July that he’s working on a payment network for conservatives. “Stripe is our objective here,” he told the Washington Post, and his AlignPay service is aimed to combat “cancel culture.”
A former Trump aide just revealed GETTR, a new social media app that looks eerily like Twitter. On Sunday, the day the program officially began, many of its users, mostly Trump supporters, were hacked.
