It seems that Donald Trump, Ex-President of the United States of America, is about done with social media platforms namely Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Trump was previously booted out of these platforms back in January when he allegedly used them to incite hate and violence among the people that led to the death of five people and hundreds of federal charges.
Reports said that Trump had riled a mob of his supporters to storm the US Capitol while members of Congress were trying to vote and certify the results of the 2020 elections. People called it an act of coop and it ultimately failed. This all led to social media platforms to ban him or as people say “cancel” him. He is currently suspended from Twitter, his Facebook account is locked for 2 years, and he has also been banned from Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest.
Trump has now announced three class-action lawsuits against Twitter, Google, and Facebook. The lawsuits have been filed in Florida yesterday and list the companies and their CEOs as defendants. The lawsuit is also being supported by America First Policy Institute, which is a nonprofit organization patched together by former members of the Trump administration.
The news came from Trump himself when he announced the lawsuits in a press conference at his golf club in Bedminister, New Jersey. He said that “We’re asking the US district court for the southern district of Florida to order an immediate halt to social media companies’ illegal, shameful censorship of the American people”. The lawsuit basically said that Trump and other conservative organizations had their First Amendment rights trampled by Big Tech (you know Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc) when it exercised its First Amendment rights to boot undesirables.
He further said that “We’re demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and canceling that you know so well. Our case will prove this censorship is unlawful. It’s unconstitutional, and it’s completely un-American. We all know that. We know that very, very well”. It’s weird seeing how Trump’s lawyers are spinning the story into Americans getting their freedom of speech taken away from them.
While I applaud that social media platforms did finally take action, I still think why they didn’t do anything when Trump called for all Muslims to be banned from the country or when he lied to the public about the coronavirus and voter fraud. But hey, I’m not being nitpicky at all.