Opinion: Trump’s inefficient lawsuits don’t hold a chance

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The frivolous lawsuits represent a desperate attempt by a concerned former politician to get headlines after being ousted from the voter position in the 2020 presidential election and boot the platforms he has long used as his megaphone after the January 6 insurgency.

It’s clear why Trump is bringing the lawsuits: as a way of trying to regain the monopoly on public attention he has now lost. In May, a review by NewsWhip, a social media tracking firm, found that interactions about him on social media had fallen 91% since January. For a man who seems to seek limelight above all else, this is clearly not acceptable. Perhaps it is also an attempt to rally conservatives to stay relevant as a party leader before the next election round.

That said, there are three reasons why no legitimate case will be made.

First, it is not necessary to give him a platform of private companies. But the former president does not seem to have understood the meaning of the Bill of Rights. On Wednesday, Trump claimed the company’s bans were “unconstitutional” and he defended the First Amendment. But, according to the First Amendment, the government cannot restrict the rights to free speech. Companies can do whatever they want, more or less. That’s why a federal judge just blocked a Florida law that attempted to dictate how social platforms can moderate content. It is noteworthy that this was ignored by a former chief executive. It is absurd that Trump claimed in his press conference that social media companies are no longer private because, under Section 230 of the Communities Act of 1934, the government protected them from responsibility for what was posted by users on their platforms. Arguing that they are not private is wrong – they will remain private companies, like all other companies subject to United States laws. (Oddly, while in office, Trump demanded the repeal of Section 230 and still threatened to veto defense spending otherwise, but the shield remains.)

Moreover, there are many precedents for allowing the government to restrict speech when it proves harmful. Some of the reasons why free speech may be limited by law include opportunities for defamation, imminent and genuine threats, and speech that facilitates crimes and invasions of privacy, wrote law professor Danielle Keats Citron in “Hate Crime in Cyberspace.” So it’s unlikely that a court will buy into the idea that companies that enforce the same kind of restrictions as government speech that can cause harm are wrong.

After all, let’s remember why Trump booted from social platforms in the first place: for violating their terms of service by using harmful language. For example, in upholding the decision to ban Trump from its platform after the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the Facebook administrator said his tweets violated policies prohibiting users from supporting or praise those who “engage in violence.” He has now been banned from Facebook for at least two years. Similarly, with a permanent ban on him, Twitter noted that Trump’s tweets violated the Glorification of Violence policy.

Therefore, with Trump’s removal from their platforms, social media companies are only enforcing policies that apply to everyone – regardless of their political beliefs. If Trump wants to use the platforms, all he has to do is read their terms of service and follow them – though, it’s scary that a then President of the United States needs a company to tell him that it is unacceptable to support violence.

Finally, while Trump claims that platforms are biased against conservatives, this claim has repeatedly been proven wrong. Earlier this year, a study by NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights found that the opposite is true: their algorithms often give conservatives more reach than their liberals. opposite. Moreover, the Center noted, the claim that conservatives censor platforms “is a kind of disinformation: a lie for which there is no reliable evidence to support it.” As I said before, Trump’s frequent claims of anti-conservative bias and threats to control social platforms while in office have likely scared platforms into not restricting his speech that violated their rules. in service earlier in his presidency. So, if anything, while in office, he has long benefited from an exclusion from the rules that work for him. While the tech companies accused declined to comment on Wednesday, they have long said they do not discriminate based on the political views of their users. And, in the past, courts have reacted to similar lawsuits by simply removing them. There is no reason not to expect a similar outcome at this time.

In bringing these lawsuits, Trump is clearly trying to regain some attention lost and rallying conservatives by mobilizing them against a common enemy: Big Tech. But the facts are not in him. In this regard, the former president is simply holding a trump card.

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