Trump sues Facebook, Twitter, Google for ‘censorship’, launches his own social media platform

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On July 7, 2021, former President Donald Trump filed class-action lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their respective CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai, citing their “impermissible censorship” of his accounts.  

The lawsuits came in response to the social media giants’ decisions either to restrict temporarily Trump’s access to his accounts—Facebook and YouTube—or suspend him permanently—Twitter—for the violence that transpired during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

Key Players

Donald J. Trump was the 45th president of the United States. He used social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, throughout the course of his presidency to fundraise, shame political opponents, and communicate with supporters.

Mark Zuckerberg is founder, CEO, chairman, and controlling board member of Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook. One of Meta’s social media platforms, Facebook, is the largest platform in the world, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users as of April 2022. Zuckerberg and Facebook have come under fire for issues related to user privacy, political manipulation, and mass surveillance. 

Jack Dorsey is co-founder and CEO of Twitter, which, like Facebook, has been criticized for enabling the spread of misinformation on its platform. As of April 2022, Twitter has around 229 million monetizable daily active users according to data the company published in an investor earnings report. In April 2022, business magnate Elon Musk began to pursue the purchase of the platform.

Sundar Pichai is CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc., and has served in that role since April 10, 2015. In his time at the helm of the company, Google has faced significant criticism and legal action revolving around search neutrality and the company’s monopoly status over internet search engines. Google owns YouTube, the second most popular social media platform in the world, with approximately 2.3 billion monthly users, according to Statista.

Further Details

Trump and his surrogates’ use of social media as a mass communication method and as a tool for an ongoing re-election campaign was unprecedented for the executive office. 

According to CNN, in the four years that Trump was in power, he sent more than 25,000 tweets and retweets, an average of 18 a day. As the 2020 election neared, he ramped up his tweet storms, even by his own metrics. Many of these tweets were verifiably false, or potentially misleading about election fraud. 

On Nov. 2, 2020, the night before the presidential election, Twitter decided to flag Trump’s tweets that made premature claims of victory or unfounded claims of election fraud by either partially hiding or flagging posts below their text or obscuring them behind a misinformation warning. As it became clear that Joe Biden had won a decisive victory, Trump continued to spread misinformation and dispute election results with legal action. By Dec. 17, 2020, Twitter had flagged 362 of his tweets, according to Factba.se, a data analytics company.

As tempers flared amongst his supporters, Trump announced a “Save America Rally” to take place on Jan. 6, 2021, the day lawmakers planned to gather for a joint session in the House for the official count of Electoral College votes. At the rally, Trump urged the crowd to march to the Capitol. “We fight like hell,” Trump said, according to USA Today, “and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. … So we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue – I love Pennsylvania Avenue – and we are going to the Capitol.” 

Following the speech, a mob of supporters attacked the Capitol and clashed with police officers, which led to the death of four Trump supporters and one Capitol police officer and, eventually, many criminal prosecutions. 

On Jan. 7, 2021, Facebook suspended Trump for at least two weeks. “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. 

Initially, Twitter had only blocked Trump’s account temporarily, citing a “risk of harm” in his messages, and allowed it to be reinstated once he deleted the tweets that prompted the short-term suspension. According to The New York Times, Twitter said it would only permanently suspend Trump’s account if he continued to break its rules. 

After getting his account back the next day, Trump sent out two tweets that Twitter later posted to its blog as grounds for his permanent ban from the platform because of a “risk of further incitement of violence.”

On Jan. 12, YouTube fell in line with the other social media giants, tweeting that Trump’s accounts were to be temporarily suspended and that comments on his videos were  indefinitely disabled. 

Initially, Facebook’s suspension of Trump was intended to last until the end of his presidential term, 13 days later, and YouTube’s for only seven days. However, both companies decided to extend their bans. On March 4, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told the Atlantic Council Trump’s account would remain suspended indefinitely until the company determined that the “risk of violence has decreased.” 

On May 5, Facebook’s oversight board upheld the company’s suspension of Trump’s account, citing similar concerns of social upheaval. The following month, the board announced his account would be suspended for two years, effective from the original Jan. 7, 2021, suspension date. Once the two-year ban is up, Facebook said,  it would “look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded” in order to determine whether or not to extend the suspension. 

Outcome

Trump files suits claiming ‘censorship,’ immediately begins fundraising 

On July 7, 2021, Trump sued Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in federal court, arguing the removal of his accounts from the platforms violated his First Amendment rights. 

The lawsuits claimed that, because the platforms coordinated with government actors like the Centers for Disease Control to disseminate accurate information and curtail misinformation about the coronavirus, the private companies rise “beyond that of a private company to that of a state actor” and therefore have more limited censorship capabilities. 

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, called the assertion a “huge stretch on the law and the facts,” in an interview with CNN, adding, “No court has subscribed to this theory, so Trump seems unlikely to prevail.”

In the past, prominent conservatives had filed a string of similar lawsuits against big tech companies, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated. They have all been dismissed by the courts under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a federal law that “provides legal immunity to websites that moderate user-generated content,” according to CNN. Trump also requested a judgment declaring Section 230 unconstitutional. 

Less than an hour after announcing his lawsuits, Trump’s team began sending out fundraising appeals invoking them, according to CNN. Later, the Republican National Committee issued a fundraising request that mentioned the lawsuits as well. 

Shirin Ghaffary of Vox referred to the lawsuits as “just another fundraising tool” for Trump, calling the cases “frivolous.” 

Trump launches social media platform “Truth Social”

In the wake of being banned from popular social media platforms, Trump announced that he would be founding his own platform.

In Oct. 2021, Trump founded the Trump Media & Technology Group, which launched the new social media platform on Feb. 21, 2022. The platform, described on its website as “America’s “Big Tent” social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology,” has suffered from low downloads and low user engagement.

All three lawsuits moved to California court

Between Oct. 26 and Nov. 19, 2021, three separate federal judges for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled in line with a binding clause in each of the social media companies’ terms of service. The forum selection clause is a required agreement for all users of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Respectively for each company, it states that lawsuits must be filed in federal or state courts in California. 

The judges rejected the Trump legal team’s argument that he was exempt from the clause because of his former status as president. 

According to Courthouse News Service, Twitter’s user agreement offers exemptions for some government officials who use Twitter in an official capacity and are legally unable to accept the clause. However, Twitter’s attorneys successfully argued that the exemption did not apply to Trump because he filed as an individual, not in his capacity as president. 

In both the Facebook and Twitter case, each judge ruled that Trump failed to show how keeping the case in Florida was in the public interest. 

Department of Justice intervenes to back Section 230 in Twitter lawsuit

On Nov. 18, 2021, Courthouse News Service reported that the U.S. Department of Justice announced a plan to intervene in the Twitter lawsuit to defend the constitutionality of Section 230. The three-page notice requested that U.S. District Judge James Donato, in San Francisco, set a Dec. 9, 2021, deadline for the government to submit a memorandum in support of Section 230. 

The decision marks the third time since the spring of 2020 that the government has intervened in a case challenging Section 230. In each of the prior two cases, both filed against YouTube, the DOJ cited the February 2020 decision in Prager v. Google, which held that private entities like YouTube are not bound by the First Amendment.

During his presidency, Trump made two failed attempts to change Section 230, which included signing a now-revoked executive order to change the act and vetoing a defense spending bill because it did not have a provision to repeal the social media-protective measure.

Trump’s Twitter ban lawsuit dismissed

On May 6, 2022, Donato dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter, claiming that the former president’s ban from the platform appears to be legal. The order rejects that Section 230 is unconstitutional, and claims that Twitter did not violate Trump’s First Amendment rights upon the ban.

In the dismissal, Donato wrote that the terms of service agreement “expressly states that Twitter may suspend or terminate an account ‘at any time for any or no reason.’ It also states that Twitter may remove or refuse to distribute any content. There is nothing cagey or misleading about these provisions.”

The order gave Trump and a group of other banned users until May 27 to submit an amended complaint.