Former President Donald Trump plans to sue Facebook, Twitter, and Google, arguing they have wrongfully censored his accounts on their platforms, Trump announced Wednesday.
The class action lawsuit, first reported by The Associated Press, will have Trump as the lead plantiff and will demand that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai reinstate his accounts and privileges on their various platforms. The social media platforms credited their bans to the pro-Trump storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, which they say Trump incited. Trump continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was fraudulent or rigged. (RELATED: Twitter Is Suspending Accounts That Post Donald Trump’s Statements From His Website)
“Today in conjunction with the America first policy 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 CEOs, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. Three real nice guys,” Trump said. “We are asking the U.S. District Court of the Southern District to order an immediate halt to social media companies’s illegal shameful censorship of the American people and that is exactly what they are doing.”
WATCH:
Trump’s announcement comes days after his senior adviser Jason Miller launched an alternative social media platform, GETTR. Miller has described the site as a “marketplace of ideas” where conservatives will not face censorship.
Facebook reviewed Trump’s ban on its site in early June, announcing the ban would last two years and end on January 7, 2023. Twitter has not clarified the term of Trump’s ban, but it is presumed to be indefinite.
“We are today announcing new enforcement protocols to be applied in exceptional cases such as this, and we are confirming the time-bound penalty consistent with those protocols which we are applying to Mr. Trump’s accounts,” Facebook said in a statement in June. “Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols.”
“We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” it continued.
This post originally appeared on and written by:
Anders Hagstrom
The Daily Caller 2021-07-07 15:31:00
