Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are actively coordinating with the government to censor people, which he wants to bring to an end using his new lawsuits.
Trump, who has been banned from most major social media platforms, brought a class-action lawsuit Wednesday against tech giants Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, along with their respective CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai.
The lawsuits will allow the former president to represent a larger group of affected people who he says have been unfairly censored by problematic content moderation policies caused by the collusion of government and Big Tech, Trump argued in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
“In effect, Big Tech has been illegally deputized as the censorship arm of the U.S. government,” Trump wrote.
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Trump said that his lawsuit argues that “Big Tech companies are being used to impose illegal and unconstitutional government censorship,” which he claims is occurring due to Democrats in Congress being able to “coerce platforms into censoring their political opponents.”
The former president said that Congress has pressured Big Tech CEOs to censor false stories and disinformation, which they do using “an army of partisan fact-checkers loyal to the Democrat Party.”
Conservatives, though, have not been constrained by Facebook’s fact-checkers on high-profile occasions and often stretch or break the content moderation rules.
Trump also claimed that Big Tech platforms are “actively coordinating” with government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove content from social media.
Trump said this “coercion and coordination” between Big Tech companies and the government is unconstitutional and that the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can not use private actors to achieve what the Constitution prohibits it from doing itself.
However, the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protections do not apply to private organizations and platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, meaning that Trump’s lawsuit is unlikely to succeed, according to a number of prominent First Amendment lawyers.
Trump also claimed that social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are manipulating and controlling the national political discourse by censoring content in the past year, including evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, physicians discussing coronavirus treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, and certain articles critical of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
Trump went on to cite people who he said had been unfairly banned from major platforms such as Facebook and YouTube for sharing information that violated their content moderation rules.
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However, just last week, a federal court blocked a controversial Florida social media law from going into effect, saying that forcing online platforms to host political speech violates the First Amendment.
