To hear my elders tell it, millennials are entitled.
For as long as I can remember, we’ve been called the participation trophy generation. It’s been said that we’re lazy, we don’t work as hard, and we believe we deserve the best just for showing up. All of that has been debunked pretty thoroughly, by the way, but the narrative persists.
So, pardon my somewhat snide reaction to the latest Trump lawsuit, which is chock-full of the entitlement millennials have been accused of for so long — and from a boomer, no less.
This week, the former U.S. president filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google. In it, he claims he and other conservatives have been wrongfully censored. At a press conference for the case, Donald Trump demanded his social media accounts be reactivated (they were removed following his involvement in the Jan. 6 riot at our nation’s capital).
According to a report by the Associated Press, Trump stated, “We’re asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to order an immediate halt to social media companies’ illegal, shameful censorship of the American people. We’re going to hold Big Tech very accountable.”
It cannot be said often enough that the aforementioned tech companies are private entities. They offer a free service with terms and conditions that the vast majority of the world’s population manages not to violate.
Is there bias in their practices? Perhaps, though top accounts on Facebook continue to be well-known conservative figures such as Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza, and Dan Bongino. But that’s really beside the point.
Private companies have a right to censorship; anything less would be a violation of the business owners’ First Amendment rights. The government cannot compel you to say or not say what you wish not to. If Trump were to have his way, this is exactly what the government would be doing. Not only that, it would be telling private business owners they have to host speech by a former (and potentially future) political candidate. There have been many egregious violations of free speech in our history, but none that surpass that in recent memory.
Fortunately, legal experts say Trump’s lawsuit is dead on arrival. And a related law in Florida seeking to force tech companies to host political candidates was recently blocked by a judge as well.
Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told the Associated Press the following: “The First Amendment applies to government censorship or speech regulation. It does not stop private sector corporations from regulating content on their platforms. … In fact, Facebook and Twitter themselves have a First Amendment free speech right to determine what speech their platforms project and amplify — and that right includes excluding speakers who incite violence.”
This is a pretty black-and-white issue. You either believe in the right to free speech, even and especially when you dislike how another person uses their right, or you don’t believe in it at all. But it’s hard to imagine a more entitled position than the belief that others must promote and publish your thoughts.
Whether or not this lawsuit is yet another grift remains to be seen. But this wouldn’t be the first time Trump used this kind of ploy to garner attention or raise money. Notably, he used his claims of election fraud to raise $280 million, of which only $13 million went to actual court challenges in which attorneys came nowhere close to making the same allegations in a court of law as Trump and his team invoked on-air.
Trump is reportedly already raising funds off this lawsuit as well, making it murky what his end goals are. Whatever the case, we know his goal is not to uphold free speech or our constitutional values.
Hannah Cox is a libertarian-conservative writer and activist. She is the content manager and brand ambassador for the Foundation for Economic Education, a fellow for Americans for Prosperity, and a fellow at Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
