by Daniel Greenfield
This isn't a one-shot deal. It's part of an extended legal battle positioning for a Supreme Court endgame.
Think of this as Step 2.
Governor Ron DeSantis signing a law restricting Big Tech censorship of political candidates was Step 1. Filing a class-action lawsuit in Florida is the next step after a legal environment was created by state legislation that allowed the lawsuit to be filed. Normally any lawsuit like this would have been a very long shot. It's still a long shot, but it now has the cover of an actual law that's on the books.
Big Tech and its Democrat judges and lawyers are obviously fighting the law with everything they've got.
A Clinton judge already intervened to protect Big Tech absurdly claiming that preventing them from censoring political candidates violates their First Amendment rights. So this is a legal battle that is taking place on multiple levels. But Florida is potentially much more hospitable to a campaign against Big Tech and so there are a number of reasons why, aside from residency, President Trump is filing his lawsuit there.
1. Big Tech has relatively little influence in Florida where the heavyweights are tourism and entertainment companies like Disney. You can expect Big Tech to start buying more influence in the state, but it'll take a while to build up its operation.
2. Under Governor DeSantis, Florida is actually moving affirmatively on legislation while other Republican governors are vetoing laws like this in response to pressure from Big Tech and assorted sports franchises and companies.
This isn't a one-shot deal. It's part of an extended legal battle positioning for a Supreme Court endgame. That's a long and hard road which will require framing it on such terms as to give Chief Justice Roberts as few excuses for tanking it as possible.
In the Facebook lawsuit, Trump contends that he was banned “using non-existent or broad, vague or ever shifting standards,” and accuses the company of prior restraint against him and other proposed class members.
That's undeniably true. Even Facebook's own leftist oversight board admitted as much. But that's typical of a double standard setup in which AOC doesn't get held accountable for Holocaust analogies and leftist rioters are labeled peaceful protesters even when they're attacking government buildings.
The lawsuit claims that Facebook has “also mounted an aggressive campaign of censorship against a multitude of Putative Class Members through censorship (flagging, shadow banning, etc.) resulting from legislative coercion.”
That's the class action part. Trump is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit involving the censoring of a class of conservatives.
The Trump lawsuit takes aim in part at Section 230, the portion of a 1996 law that provides legal immunity for the way that tech platforms moderate third party content on their site. It contends that this is an “unconstitutional delegation of authority to regulate free speech,” and that under pressure from Congress, Facebook can “impose a prior restraint on the protected political speech of a sitting President of the United States.” The lawsuit claims that “Democrat legislators in Congress” exerted “overt coercion” to compel the platform to “censor” views.
That last part is where things get interesting.
The Leftist defense of the censorship is that Facebook isn't a government agency. But that defense is fairly weak after years of Democrat hearings and pressure campaigns on Facebook. Justice Thomas has in particular appeared open to the argument that Big Tech censoring Republicans in response to Democrat pressure is state action. And it's not hard to find plenty of examples of Democrat elected officials threatening, berating, and demanding that Facebook censor their political opponents.
When government officials demand that a company censor its opponents, and it eventually complies, that's state action.
And that may prove to be the best argument because, unlike a lot of others, it has a century of precedents behind it.
Daniel Greenfield
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/07/president-trump-sues-big-tech-over-censorship-daniel-greenfield/
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