Experts say Trump's social media lawsuits are likely doomed
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Legal experts and First Amendment scholars say former President Donald Trump's class-action lawsuits announced Wednesday against Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their CEOs are unlikely to go far.
The big picture: That, according to some of these experts, suggests Trump's chief aim is to fire up his supporters and fundraise off of their anger over what they see as censorship by Big Tech.
"This is not a lawsuit. It’s a fundraising grift," said Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a progressive advocacy group that often targets Big Tech.
- "There is no chance Trump's lawsuits will do any better than the dozens that have preceded it, and Trump and his lawyers surely know that," said Eric Goldman, associate dean and professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.
- "Which raises the obvious question: if Trump doesn't care if he wins in court, why did he bring the lawsuits at all?"
The Trump campaign did immediately start reaching out to supporters for fundraising after the former president revealed the lawsuits in a press conference Wednesday morning.
- Trump’s joint fundraising committee sent out a text saying, “Pres Trump: I am SUING Facebook & Twitter for UNCONSTITUTIONAL CENSORSHIP,” adding “5X-IMPACT on all gifts!"
Details: The central argument made by the plaintiff is that social media platforms are "state actors," and thus should be bound by the First Amendment's free speech protections. First Amendment experts quickly dismissed the claim as destined to fail.
- "The First Amendment simply protects citizens from government censorship," said Syracuse University associate professor Roy Gutterman. "Social media platforms exercise great power, but they are not a branch of government."
"In what constitutional universe can it be the case that Trump wasn't a state actor when he blocked critics from his social media accounts but the social media companies were state actors when they blocked him?," tweeted Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
- The Knight First Amendment Institute in 2017 filed a lawsuit on behalf of several people who were blocked by Trump on Twitter. A lower court sided with the plaintiff and argued that that Trump's Twitter account constituted" as a “public forum” under the First Amendment, so he couldn't block people.
Trump's suits also suggest that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that gives tech platforms immunity for material third-party users post or say on their sites, is unconstitutional. Experts say the reference to Section 230 is irrelevant to the case.
- "Section 230 can never be a defense to Trump's allegations of First Amendment violations,"said Goldman. "Section 230 is a statute, which cannot modify the Constitution (amending the Constitution requires a more elaborate set of procedures; Congress can't do it alone)."
- "So the defendants in Trump's cases will not assert Section 230 defenses. They will instead argue that they are not state actors The courts will agree that the services aren't state actors. This is not a close call."
The big picture: As Axios has previously noted, the former president has filed many lawsuits throughout his career, but he has rarely taken cases all the way to court, and hasn't won many of the cases that he has.
- In fact, some of his lawsuits have actually led to historic legal precedents set by courts that create stronger First Amendment protections long-term.
The bottom line: "This is not the first time social media companies have been faced with these arguments, and in the past, they have won,” said Gutterman.
