Donald Trump’s lawsuit to challenge Twitter ban dismissed by judge

No one, except for Donald Trump and his inner circle, expected the former president’s legal challenge to his permanent Twitter ban to succeed. But now a federal judge has officially dismissed the suit.

Trump, joined by the American Federation of Conservatives and five individuals, sued Twitter (and then-CEO Jack Dorsey) in July 2021 in a class-action lawsuit alleging they had been “censored” by being fired. Trump’s lawsuit asserted that Twitter (in addition to Facebook and Google, which Trump has also sued) are in fact “government actors”, and therefore are bound by the First Amendment’s prohibition on restricting freedom of expression.

But Judge James Donato of the US District Court for the Northern District of California rejected that idea. The judge wrote that Trump’s lawsuit “does not reasonably allege that Twitter acted as a government entity when it closed the plaintiffs’ accounts.”

The judge, responding to another claim in the lawsuit, said, “It cannot reasonably be said that the government forced Twitter to take action through Section 230, which in no way imposed any firm obligations on Twitter to act in any particular way. Thus, The amended complaint does not reasonably claim a First Amendment lawsuit against Twitter.” (Read a copy of the judgment in this link.)

Twitter permanently banned Trump on January 8, after the deadly attack on the US Capitol two days earlier, citing the risk of continued violence if the then-president was allowed to remain on the social network. Others, including Facebook and YouTube, have followed suit in taking down Trump’s platform.



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