Trump Sues Twitter, Facebook, And Google For Banning Him, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That A Private Company Could Still Decline To Publish The Former President

BEDMINSTER, New Jersey. Flanked by allies at his private golf club on Wednesday, former President Donald J. Trump announced class-action lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook, and Google, resolving the long-standing concern that three private companies were still permitted to decide who appeared on their own websites.

The suits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, name the platforms and their chief executives and allege that the companies violated Mr. Trump's First Amendment rights by suspending his accounts after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Legal scholars noted that the First Amendment restrains the government rather than private firms, a structure that leaves the former president asking a federal court to compel three corporations to host him against their will.

"If they can do it to me, they can do it to anyone," Mr. Trump told reporters, describing a silencing so complete that it was carried live by every major news network and quoted in full by every newspaper in the country. He went on to demand "an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing," remarks transcribed and distributed by the same press he had assembled to hear them.

Within hours, supporters who visited Mr. Trump's website to learn more about the litigation were greeted instead by a request for money, the lawsuits having been paired with a fundraising appeal inviting donors to "add their name" to a complaint they would not be party to. Election-law specialists observed that the contributions flowed to Mr. Trump's leadership PAC, an entity free to spend on travel, events, and the former president's own expenses rather than on attorneys.

The cases were later dismissed, a federal judge in 2022 rejecting the Twitter claim on the straightforward ground that a private company is not the government. The ruling left intact both the platforms' bans and the freshly gathered donor list, only one of which had been the point.

At press time, Mr. Trump was finalizing plans to launch a social media company of his own, having concluded that the surest way to remain unbanned from a platform was to own it.