Trump Follows Up Motion to Get Back on Twitter With One to Get Back on Facebook

Report from Newsweek

In Brief – Following up on a similar move a week earlier to convince a federal judge to order Twitter to restore his account while his court fight continues, former President Donald Trump has filed a motion asking a US District Court judge to impose a preliminary injunction on Facebook to reactivate his Facebook and Instagram accounts. Along with the First Amendment arguments in his initial suits, the new filings also cite Florida’s social media law, enacted by state Republicans charging social media platforms with anti-conservative bias, which was blocked by a federal judge in July. In related news, his anti-censorship suit against Google over his banishment from YouTube was transferred out of Florida to federal court in California.

Context – On one hand, tracking the Trump lawsuits to get back on the big social media platforms brings a bit of levity to the day. In a nutshell, the First Amendment prohibits government from censoring private citizens. He is trying to make the case that the platforms were serving as government actors when they banned him… at a time he was literally the head of the US Government. That is funny, as is this blog post from TechDirt’s Mark Masnick. And the suits will fail. Federal Sec. 230 is very clear in granting platforms flexibility in moderating user content and the First Amendment rights of platforms to manage content on their sites are also clear. But think about this in the context of the huge Facebook “Whistleblower” news and her charges that Facebook consistently got content moderation wrong by going too easy on bad things. She called for a federal regulator to set the standards. Will Republicans agree to anything like that? Look past the Trump bans (many Republicans won’t) and remember that just last week Google announced it would be deciding what amounts to “climate change denial” and would demonetize those sites, posts and video. I wonder if Republicans would trust federal regulators to do better than Google?