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Three giant social media platforms took action against Donald Trump, either banning him outright or suspending his account, and now the former U.S. president is fighting back, bringing lawsuits against the platforms and against their executives.
Twitter cited the so-called “insurrection” of 6 January as grounds to permanently ban Trump, claiming that he had repeatedly violated Twitter’s moderation policies and that the ban would prevent him from using the platform “to incite further violence.” Facebook used a similar rationale to ban Trump for at least two years (see our 11 May item, “FACEBOOK’S ‘QUASI-COURT’ UPHOLDS TRUMP BAN”) and YouTube has suspended Trump’s account indefinitely.
An article appearing in the Financial Times on 8 July reports that Trump will lead class actions, filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, against Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey (see our 19 January item, “TWITTER’S KING MULLS MORE CENSORSHIP”) and Sundar Pichai and the platforms they control. The lawsuits allege censorship in violation of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, and seek an end to such censorship as well as punitive damages.
The lawsuits are supported by the America First Policy Group, a non-profit described as being dedicated to promoting Trump’s policies. Trump declared that the lawsuits would be “a very, very important game-changer for our country.” Throughout his presidency, Trump had accused the social media titans of being biased against Conservatives.
The FT article says that Trump used those platforms as “vital mouthpieces” which he “used to broadcast compulsively to his tens of millions of followers, excoriating his enemies, praising his allies and repeating baseless allegations of election fraud by his Democratic opponents in the 2020 election.”
As of this writing, there has been no formal response from those named in the lawsuits.
TREND FORECAST: Censorship has become the way of the world. We have written many articles and made trend forecasts of how governments across the globe would be silencing those that would not toe the party line.
Among them is our 19 September 2018 article “Media censorship trend to escalate,” where we wrote:
“Look no further than Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. It could not be clearer: These tech giants will aggressively, relentlessly smoke out the ‘bad actors’ and ‘block them,’ and you too, of course, from sharing any “undesired” content.”
Indeed, one of our Top Trends for 2019 that we wrote a year before the COVID war was launched was CENSORSHIP 2019. We had forecast that:
Governments across the globe, regardless of what political doctrine they profess, in collusion with social media giants, will accelerate the Censorship 2019 trend.
While Google, Facebook and Twitter will dominate market share for the foreseeable future, market gaps will widen. They’re ready to be filled by nimble, trustworthy First Amendment-driven OnTrendpreneurs® having 2020 foresight to host sites to circumvent the government/media monopolies.
Beyond the issues of censorship, the Internet has and will serve as the launch pad for major populist revolutions against established political parties, multinationals and globalist interests. New websites and hosting companies “of the people, by the people and for the people” will gain healthy market share.”
We had forecast that censorship of media will escalate throughout the “free” world. In many countries, especially in the Divided States of America, people tune into their favored sources that support their narrow agendas and fixed belief systems, ignoring alternative or multiple sources of information.
A key tenet of trend forecasting is to seek all sides of issues and events with an open mind, rather than adhere to a fixed belief system. Thus, “It’s not what you want to hear, it’s what you need to know.”