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Former President Donald Trump was kicked off of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which Google owns, after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Now he is suing those companies.
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DONALD TRUMP: Our case will prove this censorship is unlawful. It's unconstitutional. And it's completely un-American.
KING: NPR's Shannon Bond reports on the escalation of Trump's fight with Silicon Valley. And I should note that Facebook and Google are among NPR's financial supporters.
SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: Donald Trump says this is about more than his ban from social media. He's filed class action lawsuits seeking to represent other conservatives whom he says the companies have mistreated.
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TRUMP: We're demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing and canceling that you know so well.
BOND: Conservatives frequently claim they're being censored by big tech even though there's little evidence to support that. Trump wants the court to order Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to give him and his fellow plaintiffs their accounts back. And the federal law that protects tech companies from being sued over their content decisions, Trump wants that declared unconstitutional. He says it's a battle over the First Amendment.
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TRUMP: And in the end, I am confident that we will achieve a historic victory for American freedom, and at the same time, freedom of speech.
BOND: But legal experts say he has that argument all wrong because the First Amendment protects speech from government restrictions, not private companies. Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, has studied cases just like this one.
ERIC GOLDMAN: The message is quite clear. The plaintiffs never win. They lose. And they usually lose early.
BOND: Goldman says courts routinely reject the argument that social networks like Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, are acting like an arm of the government by restricting what users can post.
GOLDMAN: It's like saying Mark Zuckerberg works for the government. I think we all know better than that. And so these arguments just really don't work. They're just not credible.
BOND: Before he was banned, Trump relied on Twitter to speak directly to the public and on Facebook to raise money. Shortly after announcing the lawsuits, the former president began texting and emailing supporters, asking them for donations.
Shannon Bond, NPR News.
