Twitter has reportedly asked for Donald Trump’s lawsuit, which claims the company violated the former president’s First Amendment rights by permanently banning him from its platform, to be dismissed on the grounds that it fundamentally misunderstands free speech protections.
Bloomberg reports that Twitter asked for Trump’s lawsuit to be thrown out in a filing submitted on Dec. 9. The company is said to argue in the filing that it’s “a private actor that is not constrained by the federal constitution” and that the government “cannot force the private operator of an online platform, such as Twitter, to disseminate speech with which the operator disagrees.”
According to the report, Twitter also says in the filing that Trump “agreed to abide by Twitter’s rules, and yet proceeded to repeatedly violate those rules.” Those violations culminated in a series of tweets about the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol that prompted Trump’s ban from the platform just three days later. (He was also banned from Facebook and Instagram until 2023.)
Twitter said in a Jan. 9 blog post about its decision to ban Trump that “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Besides filing this lawsuit, Trump has responded to losing access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram by announcing his own platform called Truth Social. Almost immediately after the site was announced, however, people discovered they could sign up with usernames like “@donaldtrump” or “@donaldjtrump” because they weren’t reserved for legitimate accounts.
Others discovered that Truth Social seemed to be based on the open source Mastodon platform. That in itself wasn’t a problem—that’s the point of open source tools—but the decision not to credit Mastodon for its work violated the project’s license. Truth Social was later updated with an archive of its source code and credit to Mastodon so it would comply with that license’s terms.
Truth Social hasn’t launched yet, however, and this lawsuit suggests that Trump is keen to regain access to his Twitter account either way. Bloomberg reports that oral arguments for the case before US District Judge James Donato are scheduled to begin on Feb. 23, 2022.
