Dershowitz: Trump Lawsuit Against Twitter, Facebook, Google ‘Will Shake Things Up Considerably’

Trump’s legal action against Big Tech firms Twitter, Facebook, Google will have significant First Amendment ramifications in the U.S., according to renowned attorney Alan Dershowitz.

President Donald Trump announced his class-action lawsuits Wednesday against Big Tech.

Trump said he would be the lead plaintiff in the class-action suit against Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the leaders of three Big Tech companies that banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6 unrest at the U.S. Capitol.

The suit was filed in partnership with the America First Policy Institute, a new pro-Trump, nonprofit think-tank.

Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz said that Trump’s lawsuits against the tech giants are “very, very important” for the future of free speech in the United States. He argued that because these Big Tech companies have special exemptions from the government—under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act—they are “not just ordinary private companies.”

As long as they’re operating in “good faith,” Section 230 enables social media firms to manage their platforms by deleting content that violates their terms and conditions.

According to Dershowitz, Trump’s is “a complicated case because, as the president pointed out, and as [lawyer] Pam Bondi pointed out, the others pointed out, these are not just ordinary private companies—they have special exemption … and therefore they partake of some kind of government action, and the courts will have to parse this issue.”

He added, “What we don’t want is the government telling private companies what they can say and what they can do. That would be wrong, but we don’t want these crazy, public, enormous, monopolistic companies to be restricting our free speech. The current situation is unacceptable, and this lawsuit, I think, will shake things up considerably, though I can’t predict in the end how it will come up.”

Watch the full interview here:

Bondi on Wednesday suggested that Section 230 is currently outdated because it was drafted in the mid-1990s with the intention to protect children from harmful content online. The way in which Big Tech firms currently use the law as a shield, she argued, oversteps what it originally intended to do, according to The Epoch Times.

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