‘Twitter Is a Private Company’: Trump, Anti-Vaxxers, and Dark Money Group Lose in First Amendment Lawsuit Against Twitter – By Adam Klasfeld (Law and Crime) / May 9, 2022
Former President Donald Trump, anti-vaccination activists and others cannot gin up a First Amendment lawsuit against Twitter for the decisions the private company made to suspend or ban their accounts, a federal judge ruled.
“Twitter is a private company, and ‘the First Amendment applies only to governmental abridgements of speech, and not to alleged abridgements by private companies,’” U.S. District Judge James Donato noted on Friday.
In July 2021, Trump originally sued Twitter in the Southern District of Florida, one of a spate of putative class action lawsuits against social media companies that kicked him off their platforms in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Florida influencer Linda Cuadros, who was booted from Twitter for a post about vaccines, was a co-plaintiff in an earlier version of the lawsuit, along with the American Conservative Union, an Alexandria, Va.-based dark money group that lost followers but was not kicked off the platform.
