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Trump Takes to Florida For His Case Against YouTube
Former President Donald Trump requested for a Florida judge to issue a preliminary injunction in his case against video hosting and sharing platform YouTube. This would force the said company to give Trump back his access to the website, saying failure to do so would end up with irreparable harm to him as a potential future political candidate and to the Republican Party as a whole, per a New York Post report on Tuesday.
An injunction would give Trump the permission to continue selling his merchandise on YouTube which is a big part of his fundraising efforts.
The former president’s lawyers revealed that they are planning to make similar requests against social media sites Facebook and Twitter soon.
In July, the former president filed class-action lawsuits against the three Big Tech companies, asking for unspecified damages for what he claimed to be First Amendment violations. With the suits, Trump was also asking federal judges to trash the immunity protection granted to such companies, which were put in place in 1996. He wanted them to do this by declaring Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional.
Trump Seeking to Have Access to Account Reinstated
The former president filed the lawsuits along with the America First Policy Institute, a group founded by former members of the Trump administration.
YouTube, along with social media platforms, had “inconsistently applied their terms and services and their community standards,” Katie Sullivan, the AFPI Constitutional Litigation Partnership executive director, told the Post. She also claimed that such platforms deliberately censor specific voices and thought” so that its uses would only be able to hear one side of the story.
The YouTube lawsuit argues that banning the former president can be considered a violation of the First Amendment clause because Democratic Party congressmen persuaded the company to hand the ban to Trump.
It further added that YouTube's actions against the former president started on Jan. 6 when they removed a video about the Capitol siege. This then led to Trump’s indefinite suspension, which the platform handed to him on Jan. 27. The company enacted the suspension over “the ongoing potential for violence.”
Similarly, both Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump’s pages on Jan. 7, a day after the Capitol riot when protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol building in the hopes of disrupting the congressional certification of the Electoral College results.
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