Trump Claims ‘Thousands’ Will Join His Lawsuits Against Big Tech Companies

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Zoe Richards, Asawin Suebsaeng
·2 min read
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Brandon Bell/Getty
Brandon Bell/Getty

Former President Donald Trump announced class action lawsuits on Wednesday against Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey, and YouTube and its parent company’s CEO Sundar Pichai.

The lawyers handling the class action suits for Trump and others are John Q. Kelly and John P. Coale, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast. The lawsuits were first reported by Axios.

It comes after Trump lost his social media following on all three platforms after his comments inciting violence in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Jason Miller Sadly Begs Trump to Join ‘GETTR’: ‘We’d Love to Have Him’

“It will go down as the biggest class action ever filed because thousands of people want to join,” Trump claimed on Wednesday before mentioning two women who were supposedly joining to suit because they were kicked off platforms for posting COVID disinformation.

A former Facebook official close to the company described the lawsuits to The Daily Beast as “a desperate fundraising appeal disguised as a lawsuit.”

Two days after the Capitol assault, Trump was completely banned from Twitter—effectively cutting him off from the more than 88 million followers he had accrued.

A Facebook-funded oversight board announced last month that the former president would be suspended from the platform for at least two years.

Both companies had made repeated concessions for Trump over the years. Facebook had exempted political figures like Trump from its hate-speech rules and enacted another policy not to fact-check political leaders in spite of Trump’s promotion of misinformation.

The president and his allies have repeatedly criticized the bans as censorship while also claiming that the tech giants are biased against conservatives.

Last week, former members of Trump’s team launched a new social media platform that it has promoted as an alternative to Big Tech.

The lawsuits are not the first time Trump has tried to take aim at the tech giants. In 2020, he signed an executive order aimed at limiting the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content users post on their platforms. President Joe Biden revoked that executive order in May.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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