In July of 2021, Donald Trump held a press conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club to announce that he was suing Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and their CEOs for tortiously deplatforming him in violation of his free speech. His theory was that @Jack, Zuck, and Susan Wojcicki were so afraid of the possibility that mean Democrats might cancel Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that they effectively became state actors. Thus they suppressed Trump and his pals’ First Amendment rights by deleting their accounts.
There are one or two tiny problems with this line of reasoning. First, conservative such as Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have loudly called to repeal Section 230, which immunizes websites for user-generated content. Second, Trump himself actually vetoed the $740 million National Defense Authorization Act in 2020 because Congress refused to include Section 230 repeal in it. Third, the lawsuit asks the