Legally, Trump’s tech lawsuit is a joke. But it raises a serious question.
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Former president Donald Trump’s lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been rightly derided as wrong on the facts, preposterous on the law and doomed to be thrown out of court.
Which is all true — except that many people will not find Trump’s complaints, in this case, all that unreasonable.
It just doesn’t feel right, in other words, that company CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai get to decide which politicians Americans can hear and which ones we can’t. Everyone mocking Trump’s misreading of the First Amendment would be foolish to dismiss that feeling.
Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube) barred Trump from their platforms after he incited violence on Jan. 6. They are private companies, and they had every right to do so. They may (and most people would agree, should) ban child pornography, racist appeals or, yes, calls to violence.
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