Tech

Judge dismisses Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter

James Donato, a federal court judge in San Francisco, has dismissed the lawsuit that Donald Trump filed against Twitter in October 2021 for the purpose of recovering your account on the social network.

Twitter made the decision to permanently suspend the account of the former president of the United States after some of his supporters stormed the Capitol during the attempted coup in January 2021. The company relied on two tweets from Donald Trump in the who interpreted that “very likely they will encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place in the United States Capitol”.

Donald Trump sought through his lawsuit a preliminary injunction on the ban and argued that the measure taken by the social network violated his rights under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, Judge Donato has not shared the vision of Trump and his lawyers and has opted for dismiss the lawsuit arguing that Twitter is a private company: “The First Amendment applies only to government limitations on free speech and not to alleged limitations by private companies”.

In addition to getting his Twitter account back, Donald Trump also asked the judge to rule the federal Communications Decency Act unconstitutional. This law establishes that providers of online services such as those of social networks are not responsible for the content published by their users. In this section, the setback for the former president of the United States may have a more personal nature because he is a well-known critic of Section 230 of the law, to the extent that he went so far as to propose the limitation of the protections enjoyed by the platforms. of social media during his tenure.

Donald Trump responded to the lockdown of his Twitter account by creating Truth Social, his own social network. Truth Social has faced problems because it allegedly violated the Mastodon license, a Twitter clone released as free software under the AGPLv3 license, which requires the source code of any project or derivative product to be published.

At this time, the judicial process of Donald Trump against Twitter now seems to be more a matter of pride than anything else, since The former president of the United States has told CNBC that he would not return to Twitter even if Elon Musk, current sole owner of the social network, pardoned him.

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