Last Updated on August 22, 2019
In a clear blow to the Big Tech oligopoly, a lawsuit, put together by Freedom Watch and the conservative activist Laura Loomer, will be heard by the DC Court of Appeals.
Loomer accuses Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter in the lawsuit of working together with the mainstream media to “re-craft the nation into their leftist design”:
[They are] intentionally and wilfully [suppressing] politically conservative content in order to take down President Donald Trump and his administration with the intent and purpose to have installed leftist government in the nation’s capital and the 50 states.
Loomer was banned by Twitter last year for critcising Representative Ilhan Omar, with Facebook shortly following suit. She was also blacklisted by PayPal in February. She protested her suspension by chaining herself outside Twitter’s HQ in New York, and wrote in the suit that these suspensions prevented her from “reaching her audience with her investigative work,” and caused her to “suffer severe financial injury.”
The suit further alleges that due to their co-operation, the companies are breaking the First Amendment, the Sherman Act (designed to prevent monopolies), and DC’s public accomodation law.
The suit was originally dismissed in March, by US District Court Judge Trevor McFadden. McFadden said that the concerns raised were “non-trivial,” but because it contained no allegations “that any of the platforms met or otherwise communicated an intent to collectively supress conservative content,” there were therefore no grounds for a lawsuit.
Loomer and Freedom Watch subsequently filed an appeal with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The Big Tech giants demanded that the suit be dismissed again.
“The merits of this appeal are so clear that no further brifeing is needed,” they wrote in June.
Papers from Loomer and Freedom Watch have them vehemently disagreeing, arguing that the case was “of paramount importance,” and that the results “greatly affects hundreds of millions of Americans who use social media” and many more worldwide.
The Court dismissed the motion put forward by Big Tech, and said that it will hear the merits of the suit, arguing that “the merits of the parties’ positions are not so clear as to warrant summary action.”
The judgement came in the same week of a dump of leaked documents from Google by Project Veritas, showing that Google taught their employees how to protest President Trump, and that they lumped holocaust deniers and climate sceptics in the same category of “fringe theories.
Facebook also this week put out a report essentially admitting that they censor conservatives, and have no plans to stop doing so. The lawsuit being heard is therefore a small win for any conservatives who have been censored online – we can only hope that the big win is yet to come.
