Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Facebook, Google and Twitter for violating the First Amendment, writing today in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he was doing it “to restore free speech for myself and for every American.”
In for Jim Braude on Greater Boston, Adam Reilly was joined by Joan Donovan, research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; and Joanna Weiss, editor-in-chief of Northeastern University’s Experience Magazine.
When asked about the merits of the case, Weiss explained that the First Amendment only applies to government bodies, not companies.
“Anytime you sign up for a social media platform, you have to check off that very, very long list of terms of service that nobody reads, but they grant these companies the right to moderate the content on their websites as they see fit,” she said. “So there is just no legal case that that this lawsuit serves.”
Donovan said, however, that there is a legitimate concern about the outsized amount of power that Facebook, Google and Twitter wield in the online sphere.
“As a scholar of the internet, nobody wants these companies to have this much control,” Donovan said. “There is a very sincere problem that lie at the heart of the issue, which is that these companies scaled very quickly, they have enormous power, and they do control, by and large, the flow of information.”
WATCH: Media experts on former President Trump’s lawsuit against major social media platforms
