Twitter Inc. takes legal action in court against its most infamous user, Donald Trump
Donald Trump has decided that the most efficient way to get his lies directly to his supporters is to bypass the media, who might fact check him along the way, and to simply post his latest lies on Twitter each day. Despite repeated calls for Trump to be suspended or banned from Twitter due to his continued abuse of the platform and its rules, something which has not happened to date. However, in a remarkable development, Twitter Inc. has now taken legal action against Trump in court.
Twitter has joined nearly a hundred other tech companies including its social media rival Facebook, along with Apple, Google, and Microsoft, in filing an amicus brief in federal court aimed at helping to shut down Donald Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban. The U.S. Court of Appeals is currently deciding whether to reinstate the ban, after a lower federal court temporarily struck it down in its entirety. The tech industry is almost uniformly standing against Trump on this issue, with many of them trying to protect their own employees in the process.
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The legal maneuver, as documented by the Chicago Tribune and others, now raises the question of whether Donald Trump will begin using Twitter to attack Twitter itself. If so, could Twitter Inc. be prompted to finally shut off his infamous @realdonaldtrump account? And if so, what would it do about his other, tamer @POTUS account? The latter technically belongs to the presidency, rather than the president. While Trump’s use of Twitter to spread lies has caused harm, it can also be argued that the open nature of the platform allows the public to immediately and publicly push back against his lies, in effect fact checking him in real time.
Meanwhile, even as Twitter Inc. takes legal action against its own most infamous user, some other tech companies are joining the fray in surprising fashion. The CEO of Uber has been pressured by the public and by his employees into turning against Trump and joining the legal action against him. And while Amazon was not able to sign onto the amicus brief because it’s a witness in the case to begin with, Amazon has publicly confirmed that it fully supports the legal action against Trump.
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