Twitter filed a motion recently to transfer the jurisdiction of a major class-action lawsuit from southern Florida to northern California, according to a case update from the America First Policy Institute.
The left-leaning social-media publisher is one of three companies named in the lawsuit, which Trump first announced in July. Facebook and Google are also included in it.
As of late August, the suit had garnered more than 85,000 class-action participants.
The AFPI said it had anticipated a change-of-venue attempt by the Big Tech billionaires as they seek to derail the effort with near limitless resources.
“This move aligns with Big Tech’s predictable response strategy that President Trump’s legal team has been prepared for,” said the update. “Their response will make a unique set of legal arguments as to why this case should remain in the Southern District of Florida, and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) believes they will be successful in this effort.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has pursued tougher laws in his state to crack down on alleged abuses of the Communications Decency Act.
The quarter-century-old federal law’s Section 230 provided for special protections that would encourage growth in the early days of the online boom by exempting tech platforms that acted in good faith from the normal liabilities of media publishers.
As the tech companies have grown more powerful, however, they have used it as a loophole to avoid any sort of government regulation—despite the fact that they now function, essentially, as public utilities, similar to phone companies.
Flouting First Amendment free speech protections, they have maintained that they have the right as private companies to impose their own arbitrary and constantly shifting “guidelines,” which they have used as justification to silence conservatives and to promote misinformation about significant issues such as vote fraud and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s time to deny Twitter the unfair advantage of Silicon Valley judges who have time and time again protected the Section 230 immunity granted to these social media behemoths,” said AFPI.
AFPI said it had filed an amicus brief in the case of Netchoice, LLC v. State of Florida, which a district court judge recently used to declare DeSantis’s Big Tech law unconstitutional.
The case is currently pending review in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
