Former President Donald Trump’s legal efforts to restore his Twitter account were frustrated on Tuesday, local time, when a federal judge ruled that his lawsuit should be transferred from Florida to California.Trump’s supporters rushed into the U.S. Capitol in January and rioted, resulting in several deaths, including a congressional policeman, after which Trump was banned from using Twitter.
The social media platform company stated that the ban was due to the risk of further incitement to violence on its account. In July, Trump filed a lawsuit over the Twitter ban.
Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. for the Southern District of Florida approved Twitter’s motion on Tuesday to transfer Trump’s lawsuit and rejected the former president’s argument that he was exempt from Twitter’s terms of service because of his account. When he was suspended, he was still the president, so the forum selection clause was not legally acceptable. This clause is agreed to by all users for the use of Twitter, and it stipulates that the Northern District of California is the venue for the settlement of legal disputes involving the platform.
“Even assuming that Trump is using his account in an official capacity, Trump did not raise any legal authority to support his argument that he met the second requirement of immunity: he’s legally unacceptable to control. Law, jurisdiction or location terms…” Scola wrote in his ruling.
Scola also believes that Trump’s reliance on the lawsuit filed against him in 2017 for preventing Twitter users from following his account is “misplaced.” In this case, the Second Circuit held that Trump’s account is a public forum, so the president’s blocking of users violated the First Amendment.
Scola ruled that the lawsuit against Trump “has nothing to do with the current lawsuit because it did not consider the enforceability of Twitter’s forum selection terms, especially whether Trump is exempted from its requirements as president.”
Trump’s use of Twitter has redefined politics, and through this use he avoided the mainstream media in an attempt to grasp the dominance of political narratives. But after the riots on Capitol Hill in the United States in January this year, Twitter, Facebook and Google’s YouTube all drove him off their platforms.
The former president sued these platforms, alleging censorship and violations of the First Amendment, even though the First Amendment applies to the government rather than private companies such as social media sites. For some time, Trump claimed that these companies discriminated against right holders without evidence, and these companies have repeatedly denied this accusation.
In the course of these lawsuits in court, Trump announced last week that he will launch a new social network called Truth Social, with the goal of countering these big companies.
A statement made by a Trump legal representative late on Tuesday seemed to imply that the ruling was expected. Twitter declined to comment on the ruling.
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