President Trump has been doing pretty well in litigation lately. Yesterday, YouTube agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a putative class action that was brought by Trump and two other plaintiffs:
Trump sued the Alphabet-owned video sharing platform in July 2021, alleging that YouTube unlawfully silenced conservative viewpoints after the company suspended his account in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
***
YouTube was the last of the major social media companies sued by Trump over Capitol riot-related bans to settle.Meta and X settled similar lawsuits brought by the president earlier this year, to the tune of $25 million and $10 million, respectively.
Trump was banned from YouTube for nearly two years in the aftermath of the riot.
Trump’s complaint is here. It alleges that by censoring Trump and many others at the behest of the federal government, YouTube violated the First Amendment:
129. Defendants are vulnerable to and react to coercive pressure from the federal
government to regulate specific speech.130. In censoring the specific speech at issue in this lawsuit and deplatforming Plaintiff, Defendants were acting in concert with federal officials, including officials at the CDC and the (Biden) White House.
131. As such, Defendants’ censorship activities amount to state action.
The issues in this case are similar to those raised in Murthy v. Missouri where the Supreme Court punted by finding that the individual and state plaintiffs lacked standing. That result was disappointing.
So we still don’t have clarity on the degree of collaboration or coercion between the government and a social media platform that is required to invoke the First Amendment. That is unfortunate.
Given the issues raised in this case, the expense involved in litigating class actions, and the fact that the plaintiffs sought to invalidate as unconstitutional Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media platforms, it is not hard to see why YouTube was willing to pay $24.5 million.
