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Court Nixes Trump Attempt To Consolidate Three Tech LOLsuits Into One Bigger, Dumber Tech LOLsuit

Debate me, you cowards!

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(Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

In some sense, Donald Trump’s lawsuits against Google, Twitter, and Meta are quite similar.

They all involve charges of tortious deplatforming in violation of the First Amendment on the theory that big tech is actually the government. They’ve all been bounced out of Florida, where they were originally filed, to the Northern District of California in accordance with the platforms’ terms of service. And they are all patently ridiculous, not least because they allege a conspiracy between big tech and the government to silence Donald Trump, cooked up at a time when Donald Trump was literally the head of the federal government.

But they are not the same case, as US District Judge Jeffrey S. White pointed out in his order denying Trump’s motion to consolidate the cases on the theory that “they involve predominantly common issues of law and/or fact.”

“The Court finds that Plaintiffs’ request for consolidation of these cases is premature,” Judge White writes. “It would be more efficient and conserve judicial resources to resolve the pending motions to dismiss (and preliminary injunction motions) to see what remains of the cases.”

If anything.

Indeed, there are a lot of pending motions here. Having forced the cases into California, each of the platforms has filed a motion to dismiss because FFS, YOU DON’T HAVE A FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO USE SOMEONE ELSE’S MEGAPHONE.

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Trump has similarly demanded that the court issue injunctive relief, ordering the platforms to give him back his accounts so the world can once again read his daily livetweets of Fox and Friends and Hannity.

And not for nothing, but the former president has announced that he’s launching his own social media platform via that, uhh, creatively structured SPAC. So his argument that he’s being silenced by big tech censorship may be slightly undercut by his own promise that he’ll soon be the dominant player in that space.

No doubt Trump’s legal team will handle three simultaneous cases up against a squadron of the best lawyers in the world with its usual aplomb and attention to detail.

Trump v. YouTube [Docket via Court Listener]
Trump v. Meta [Docket via Court Listener]
Trump v. Twitter [Docket via Court Listener]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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