The Former President Is Filing a Class-Action Lawsuit Against Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | July 7, 2021 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | July 7, 2021 |

In pointless lawsuits filed not to win but to fuel support among his Republican base, the Hangdog Blumpkin is filing a suit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Not against the companies, mind you. But against the individuals. Blumpkin is expected to make the announcement at a press conference at 11 a.m. today.

Blumpkin has the backing of America First Policy Institute, a “non-profit” focused on advancing the former President’s policies. By filing it as a class action, Hangdog will probably get more attention, but it’s still unclear what — if any — legal basis there is for the lawsuit. The suggestion is that he’s going to sue the CEOs because of their companies’ supposed bias against conservatives, but that’s not a thing, even if he could prove bias, and there is no evidence that the social media companies acted in any way except to protect their users. If you could sue the CEO of a private company for bias, we could all file a class-action lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch for being biased against, uh, facts.

Presumably, the suit will take aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a longtime bogeyman for Blumpkin — which protects social media companies from liability for content posted by their users (it also protects websites like ours from all the hateful untrue things our commenters write about Eddie Redmayne, who is a gentle, kind person who has no association whatsoever with Satan himself. How dare you suggest otherwise!).

Mostly, however, the lawsuit draws more attention to the fact that, without his Facebook and Twitter megaphones, Hangdog Blumpkin is virtually powerless, and that his efforts to create his own competing social networks have been immense failures, starting with an online blog he shut down after a few weeks because he was embarrassed by the anemic traffic. More recently, a Twitter clone called Gettr (no, really, that’s the name) was launched in an effort to start a “free speech” social network for conservatives, and it’s not gone well, either. Hackers have scraped user information from 85,000 users, and another hacker f**ked with the profiles of Jason Miller and Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others.

Jason Miller's new right-wing social media site "Gettr" was hacked this morning. pic.twitter.com/cncddw9RZ9

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) July 4, 2021

The worst part of the lawsuit, alas, is that — at least in this case — we will find ourselves on the side of Dorsey and Zuckerberg, and that’s never a side you want to end up on (at the same time please protect our commenters’ ability to say whatever they want about Eddie Redmayne, no matter how untrue it is!).