Former President Donald Trump on Monday asked a Florida judge to issue a preliminary injunction in his case against YouTube that would compel the company to reinstate his access to the platform.
Trump’s lawyers said they plan to make similar requests in his suits against Facebook and Twitter in the coming weeks.
The request for a preliminary injunction against YouTube argues that a failure to issue one would result in irreparable harm to both Trump as a potential political candidate in the future and the Republican Party as a whole, court documents dated Monday show.
Notably, the injunction would allow Trump to continue selling merchandise on YouTube, potentially critical to political fundraising efforts.
Trump brought class-action lawsuits against the three Big Tech titans last month, seeking unspecified damages for alleged First Amendment violations that Trump said could total “trillions” of dollars.
Trump filed the suits in coordination with the America First Policy Institute, which was founded by former members of his administration and was granted nonprofit status as a public charity by the IRS in May.
The three suits, filed in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., also ask federal judges to overturn the controversial immunity protections granted to internet companies in 1996 by declaring Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional.
Katie Sullivan, executive director of AFPI’s Constitutional Litigation Partnership, said YouTube and the other social media platforms have “inconsistently applied their terms and services and their community standards.”
“What they do is say, ‘Hey, look, we have this free and open community you should join where you can share political thought, updates on family, or even have the ability to make a living.’ But the defendants do not apply their rules evenly or consistently — they censor specific voices and thought so that other users only hear one side of a story,” Sullivan said in a phone interview with The Post.
“They encourage users to become reliant on them as one of their main vehicles of communication and in many cases livelihood and now defendants are choosing the winners and losers of society.”
Three different judges are currently presiding over the separate, but nearly identical, suits against the Big Tech companies. Judge K. Michael Moore is presiding over the suit against YouTube in the Southern District of Florida.
The lawsuit against the video-sharing platform, which also names the CEO of parent company Alphabet as a defendant, argues that banning Trump is a violation of the First Amendment because the company was coerced to do so by members of Congress, especially Democratic politicians.
The three suits also argue that by failing to live up to their own standards and unevenly applying their own rules, the social media companies are deceiving users and violating the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
“President Trump being taken down and the Taliban staying up on Twitter is kind of a perfect example,” Sullivan said, referencing the Islamic militant group’s use of Twitter in recent days as they quickly conquered Afghanistan.
“I mean that’s just low-hanging fruit right there,” she said.