On August 30th, Larry Klayman, founder of both Judicial Watch and now Freedom Watch, and a former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor who was part of the trial team that broke up the AT&T monopoly during the Reagan administration, announced the filing of a class action lawsuit alleging suppression of conservative speech online.
The lawsuit alleges that social media giants Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Instagram, and Google/YouTube “conspired by entering into an explicit or tacit agreement, in parallel to each other, to restrain trade in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. See Freedom Watch v. Google/You Tube et. al (Civil Action Number 18-cv-2030, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia),” according to Freedom Watch USA.
“The class action complaint alleges that the intent and effect of this agreement in restraint of trade is to quash and/or limit advocacy by conservative and pro-Trump public interest groups, advocates and others to further the leftist anti-conservative agendas of these social media giants and to help bring down the Trump presidency and nullify the vote of the millions of citizens who voted for the president. These alleged illegal and anticompetitive actions are an integral part of the so-called “resistance” to remove President Trump and install a leftist government over the 50 states.”
The class-action suit demands damages in excess of $1 billion for four causes of action: discrimination in violation of the Washington, D.C. code; violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution; illegal agreement in restraint of trade, a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act; and intent to monopolize, a second violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
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Klayman appeared on Fox Business one day before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that involved Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
“I’m a former anti-trust lawyer, as you know, Charles,” Klayman told Charles Payne, a co-host of the Fox Business show “Varney & Co.” “I helped break up AT&T when I was a young Justice Department lawyer during the Reagan administration.”
“When companies move in tandem, in parallel fashion to do the same thing, that can be restraint of trade,” the Freedom Watch founder explained. “So we believe there’s an actual agreement between these leftist-owned media giants like Google, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera. [But if not,] it’s conscious parallelism.”
The lawsuit alleges that Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter “have engaged in a conspiracy to intentionally and willfully suppress politically conservative content.”
A Gizmodo article where former Facebook workers confessed to suppressing conservative news was cited in the Freedom Watch lawsuit where one worker admitted, “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”
On top of the two anti-trust claims, Freedom Watch accused the social media companies of engaging in discriminating against conservatives based on their “political affiliation,” which is illegal under Washington, D.C. law, where Freedom Watch is based.
The suit also argues that the social media giants “created, operate, and control public platforms that are for public use and public benefit and invite the public to utilize their platforms as a forum for free speech.” Even with that being said, they “act as quasi-state actors because they regulate their public platforms, thereby regulating free speech within their public forums.”
Some have called for the social media companies to be treated as if they were public utilities, but the anti-trust push treats them as the private companies that they actually are.
Don’t forget these companies work with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a left-wing manufacturer of slander and liable who recently paid a $3.375 million settlement for defamation to Maajid Nawaz and his organization, the Quilliam Foundation for including them in their publication A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.
The SPLC now faces two other current lawsuits including one from D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) for defamation, religious discrimination, and trafficking in falsehood. The SPLC listed DJKM as a “hate group.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center can also look forward to around potentially 60 individual suits all stemming from different Christian organizations that the SPLC unfairly labeled as “hate groups” all around the country, making this class action lawsuit all the more powerful.