Okay, so we're talking on July 23rd on Friday afternoon and so what do we have for this month?

Well, first, uh, Trump update, we haven't talked about him for a while.

Heaven for a friend.

Well, at the beginning of the month, Donald Trump filed a class action lawsuit against

Facebook, Twitter, and Google in federal court for banning or blocking him from being on their

sites and posting content. Now remember you know Trump was deplatformed at the

beginning of the year right you had the January 6th attacks on the capital,

Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, banned Trump and then Facebook suspended

Trump for two years. so he kind of disappeared on all of these sites and

Trump responded by setting up a blog have you ever taken a look at it? I have not.

Yeah neither have I.

And neither did anyone else apparently because it quietly died after about a month.

Now, Trump's claim in this lawsuit is that his First Amendment rights were being violated by

being deplatformed. The problem with the lawsuit is that the First Amendment

only applies to what the government does. Now Trump Trump's claim here is that, well, maybe that's technically true, but Facebook,

Twitter, and Google behave just like many governments, and since they are kind of like many governments

they should have to follow the same rules that apply to governments.

As a part of this, he also asked the federal court to declare a section 230 which gives platforms some immunity with respect to user

content unconstitutional.

So let's get back to the First Amendment problem.

Maybe these places, Twitter, Facebook, they feel like the new public square.

But you know, the reality is that the heads of these three tech companies don't work for the government.

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