James Donato, San Francisco Federal Court Judge, dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit on Twitter in October 2021 in order to restore your social media account.

Twitter decided to permanently suspend the former United States president’s account after some of his supporters attacked the Capitol during a coup attempt in January 2021. The company relied on two tweets by Donald Trump in who interpreted it. “It is very likely to encourage and inspire people to repeat the crimes that took place in the United States Capitol.”.

In his lawsuit, Donald Trump sought interim injunctive relief, arguing that the social network measure violated his rights under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, Judge Donato did not share the vision of Trump and his lawyers and decided to do so dismiss the action on the ground that Twitter is a private company: “The first amendment only applies to government restrictions on freedom of expression, not to alleged restrictions by private companies.”.

In addition to regaining his Twitter account, Donald Trump also asked a judge to declare a federal decency law unconstitutional. This law stipulates that providers of online services, such as social networks, are not responsible for the content published by their users. In this part, the failure of the former President of the United States may be more personal, as he is a well-known critic of Section 230 of the law to the extent that he has gone so far as to propose restrictions on the protection enjoyed by social media platforms during his term.

Donald Trump responded to locking his Twitter account by creating his own social network, Truth Social. Truth Social faced problems because it allegedly infringed the license of Mastodon, a Twitter clone released as free software under the AGPLv3 license, which requires the publication of the source code of any project or derivative.

At the moment, Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter seems to be a matter of pride rather than anything else since then. The former president of the United States told CNBC that he would not return to Twitter, even if Elon Musk, the current sole owner of the social network, had pardoned him..