“Former U.S. President Donald Trump asked a federal judge in Florida on Friday to ask Twitter to restore his account, which the company removed in January citing a risk of incitement of violence. Trump filed a request for preliminary injunction against Twitter in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, arguing the social media company was ‘coerced’ by members of the U.S. Congress to suspend his account,” reports NBC News. “Twitter and several other social media platforms banned Trump from their services after a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in a deadly riot on Jan. 6.”

There are several problems with Trump’s suit. The first is that the claim Twitter was “coerced” is entirely speculative, and all that’s required to dismiss that claim is for a Twitter representative to deny Trump’s assertion and declare that Trump was suspended for violating Twitter’s Terms of Service which bar using the platform to call for violence against others. The second problem with Trump’s claim is that Twitter is a private company, and is legally able to bar anyone they like from their platform. Twitter is not subject to any kind of “equal time” regulations that require it to maintain accounts for political figures. Twitter is free to suspend anyone who violates their terms of service, and is free to maintain whatever balance of opinions or any kind of political environment they’d like. The company’s decision that they would not apply Terms of Service requirements as strictly for individuals who are public figures was a voluntary policy, and not something that the company was bound to by Federal regulations. For Trump to attempt to seek a legal precedent that would function as a regulation of Twitter and a short list of social media companies that have banned him, but not apply to all media companies as a whole constitutes an attempt at imposing regulation via legal precedent, and thereby ultimately constitutes the seeking of a legal precedent that will function as a bill of attainder, something that our Constitution strictly forbids.