Rumors started circulating on the Birdy app and in comments sections earlier today that the former guy had created a new Twitter account with the handle @DJTDesk.  As of 8:28pm on Wednesday May 5th, less than one day after the account was created, it’s already been suspended.  This will no doubt lead to more bullshit from Republicans insisting that Twitter is “violating Firsts Amendment Rights”, but Twitter really doesn’t have anything to worry about.  Donald Trump can’t sue Twitter or Facebook for violating his First Amendment Rights because Twitter and Facebook do not represent the United States government, and they haven’t tried to throw him in prison, or levy some huge financial fine on him because of his behavior.  Trump can’t report the banning of his social media accounts via a criminal complaint because there is nowhere in the criminal code that makes it a crime for a social media company to bar people from their platforms for spreading disinformation or making threats. Trump also can’t file a torts claim because there’s no actual injury, and no judge, even the most loyal Trump appointee is going to be dumb enough to try to rule that the entire history of US Contract law is invalid, that firms don’t have any legal right to dictate terms of service agreements, or that individuals who agree to said service agreements are under no obligation to abide by the terms of the contract.

“But what about Zappos?” one might ask.  “Aren’t they an online company that had their terms of service agreement nullified in court?”  Well yes they were, but that involved a data breach that included customers credit card data being exposed to third parties, and the part that was thrown out had to do with customers being forced to abide by binding arbitration language.  Terms of use for a social media platform that charges no upfront fee is a completely different animal.

Now Republicans in Congress are claiming they’ll consider antitrust action against Facebook.  This has the potential to be one of the greatest circular firing squad moments in American history.  The problem is that Republicans don’t appear to grasp the fact that Facebook’s primary asset is its user network, and if they go dividing up Facebook, that ultimately means dividing users up based upon some organizational scheme.  That means the economies of scale that allowed Trump to exploit that large user network will disappear.  If they attempt to create one group that’s all Trump supporters, and gerrymander other users onto different social media platforms, you’ll have a lot of pissed off users who are angry that their children aren’t sending them pictures of the grandchildren anymore. Dividing Facebook users into sub-groups will inevitably lead to a massive repositioning of users between social media groups as families reunite on the various platforms, and Republicans will lose economies of scale as they’ll have to recreate messages across numerous platforms that over time, will become less homogenized in their function and require greater customization of messaging.  Furthermore, without a sociopath like Zuckerberg running those other platforms, the chances that Republicans will face additional penalties for their conspiracy theory mongering and violent threats on those various new platforms increases greatly.

Long story short: Trump’s an idiot, he has no chance of being able to successfully sue social media companies, the Zappos case is not a viable precedent for Trump to base any legal action on, and attempts to break up the Facebook network will end up becoming a self-inflicted wound for the GOP.