Steven Crowder, host of the conservative talk show “Louder with Crowder,” revealed Monday that he is suing Facebook on the grounds of “unfair competition, fraud, false advertising, and antitrust.”
Crowder hinted at the lawsuit during an “explanation” for his three weeks of “radio silence” last week.
On Monday, Crowder and BlazeTV lawyer, Bill Richmond, made the announcement of the lawsuit.
Crowder is one of the most notable victims of Youtube’s demonetization and social media censorship. After garnering over 8.1 million views on his election livestream, Crowder claims that Youtube cut it off. The stream beat out viewership of all cable networks except Fox and CNN on election night.
“They removed the biggest stream that has ever existed, from the biggest platform that’s ever existed with no reason,” Richmond, said.
“Getting them to just, in a word, stop it,” he added. “Stop throttling, stop secretly throttling, stop expressly throttling, stop doing all the different things that are anti-competitive behavior.”
When discussing other lawsuits that have been filed against the platform, Crowder said that this one is “different.”
“The reason why it’s different is because we’re going after Facebook based on its own words and its own premises,” Richmond said.
Even though tech giants claim that they do not censor conservatives more than others, a 2016 report published by Gizmodo explains Facebook employees admitted to “routinely” suppressing conservative news. Richmond pointed to this study as evidence.
“They told Congress ‘we don’t do it,’ they told the consumers ‘we don’t do it,’ they told us that they don’t do it, but over the course of years, we’ve realized they actually are doing it,” Richmond said.
Richmond added that the lawsuit is “pro-business, anti-fraud,” because, “you can run a business however you want — if you were a social media platform or any kind of business and you wanted to allow certain types of content or certain types of customers in your store or on your platform, you’re allowed to do it — but what you can’t do is lie.”
“What you can’t do is say, ‘We are open to everyone, we don’t discriminate based on political ideology or race or religion,’ and then turn around and actually do that, both expressly and through the software that you’re implementing,” Richmond said.
Richmond said that he is seeking injunctive relief from Facebook which means a court order would be issued requiring the platform stop censoring content from conservative sources.
Richmond revealed that he expects pushback from certain federal courts but said “we are ready and prepared to take this all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Other prominent conservative voices such as Candace Owens have filed similar suits against the tech giants who claim to promote free speech.
Richmond said the suit has already been in the works and more information will be made public soon as the case progresses.
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