Experts say Trump's social media lawsuits are likely doomed

Legal experts and First Amendment scholars say former President Donald Trump's class-action lawsuits announced Wednesday against Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their CEOs are unlikely to go far.

The big picture: That, according to some of these experts, suggests Trump's chief aim is to fire up his supporters and fundraise off of their anger over what they see as censorship by Big Tech.

"This is not a lawsuit. It’s a fundraising grift," said Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a progressive advocacy group that often targets Big Tech.

The Trump campaign did immediately start reaching out to supporters for fundraising after the former president revealed the lawsuits in a press conference Wednesday morning.

Details: The central argument made by the plaintiff is that social media platforms are "state actors," and thus should be bound by the First Amendment's free speech protections. First Amendment experts quickly dismissed the claim as destined to fail.

"In what constitutional universe can it be the case that Trump wasn't a state actor when he blocked critics from his social media accounts but the social media companies were state actors when they blocked him?," tweeted Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

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