Trump says he’s hired ‘tobacco lawyers’ to sue Twitter and Facebook for banning his account

Former U.S. President Donald Trump is suing Facebook and Twitter for banning his account after the U.S. Capitol Insurrection, and The Apprentice star has intentionally sought out tobacco lawyers to serve as his legal team for the case.

“We’re demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing and canceling that you know so well,” Trump said of his plans via press conference, held at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “We are asking the court to impose punitive damages on these social media giants. We’re going to hold big tech very accountable.”

He also made sure to reiterate that “this is the first of numerous other lawsuits I assume that would follow, but this is the lead.”

“I think it’s going to be a very very important game changer for our country,” Trump continued. “It will be a pivotal battle in the defence of the first amendment and in the end I am confident that we will achieve a historic victory for American freedom and at the same time, freedom of speech.”

Trump then proceeded to give his legal team a shout out.

“I want to thank all of the exceptional legal team…in particular the tobacco lawyers. You know, I said, ‘who are the best lawyers?’ Well, the tobacco lawyers seem to do a very good job so I figured let’s see if they want to do it and they really wanted to do it.”

First reported by AP, the lawsuit, in which Trump is the lead plaintiff, claims Trump “was wrongfully censored by the platforms,” which include Twitter, Facebook, and even Google.

However, per Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, tech and internet companies are permitted to moderate and therefore remove potentially dangerous posts — like ones that lead to full-blown Insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.

Well, who better to take on Trump’s case than the exact sort of lawyer who have been coined “disease vectors” by public health researchers?

Indeed, per a study conducted by Public Health Advocacy Institute in Boston and Northeastern University School of Law, the tactics specifically used tobacco industry lawyers’ (or, as they call them, “disease vectors”) “have impeded the flow of information about the dangers of smoking to the public and the medical community,” and “their extravagantly aggressive litigation tactics have pushed many plaintiffs into dropping their cases before trial, thus reducing the opportunities for changes to be made to company policy in favour of public health.”

“Stricter professional oversight is needed to ensure that this trend does not continue,” the researchers concluded.

Well, in good (?) news, it seems they’ve found another controversial case to tackle.