Mo., Ark. AGs Add Proposed Class Action in 3rd Amended Complaint v. Biden
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) and Missouri AG Andrew Bailey (R) added a claim for class action certification and removed President Joe Biden from the injunction they seek against nearly 70 governmental officials and departments in their third amended complaint against Biden in (docket 3:22-cv-01213) Friday in U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana in Monroe.
In the request for class certification in the First Amendment lawsuit, the AGs asked the court to appoint plaintiffs Jayanta Bhattacharya, Jill Hines, Jim Hoft, Aaron Kheriaty and Martin Kulldorff as class representatives and John Vecchione, of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and John Burns of Burns Law as class counsel.
Plaintiffs allege 67 government agencies and officials colluded with Big Tech to censor social media information about the 2016 presidential election and COVID-19 health information. The AGs seek a preliminary injunction against Biden administration defendants barring them from “inducing social-media companies” to censor particular individuals or content or to adopt or enforce speech-restrictive content-moderation policies.
The only other changes from the second complaint to the third was removing Biden’s name from the claim seeking an injunction against defendants from continuing to engage in alleged unlawful conduct. It said: “Subject to the limitation that the Court may grant only declaratory and not injunctive relief against the President in his official capacity,” the court has the authority to restrain, enter judgment and impose penalties on the other defendants to prevent violation of federal law, including the First Amendment.
Defendants petitioned the court last month to deny plaintiffs' motion for class certification and for leave to file a third amended complaint (see 2304120028). Defendants said the court should deny the “belated” motion for leave to amend the complaint a third time because it seeks only to add class allegations, but neither proposed class meets applicable requirements, said the response.
Plaintiffs proposed to define the first class as social media users who have “engaged or will engage in, or who follow, subscribe to, are friends with, or are otherwise connected to the accounts of users who have engaged or will engage in, speech on any social-media company’s platform(s) that has been or will be removed; labelled; used as a basis for suspending, deplatforming, issuing strike(s) against, demonetizing, or taking other adverse action against the speaker.” Class 1 also includes social media users who have been “downranked; deboosted; concealed; or otherwise suppressed by the platform after Defendants and/or those acting in concert with them flag or flagged the speech to the platform(s) for suppression.”
Proposed Class 2 members are social media users who have engaged or will engage in, or who “follow, subscribe to, are friends with, or are otherwise connected to the accounts of users who have engaged in or will engage in, speech on any social-media company’s platform(s) that has been or will be removed; labelled; used as a basis for suspending, deplatforming, issuing strike(s) against, demonetizing, or taking other adverse action against the speaker; downranked; deboosted; concealed; or otherwise suppressed by the company pursuant to any change to the company’s policies or enforcement practices that Defendants and/or those acting in concert with them have induced or will induce the company to make.”
Class 1 is so large that joinder of all members “is impractical,” said the complaint, saying those who were flagged for suppression of social media content numbered in the “hundreds of thousands or millions of followers.” For Class 2 members, defendants’ conduct resulted in policy and enforcement practice changes at social media platforms that caused censorship affecting "thousands if not millions” of social media users. Both classes seek injunctive and declaratory relief.