Big Tech Starts To Feel The Heat: 'The Blaze' Host Steven Crowder Launches Lawsuit Against Facebook's Alleged Censorship Tactics

Is Big Tech about to begin reaping the whirlwind of their post-election censorship-spree and market strangulation?

As Redstate’s Sarah Lee reported on Monday afternoon, Big Tech players like Google are facing some antitrust suits both in United States and the U.K.

Big Tech is facing a barrage of antitrust lawsuits, both state and federal, as well as potential antitrust probes in the U.K. They can now add the first antitrust lawsuit from a news publishing company out of West Virginia alleging Google and Facebook “[have] so monopolized the online ad market that ‘it threatens the extinction of local newspapers across the country.’”

HD Media, which owns several newspapers in the state, also references a suit by 10 Republican Attorneys General filed in December as proof that the two tech giants “conspired to further their dominance with a secret agreement.”

In the U.K., a competition watchdog opened a formal probe in January to determine if Google was squeezing out competition by ostensibly protecting user privacy by disabling cookies in their Chrome browser, making it harder for newspapers and competitors to track data online while Google offers other ways for advertisers to target users with personalized ads.

These issues are important monopoly issues, but are not directly related to the discrimination aimed at conservative outlets and content creators since the beginning of January. They are certainly indirectly related, however. The issue is monopoly and overreach. Google, Facebook and Twitter as well as Amazon have made moves to directly squash competitors (driving Parler off the internet and deplatforming outlets or creators who depend on social media for distribution). The longer it goes on the more people are getting caught in the trap. Have they finally reached too far?

We should expect to see a myriad of lawsuits from individual internet creators and at the forefront is conservative comedian and BlazeTV host Steven Crowder. Crowder’s lawyer announced Monday that they intended to sue Facebook over unfair competition and antitrust, among other things. Naturally the news broke at The Blaze.

Bill Richmond, the lawyer for BlazeTV host Steven Crowder, announced Monday he has begun filing a lawsuit against Facebook Inc. over “unfair competition, fraud, false advertising, and antitrust” violations.

The lawsuit is set to be filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and will seek injunctive relief as well as monetary damages, according to a summary of the filing posted on Crowder’s website.

Richmond, who is jokingly referred to on the set as Crowder’s “half-Asian lawyer,” was unusually straight-faced during Monday’s show as he shared details about the lawsuit, which he expects will pull him away from the show for the foreseeable future.

“This time’s different,” said Crowder about other minor lawsuits often filed against the platform for alleged censorship.

“The reason why it’s different is because we’re going after Facebook based on its own words and its own premises,” Richmond added.

Richmond and Crowder claim that even as Congress pulled Facebook up to the Capitol repeatedly to ask questions about censorship, Zuckerberg continued to deny that they did any censoring of conservative outlets or viewpoints.

“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,” Richmond claimed on Monday, adding, “but over the course of years, we’ve realized they actually are doing it.”

One of the main complaints focuses on “Louder with Crowder’s” massively popular election night livestream, which Crowder said Facebook took down without any explanation.

Richmond added that the lawsuit is “pro-business, anti-fraud,” saying, “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,” he said.

Richmond and his client hope to force Facebook to end their censorship or dish out a hefty payment.