Drs. Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, and Bryan Tyson filed their complaint in the Superior Court of California. It alleges that Twitter breached its own terms and policies by silencing their voices and refusing to provide them with official "verified" badges.
The plaintiffs also say that Twitter's actions caused them harm, and are asking the judge to order Twitter to reactivate their accounts so they can reconnect with their followers.
All three doctors are represented by Bryan M. Garrie and Matthew P. Tyson, the latter of whom sent a letter on May 12 to the directors and managing agents of Twitter requesting that these three accounts as well as two others be immediately reinstated with "verified" badges. The company failed to respond.
Tyson the attorney, who has no relation to Dr. Tyson, acknowledged that Twitter is a "private company," and that it can "suspend user accounts for any or no reason."
"However, Twitter also implemented specific community standards to limit COVID-19 misinformation on the platform, and Twitter was bound to follow those terms," he added.
If this lawsuit is a success, it will have far-reaching implications for Twitter
Twitter's content-moderation terms, the complaint adds, included removal procedures for ineffective treatments and false diagnostic criteria, as well as measures for "labeling" information as "misleading."
The company failed to follow these procedures and instead gave the three doctors and numerous others the axe, rather than follow its so-called "five-strike policy."
"The consequences for violating our COVID-19 misleading information policy depend on the severity and type of the violation and the account's history of previous violations," Twitter's website states.
"In instances where accounts repeatedly violate this policy, we will use a strike system to determine if further enforcement actions should be applied."
Strike 1 involves "no account-level action," followed by a 12-hour lock for Strike 2. Strike 3 results in another 12-hour account lock, followed by a seven-day account lock for Strike 4. Five more strikes and a user's account gets permanently "suspended" – meaning banned.
The plaintiffs say that they relied on Twitter to fairly and in good faith enforce its terms, which they say the company did not do. Tweeting truthful information about covid, they say, does not violate Twitter's terms of service, community standards, content moderation policies, or misinformation guidelines.
"None of these physicians posted false or misleading information, nor did they receive five strikes before suspension," Tyson the attorney added in his letter.
"It's no accident that Twitter violated its own COVID-19 misinformation guidelines and suspended the accounts of Drs. Zelenko, Malone, Fareed, Tyson and McCullough."
Keep in mind that all of the plaintiffs are licensed physicians. They are respectable people, unlike Twitter's censorship trolls who willy-nilly throughout the plandemic shut down accounts of people and companies they do not like, applying its rules and policies unfairly and in a discriminatory way.
If successful, this lawsuit will set a precedent for social media free speech, and possibly lead to other lawsuits from other Twitter users who were unfairly targeted by the company.
"These doctors are simply truth tellers," wrote a commenter at The Epoch Times about the plaintiffs. "I want Twitter to expose any false or misinformation that these doctors supposedly posted. Show me!"
Another wrote that these doctors may also be able to sue for "harassment due to ideological motives," as there is clearly a systemic bias at Twitter against truthful covid information.
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