It’s Never the RICO–Loomer v. Zuckerberg

March 27, 2025 · by · in Content Regulation

Loomer brought RICO claims against Facebook, Twitter, and Procter & Gamble, claiming they were all part of a “wide-ranging conspiracy…to unlawfully censor conservative voices and interfere with American elections.” The panel says wearily that “This action is Loomer’s fourth lawsuit about this alleged conspiracy” but sidesteps the obvious res judicata problem. (Loomer’s other suits: Freedom Watch v. Google, Illoominate v. CAIR, and Loomer v. Facebook). All of those prior lawsuits failed, and this one does too, in a perfunctory memo opinion. My blog post on the district court opinion (I focused on the 230 issue, but this ruling turns on the failure of the prima facie elements).

The panel says there’s no RICO “enterprise.” “The gravamen of Loomer’s complaint is to hold Meta and X Corp liable for deciding whether to block or restrict certain content provided by others. Loomer claims a RICO violation against Procter & Gamble for doing business with Meta and X Corp by placing advertisements on their platforms.” To show the requisite coordination among the parties, Loomer argued that the defendants had the “common goals of making money, acquiring influence over other enterprises and entities, and other pecuniary and non-pecuniary interests.” The court says that allegation (and others) is too unspecific.

It’s hardly surprising that Loomer lost this lawsuit. First, it’s never the RICO. Second, her track record in court is littered with futility. Still, Zuckerberg and Musk have been adding fuel to the overall angst among conservatives that surely they were being censored.

Loomer’s lawsuit also was off-base in three structural ways. First, as recently demonstrated in Tech Policy Press, “to the extent conservatives experience content moderation more often, it is because they are more likely to share information from untrustworthy news sources;” and “conservative sources and accounts tend to receive more engagement, not less.” In other words, conservatives have been getting more favorable treatment in social media than they deserve.

Second, lawsuits like this conflate government censorship and private editorial discretion. It’s never “censorship” when a publisher decides that content doesn’t meet its editorial standards.

Third, allegations of secret social media censorial conspiracies seem quaint in comparison to the broad-based and brazen censorship efforts being deployed by the Trump administration. Efforts to disappear people for protesting or writing op-eds, punish anyone who has supported “DEI,” punish law firms for the clients they represent, and tell universities what and how to teach–these are four-alarm fires of government censorship, and they taking place in broad daylight as a misuse of our tax dollars. All of the people who have been howling about social media “censorship,” but are now cheering Team Trump’s censorshipalooza in the past 2 months (or just standing quietly on the sidelines), have proven that they never truly cared about “censorship” at all.

Case Citation: Loomer v. Zuckerberg, 2025 WL 927186 (9th Cir. March 27, 2025). This is another failed account termination/content removal case.

Prior Blog Posts on Loomer: