- Tuesday, March 04, 2025
By: Pramod Kumar
INDIAN AMERICAN attorney Harmeet Dhillon has sued Twitter for permanently suspending the account of Republican influencer Rogan O’Handley for his tweets claiming fraud in the 2020 general election.
The lawsuit, filed on June 17 in US district court for the central district of California, also names former California Secretary of State Alex Padilla whom Dhillon accuses of collaborating with Twitter to censor O’Handley’s posts about election fraud.
Also named is current Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the public affairs firm SKDKnickerbocker, and two employees of the Secretary of State’s Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC).
“Social media companies ‘policing’ their platforms is not, as of now, a First Amendment issue by itself. There are other issues with it including consumer protection, false advertising, and defamation,” Dhillon said.
“But when a company colludes with the government to silence speech, that is a First Amendment violation, and that is what happened here.”
Dhillon claimed that Padilla and the OEC aggressively attempted to suppress speech they deemed to be ‘misleading’, under the guise of fostering ‘election integrity’.
The OEC was launched in 2018 with the sole purpose of keeping every Californian’s vote safe from online interference, especially the spread of mis- and disinformation.
O’Handley had over 420,000 followers on Twitter, and tweeted using the handle “DC_Draino.”
According to the lawsuit, O’Handley, who is licensed to practice law in California, left private practice in order to focus on media and speaking engagements.
His following on Twitter and other social media increased his visibility, leading to 75 appearances on national news networks over the past 15 months.
On Nov. 12, 2020, five days after President Joe Biden declared victory in the general election, O’Handley tweeted: “Audit every California ballot. Election fraud is rampant nationwide and we all know California is one of the culprits. Do it to protect the integrity of that state’s election.”
Following a complaint by the OEC, Twitter flagged the tweet, with the cautionary note: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
On January 6, violent mobs breached security to storm the Capitol Building in Washington, declaring the election was fraudulent and stolen.
On January 18, O’Handley tweeted: “When your country is stolen and you aren’t even allowed to talk about it, that’s not freedom. It’s fascism.”
Twitter flagged his tweets on January 21 and 22 and added a note: “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, retweeted or liked due to a risk of violence.”
Then, on February 22, O’Handley tweeted a photo of the US Capitol surrounded by barbed wire fencing, with the caption, “Most votes in American history.”
Following this, Twitter permanently suspended his account for “violating our rules about election integrity.”
Dhillon alleged that O’Handley has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of his ban from Twitter.
