Laura Loomer’s Social Media Lawsuits: Four Losses, SCOTUS Denial

Laura Loomer’s social media lawsuits ended on October 6, 2025, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her final appeal without even asking the other side to respond.¹² Between 2018 and 2022, she filed four lawsuits against the platforms that had banned her, each built on a different legal theory: First Amendment and antitrust, defamation, tortious interference, and federal racketeering. All four were dismissed.

Why Loomer Sued

The bans came in waves. Twitter removed Loomer in 2018 after anti-Muslim remarks about Rep. Ilhan Omar.³ In May 2019, Facebook and Instagram designated her a “dangerous individual” and removed her accounts.⁴ She was also removed from Uber, Lyft, PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, and Uber Eats over policies on hate speech and targeted harassment.⁵

Loomer ran for Congress twice in Florida, winning her 2020 Republican primary in a Palm Beach County district before losing the general election by nearly 20 points, and losing a 2022 primary in Florida’s 11th congressional district by about seven.⁶

The district court dismissed the case, and on May 27, 2020, the D.C. Circuit affirmed. Judges Judith Rogers, Thomas Griffith, and Raymond Randolph rejected each theory. The First Amendment restrains only the government, and private companies hosting speech are not state actors. Parallel conduct by several platforms, without more, does not establish an antitrust conspiracy. And the D.C. Human Rights Act reaches physical places of public accommodation, not online services.⁸

Suit Two: The Facebook Defamation Case

After Facebook labeled her a “dangerous individual,” Loomer sued in the Southern District of Florida (Case No. 9:19-cv-80893-RS), assigned to Judge Rodney Smith. She brought claims for defamation, defamation per se, and defamation by implication, seeking more than $3 billion in punitive damages plus reinstatement and an apology.⁴⁹

Facebook argued that calling someone “dangerous” is an opinion on which “reasonable minds can disagree,” not a provable false statement of fact.¹⁰ A Florida court later issued an anti-SLAPP ruling against Loomer and considered sanctions against Klayman.¹¹

Suit Three: Illoominate Media v. CAIR

Also in 2019, Loomer and her company Illoominate Media filed a tortious interference suit in Palm Beach County circuit court against the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR-Florida, and Twitter, claiming CAIR had pressured Twitter to ban her. The defendants removed the case to federal court (Case No. 9:19-cv-81179-RAR), where Judge Rodolfo Ruiz dismissed it in November 2019.¹²

On December 29, 2020, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed. Judges Kevin Newsom, Britt Grant, and R. Lanier Anderson III found that CAIR-Florida had been fraudulently joined to defeat diversity jurisdiction, noting that the allegation of its involvement had actually originated as a prank by third parties. The tortious interference claim also failed on the merits: Twitter’s terms of service let the company terminate any account for any reason, so Loomer had no protected contractual interest to interfere with, and no cause of action exists for interference with a person’s relationship with the general public.¹³

Suit Four: The RICO Case Against Zuckerberg and Others

The fourth suit was the most ambitious. Filed in 2022 in the Northern District of California (Case No. 3:22-cv-02646-LB), it alleged that Meta Platforms, Mark Zuckerberg, X Corp., former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and the Procter & Gamble Company had joined a “Community Media Enterprise” — a racketeering conspiracy under federal RICO law — to censor conservative voices and interfere with U.S. elections. The complaint also named 100 unnamed federal officials as “Doe” defendants.¹⁴

Procter & Gamble’s presence was unusual. Loomer alleged that P&G joined the enterprise by placing ads on Meta and X and by threatening to pull ads unless certain users were banned. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler found that even assuming P&G had pressured Facebook, that amounted to a legitimate business decision to keep ads away from objectionable content, not a criminal conspiracy.¹⁵

Dismissal With Prejudice

On September 30, 2023, Judge Beeler dismissed the amended complaint with prejudice on three independent grounds.¹⁶

Res judicata barred the claims against Meta and X because they arose from the same transactional nucleus of facts as her earlier suits, namely the 2018 and 2019 bans.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded the platforms because Loomer’s RICO claims were, in substance, challenges to editorial choices about publishing or removing third-party content.
The complaint failed to plead a RICO enterprise, describing lawful business conduct rather than a coordinated criminal group with a common purpose, structure, and longevity under Boyle v. United States.

Beeler also refused to let Loomer file a second amended complaint, ruling that new material referencing the “Twitter Files” and P&G’s alleged pressure would not fix the underlying defects.¹⁶

The Ninth Circuit

A three-judge panel — Senior Circuit Judge Sidney R. Thomas and Circuit Judges John B. Owens and Daniel P. Collins — affirmed on March 27, 2025 in an unpublished memorandum (Case No. 23-3158). The panel resolved the appeal on the RICO enterprise question alone. A civil RICO claim requires a continuing unit that functions with a common purpose, along with structure and longevity. Loomer’s allegation that the defendants shared “common goals of making money, acquiring influence over other enterprises and entities, and other pecuniary and non-pecuniary interests” was, the panel concluded, “too unspecific” to establish a shared criminal purpose.¹⁷ Without a substantive RICO claim, the conspiracy count also fell. The panel called it unnecessary to reach res judicata or Section 230, leaving those grounds intact from the district court but unaddressed on appeal.¹⁴

The Supreme Court Denial

Loomer’s attorney, John M. Pierce of Woodland Hills, California, filed a petition for a writ of certiorari on June 25, 2025 (Docket No. 25-19).² The petition presented three questions: whether the Ninth Circuit misapplied res judicata to claims based on later events, whether the broad reading of Section 230 immunity as applied to alleged conspiratorial censorship raised policy concerns, and whether the lower courts imposed an unduly strict standard for pleading a RICO enterprise.¹⁶

Both X and Meta waived their right to respond, a signal CNN read as the companies not taking the petition seriously.¹ The Court denied certiorari on October 6, 2025 without comment. Justice Samuel Alito took no part in the decision. The recusal was attributed to Procter & Gamble stock that he and his wife own; Alito inherited the shares when his father-in-law died in 2012 and has routinely stepped aside from cases involving the company.¹⁸

Why the Cases Kept Losing

Two legal principles ran through every dismissal. The first is the state action doctrine: the First Amendment restricts only the government, and courts uniformly treated Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple as private companies making their own editorial choices. The Eleventh Circuit has held in a related case that social media companies themselves have a First Amendment right to curate content.¹⁹

The second is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 statute that shields platforms from liability tied to their content moderation decisions. Loomer tried repackaging the same underlying grievance — being banned — as defamation, tortious interference, and racketeering. Courts treated the label as irrelevant when the conduct being challenged was still the platform’s decision to publish or remove her posts. As CNN noted, the Supreme Court has largely stayed out of Section 230’s scope despite pressure from both the political left and right, issuing narrow 2023 rulings in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh without redefining the statute’s reach.¹

Loomer’s Twitter account was reinstated in December 2022 after Elon Musk acquired the platform, alongside many other previously banned users.²⁰ The reinstatement did not moot the litigation, and the courts’ rulings on why her theories failed remain on the books.

1
CNN. Laura Loomer Supreme Court Appeal
2
Supreme Court of the United States. Docket 25-19, Loomer v. Zuckerberg
3
The New Yorker. Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback
4
First Amendment Watch. Laura Loomer Sues Facebook for Defamation
5
Britannica. Laura Loomer
6
Britannica. Freedom Watch v. Google, Judgment
8
Courthouse News Service. Freedom Watch v. Google, D.C. Circuit Opinion
9
Reclaim the Net. Loomer v. Facebook, Facebook Motion to Dismiss
10
Bloomberg Law. Facebook Defends Decision to Ban Laura Loomer as Dangerous
11
Media Law Resource Center. Florida Court SLAPPs Anti-Muslim Activist Laura Loomer’s Lawsuit
12
Florida Politics. Court Rules Against Laura Loomer in Twitter Ban Case
13
Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Illoominate Media v. CAIR Florida, No. 19-14741
14
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Loomer v. Zuckerberg, No. 23-3158
15
MediaPost. Laura Loomer to SCOTUS: Revive Claims Against Meta
16
Supreme Court of the United States. Loomer v. Meta Platforms, Petition for Writ of Certiorari
17
Metropolitan News-Enterprise. RICO Conspiracy Ruling
18
Fix the Court. Alito’s Recusal in the Loomer Case
19
First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University. Social Media
20
Media Matters for America. Elon Musk Reinstates Twitter Accounts