• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, October 3, 2023

A judge has thrown out a lawsuit by conservative activist Laura Loomer against consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, Meta Platforms and X Corp. (formerly Twitter) over bans of her social media accounts.

The ruling, issued Saturday by U.S. District Court Judge Laurel Beeler in the Northern District of California, was with prejudice -- meaning Loomer can't revise her claims and bring them again.

Beeler's order comes in a lawsuit brought by Loomer last year, when she claimed in a sprawling complaint that Meta and X engaged in a racketeering conspiracy by banning her over alleged violations of their content policies. She later amended her lawsuit to claim that Procter & Gamble was part of the alleged racketeering conspiracy, because it supposedly threatened to stop running ads on Meta unless it banned her.

Meta's Facebook banned Loomer in May of 2019. X banned her in November of 2018, but reinstated her account after Elon Musk acquired the company last year.

Meta and X urged Beeler to dismiss the complaint for several reasons, including that Loomer previously lost lawsuits against them based on similar claims. The companies also said Loomer's claims were barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects online services from lawsuits over decisions about content moderation.

Procter & Gamble argued separately that Loomer's allegations, even if proven true, would show only that the company “asserted its own legitimate business interest in not having its advertisements appear next to hateful, denigrating, discriminatory, or other similarly offensive content.”

Beeler sided against Loomer on all counts. The judge specifically noted that the allegations that Procter & Gamble pressured Meta into banning Loomer wouldn't support a racketeering claim.

Loomer "alleges essentially that Procter & Gamble pressured Facebook to ban her by threatening to pull advertisements from Facebook if it did not do so, and Facebook capitulated,” Beeler wrote.

Those allegations would show only that Facebook and Procter & Gamble were acting in accordance with their business interests, Beeler wrote. She added that Procter & Gamble's alleged attempt to avoid running ads near objectionable content was a legitimate business decision.

“The plaintiff thus has not plausibly pleaded that Procter & Gamble is part of a RICO enterprise,” Beeler wrote.