By Alex Berenson
19 hr ago
In January 2021, after the lil bird kicked off Donald Trump, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said he would investigate twitter’s “content moderation” (aka censorship) policies.
twitter didn’t like this idea. So it went running to its home courts in California to try to get them to quash Paxton’s investigation before his office had tried to enforce a single subpoena.
Because First Amendment, which twitter appeared to think protects it from any and all legal and governmental scrutiny.
Things have not gone as planned for the lil bird.
On Wednesday, following some back-and-forth, three 9th Circuit judges blew twitter out of the water. They found that twitter’s effort to block the investigation was not “ripe,” because Texas hadn’t actually gone to court to enforce its requests.
By itself, that portion of the ruling was more procedural than substantive. But the judges didn’t stop there.
They destroyed twitter’s claim that the First Amendment prevents any scrutiny of whether the company is being honest with the public – and its users – about the way it reviews and censors content:
Even if content moderation is protected speech, making misrepresentations about content moderation policies is not. See Va. State Bd. Of Pharmacy v. Va. Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., 425 US 748, 772 (1976) (misleading commercial speech is not protected).
Even worse for the little bird, the judges specifically rejected twitter’s claim that its own statements that it is committed to free speech are nonsense which no one should take seriously (yes, twitter actually made this argument)….
Read the whole thing here.
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2 comments:
Judge wasn't paid off enough.Maybe one of the few that couldn't be bought?Wish him good health in the short and long term.
--GRA
Somehow I think Twitter will survive this 'devastating defeat'.
Trump was president and Republicons controlled Congress 2017 - 2019, yet nothing was done about big tech censorship via arbitrary ToS, which was at that time already a HUGE problem, and it has only gotten worse since then -- so it's ironic that Trump's ban from Twitter was the impetus for this lawsuit.
The relevant part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act:
§230(c)
(2) CIVIL LIABILITY - No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of -- '(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; ...
Reading this text, it seems pretty clear that social media companies are massively abusing their liability protection under §230(c)(2) by censoring 'speech' that does not in any way fall under the language of §230(c)(2) -- and these practices are just as clearly a violation of the First Amendment.
But what Republicans do best is con the public into thinking they are useful opposition to Democrats -- they're not good for anything else.
The GOP cannot be destroyed and its corpse desecrated soon enough.
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