Social-media giant Twitter on Monday filed a complaint in U.S. District Court against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in order to stop the state’s probe into its moderation policies.
In its filing, the company called the investigation an abuse of power, panning it as nothing more than retaliation for having permanently suspended the account of President Donald Trump — his preferred method of communicating with the public.
“Twitter seeks to stop AG Paxton from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” Twitter wrote.
On January 13, five days after Twitter suspended Trump in response to the January 6 Capitol protest, Paxton announced he would be investigating the moderation policies at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple.
“First Amendment rights and transparency must be maintained for a free online community to operate and thrive,” the Texas AG said in a statement at the time. “However, the seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President of the United States and several leading voices not only chills free speech, it wholly silences those whose speech and political beliefs do not align with leaders of Big Tech companies.”
Twitter countered Paxton’s assessment, arguing in its filing that the First Amendment protects the company’s right to decide what is allowable on its platform, as well as to remove or restrict whatever it wants.
The tech giant went on to claim that complying with Texas’ request for “volumes of highly confidential documents” related to content moderation would hurt its ability to execute such moderation.
Twitter also said it attempted to come to an agreement with the Texas AG to reduce the scope of his office’s request, which sought all of the company’s policies. The two parties, however, could not come to an agreement.
“Instead, AG Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees,” Twitter said.
Paxton has voiced his disapproval of Twitter’s moderation policies in the past, stating in an opinion piece for Fox News last May that Twitter fact checkers are biased against Donald Trump.
Other prominent social-media platforms to suspend President Trump were Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They have since reinstated his accounts, although he has not posted since leaving office.
That leaders at the tech firms are overwhelmingly liberal can’t be denied. As TNA has previously reported, top executives at Facebook and Twitter donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaign of Joe Biden while giving nothing to President Trump’s reelection bid.
Moreover, leaked documents reveal that executives from a number of American tech companies — including Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon — participated in an annual conference held by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which leads the Chinese Communist Party’s digital COVID-19 disinformation campaign.
Not only did Chinese President and CCP leader Xi Jinping speak at the 2020 conference; the event was attended by companies that have been identified by the Department of Defense as assisting the Chinese military for over 20 years. These include Huawei, China Telecom, and China Electronics Technology Group.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was among those present at the event.
Zuckerberg played a prominent role in the 2020 election. Besides the fact that his social-media platform regularly censored conservative speech during the race, Zuckerberg spent half a billion dollars to increase turnout in Democrat strongholds. He did this by way of a “dark money apparatus of 10 nonprofits funded by 5 foundations” with the aim to “fundamentally undermine the electoral system.”
Under this apparatus, Fulton County, Georgia, alone received $6.3 million from the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life’s “Safe Elections” project.
The Big Tech companies have attempted to stamp out competition from free speech alternatives by colluding to shut them down. Shortly after Twitter banned President Trump and conservatives flocked to Parler in large numbers, both Google and Apple removed the Parler app from their app stores and Amazon cut off Parler’s servers, bringing the website down altogether. Parler has since come back online.
Be it on social media, in the classroom, or the boardroom, the Left is now on a rampage to suppress conservative speech in any sphere it controls.
