On January 13, five days after the company suspended Trump in the wake of the deadly riots at the US Capitol, Paxton announced that it would launch an investigation into content moderation policies at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Apple.
“Rights and transparency must be maintained for the first amendment so that a free online community can function and thrive,” he said in a statement at the time. “However, the seemingly coordinated deployment of the President of the United States and several leading voices not only cool freedom of speech, but also silence those whose speech and political convictions are not in line with those of big tech companies.”
In its submission, however, Twitter maintained that the protection by the first amendment ensures the company’s ability to decide what is permissible on its platform, as well as what to remove or restrict. The collaboration with the state’s request for ‘volumes of highly confidential documents’ related to content moderation, the company said, would undermine the effectiveness of Twitter’s policies and impair its ability to carry out such moderation.
The company said it was trying to work out an agreement with the Texas Attorney General to limit the scope of his office’s request, which seeks all of the company’s policies, but the two parties were able to do not.
“Instead, AG Paxton has made it clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his extensive investigative powers, to retaliate against Twitter for making editorial decisions with which he disagrees,” the company said.
Representatives of Twitter and the Texas Attorney General did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Paxton has shaken up its social media platform in the past over its content moderation policy, claiming in a Fox News opinion piece last May that Twitter’s fact-checking was anti-Trump politics.
However, Twitter was not the only platform that took action against Trump in response to the events of January 6. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, have all taken their own steps to punish him. Unlike Twitter, they have all since reinstated the former president’s accounts, although he has not held any new posts since leaving office.
The court case is the latest development in an ongoing battle between social media companies and those on the right, who view efforts to control content and deploy conservative reports as an indication of a social cancellation culture that Republican voices want silence.
Conservatives like accusations against Big Tech as a rally in the wake of the riots, some have predicted that this could be a major IDP issue for the midterm elections and in 2024. The anti-Silicon Valley sentiment is now a defining theme of the Republican Party, which has overtaken CEOs for hearings over the past year. Last fall, Trump appointees filed two major antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook.