On January 13, five days after the company suspended Trump due to deadly riots at the U.S. Capitol, Paxton announced that he was launching an investigation into content moderation policies on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Apple.
“The rights and transparency of the First Amendment must be maintained for a free online community to operate and prosper,” he said in a statement at the time. “However, the apparently coordinated decentralization of the President of the United States and several important voices not only chills freedom of speech, but totally silences those whose speech and political beliefs do not align with the leaders of Big Tech companies.”
In its action, however, Twitter maintained that First Amendment protections guaranteed the company’s ability to decide what was allowed on its platform, as well as what to remove or restrict. Cooperating 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 jeopardize its ability to conduct such moderation.
The company said it tried to reach an agreement with the Texas attorney general to limit the scope of his office’s request, which sought all company policies, but the two parties were unable to do so.
“Instead, AG Paxton made it clear that he will use the full weight of his position, including his broad investigative powers, to retaliate on Twitter for making editorial decisions that he disagrees with,” the company said.
Representatives from Twitter and the Texas attorney general did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Paxton has fought with the social media platform in the past over its content moderation policies, stating in an opinion piece from Fox News last May that Twitter fact checkers were politically biased against Trump.
However, Twitter was not the only platform to take action against Trump in response to the January 6 events. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, all took their own steps to sanction it. Unlike Twitter, they all reinstated the former president’s accounts, although he did not make any new posts after leaving office.
The lawsuit is the latest development in an ongoing battle between social media companies and those on the right, who have seen attempts to verify the content and debunk conservative accounts as indicative of a culture of withdrawal from society that aims to silence Republican voices. .
Conservatives clung to the charges against Big Tech as a rallying cry after the riots, with some predicting it could be a key issue for the Republican Party for the mid-term elections and in 2024. Anti-Silicon Valley sentiment is now a defining theme for the Republican Party, which in recent years has summoned CEOs to audiences. Last fall, Trump’s nominees filed two major antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook.