A federal appeals court upheld a Texas law on Friday that seeks to curb censorship by social media platforms. The ruling, a major victory for Republicans who charge companies like Twitter and Facebook are limiting free speech, is a step in a major legal battle that could end up at the Supreme Court.
The lawsuit is challenging HB 20, a Texas bill signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott that regulates social media platforms with more than 50 million monthly users, which includes Google, Facebook and Twitter, and says they cannot censor or limit users’ speech based on viewpoint expression.
In his opinion, Federal Judge Andrew S. Oldham of the Fifth Circuit said the platforms argued for “a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment” that “buried somewhere in the person’s enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech.”
“Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Oldham continued.
Both Facebook and Twitter tried to suppress reporting in October 2020 about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter went on a suspension orgy over the New York Post articles that exposed Hunter Biden’s emails and the Biden Crime Family involvement with Ukraine.
All 3 Big Tech CEOs have decided on a global censorship database. The goal is to suppress the free speech of people, groups, and organizations they hate. This is coming from a conglomerate that says ‘Free speech is not a human right‘.
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