The US Supreme Court has blocked an attempt by the state of Texas to ban social media companies from blocking users based on their views. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the bill into law last year.
He said at the time that his intention was to prevent bias against conservative viewpoints and protect free speech. Yesterday, America’s top court agreed to a request from the tech giants to temporarily block the law from coming into force.
According to The BBC:
The legislation would have prevented larger tech companies from banning or censoring Texas users for their views.
Republicans in the state said it was necessary to combat what they claimed was social media’s liberal bias.
But tech groups argued that the law was a violation of the private companies’ freedom of speech rights.
In a rare 5-4 ruling, the US’s top court agreed on Tuesday to a request supported by tech giants to temporarily block the law from coming into force.
Industry groups suing against the legislation argued that it violated the right to free speech, which included the freedom of private companies to decide what content to publish on their platforms.
Without the ability to moderate their platforms, Silicon Valley campaigners claimed that the state legislation would have turned Facebook, Twitter and YouTube into “havens of the vilest expression imaginable”.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed the bill into law in September last year, said at the time that the opposite was true – that the measure was intended to prevent bias against conservative viewpoints and protect free speech.
Social media companies are “our modern-day public square” where debate should flow freely, he argued. “There is a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas”.
The law stated that social media platforms with more than 50 million users could not ban people based on their political viewpoints.
Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube all fell within its scope.
On Tuesday, an unlikely group of five Supreme Court justices – appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents – joined forces to block the law from taking effect while lawsuits over its legality continue.
This is a smokescreen. In reality, the tech giants couldn’t care less whether users are conservative, liberal, religious, atheist, gay straight or trans. All they care about is their hegemony over the internet.
Their algorithms are carefully designed to create a sense of injustice in every one of the thousands of identity groups. Every now and then, Twitter will kick off a conservative commentator just for the hell of it and to create a bit of outrage, but it doesn’t really care about your views on immigration, nationalism, sexuality or gender identity.
Twitter (and the rest) are in the business of distorting reality. You and I know that there is an expeditious agenda to utterly transform life on this planet.
Its architects are using manufactured crises like climate change and fake pandemics to change people’s perceptions so that they will accept a new reality where everything they do is controlled to the nth degree.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok have only one purpose, that is to hide this agenda from their billions of users and to keep them bickering over matters of little importance.
