AUSTIN, Texas (Legal Newsline) – A Christian satire website is supporting a Texas law that prohibits social media platforms from banning users without reason, arguing that Jesus Christ himself would have been cancelled by the internet in 2021.
The Babylon Bee and its sister site Not The Bee filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Austin federal court on Nov. 23 to defend HB 2020 from a legal challenge by Netchoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association.
The bill requires companies like Facebook and Twitter to establish guidelines for bans that are applied without bias. The Babylon Bee and Not The Bee, which chronicle what they feel are hypocritical bans and littered their brief with those examples, say they have even been “shadow” banned by Facebook at the algorithm level.
“These platforms publicly declare dedication to free speech and equality but surreptitiously censor or shadow-ban online discourse in a way that perpetuates existing power structures,” the brief says.
“This jeopardizes civil liberties, like freedom of expression and the right to assemble. It exposes vulnerable groups with less political clout to online and offline abuses like online silencing, doxing (hostile posting of personal information) and even real-world violence.”
The Bee says its conservative and religious viewpoints have been suppressed and that the offenders have falsely used cracks in algorithms to explain them.
“In today’s social media culture, Jesus – who by all accounts should check many of the progressive boxes for victimhood and powerlessness and by many accounts advanced a host of their stated positions – would be digitally crucified and sealed in a virtual case,” the motion says.
“in other words, he would be ‘canceled.’ His Christian followers are persistently cast into an online colosseum and subjected to damnatio ad bestias with no means for self-defense merely because they refuse to submit to – and sometimes lampoon – hypocrisy and often irrational dictates imposed by those with other viewpoints.”
Challengers of the law say it prohibits social media platforms from engaging in their own expression to label or comment on what is disseminated on them.
Because the suit challenges a state law, the state attorney general is the named defendant. That gives Texas AG Ken Paxton another front to fight.
He issued a civil investigative demand to Twitter after it banned President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Paxton sought documents relating to what he felt were possible violations of his state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act in regard to what it allows to be posted.
Twitter’s response was to sue Paxton in California federal court in an attempt to stifle his CID. Judge Maxine Chesney ruled for Paxton in May, declaring Twitter’s suit premature. The company has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
According to Twitter’s lawsuit, Paxton has a long history of complaints with social media/big tech companies, including accusing them of censoring or stifling conservative voices and opinions on the platform and internet.
Paxton complained on Fox News about Twitter censoring false or misleading content regarding election and voting practices in May of last year, and called the platform "politically biased," the suit says.
In September 2020, Paxton filed a comment with the Federal Communications Commission urging the FCC to construe a provision of federal law after Twitter continued to censor false and misleading tweets from former president Donald Trump, the suit says.
Twitter says that Trump's inappropriate tweets increased in frequency after the November 2020 election, until he spoke to a crowd in January of this year where he continued to insist the election was stolen, and encouraged the crowd to march to the Capitol Building, to "fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
After Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter, Paxton tweeted that he would "fight [Twitter] with all he's got."
Elsewhere, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Texas filed a lawsuit in April that says Paxton violates the Constitutional rights of Twitter users when he blocks them.
Other plaintiffs range from journalists to project managers to students to campaign managers to attorneys, all of whom have criticized Ken Paxton for issues including his policies and his federal fraud indictments and were consequentially blocked from viewing his Twitter account.
The plaintiffs accuse Paxton of unconstitutionally blocking people from his official Twitter account and official statements after they criticized him or his policies. The plaintiffs argue that the First and Fourteenth amendments protect their rights to participate in a public forum with a government official and that viewpoint-based restriction on the plaintiff's ability to petition the government for redress of grievances has been imposed.