SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – A federal appeals court has affirmed the dismissal of Twitter’s lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that sought to prevent any legal action against the social media company for its ban of former President Donald Trump.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on March 2 affirmed Judge Maxine Chesney’s ruling that Twitter’s fight was premature because Paxton has not gone to court to fight the company. Paxton is concerned about Twitter’s content-moderation decisions and has served it with a civil investigate demand seeking information about them.
But he hasn’t actually sued Twitter.
“(A)ddressing Twitter’s claim would require the district court to determine whether Twitter had made misrepresentations,” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote.
“But misrepresentations are exactly what are prohibited by Texas’s unfair and deceptive trade practices law; this is the very thing that Paxton claims (the Office of Attorney General) is trying to investigate. And at this stage, OAG hasn’t even alleged that there is a violation; OAG is just trying to look into it.”
Twitter’s lawsuit also focuses on Paxton urging the Federal Communications Commission to construe a provision of federal law after Twitter censored tweets from Trump.
According to the lawsuit, Paxton has a long history of complaints with Twitter and other 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 2020, 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."
Paxton then filed a civil investigative demand to see Twitter's content moderation policies, despite Twitter having a First Amendment right to its highly confidential internal documents, the suit claimed.
Last year a federal judge blocked a Texas law that required Facebook and Twitter to establish guidelines for banning users that are applied without bias.
Conservative groups like The Babylon Bee say Facebook and Twitter go out of their way to silence users when they don’t agree with them, but plaintiffs NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association successfully argued for a preliminary injunction.