Two trade associations, NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), filed a lawsuit in a federal district court to strike down provisions of a new Texas law, passed in the Texas legislature as House Bill (HB) 20.
NetChoice and the CCIA, whose members include big tech companies such as Facebook and Google, contend that the regulations on the social media platforms are a violation of the businesses’ First Amendment rights to curate the content hosted on their sites.
“Allowing HB 20 to take effect will inflict significant harm on Texans by threatening the safety of users, creators, and businesses that use these websites to reach audiences in a family-friendly way,” said the president and CEO of NetChoice, Steve DelBianco, in a press release. “No American should ever be forced to navigate through harmful and offensive images, videos and posts.”
The lawsuit says that the big tech members of NetChoice and CCIA currently “prohibit all sorts of speech that they deem harmful or objectionable or against their policies, including medical misinformation, hate speech and slurs (spanning the spectrum from race and religion to veteran status), glorification of violence and animal abuse, and impersonation, lies, and misinformation more broadly.”