But Steve DelBianco, president of NetChoice, a trade association that represents the tech industry including Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google, testified that as private companies they are protected by the same First Amendment rights that prohibit governments from forcing newspapers to carry speech they don’t want to.
“They are not held to the First Amendment,” DelBianco said. “It restricts governments from imposing conditions on the speech of us as individuals, churches, the Austin American-Statesman, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.”
“In other words the First Amendment protects them from you [the Legislature], it doesn’t protect the rest of us from those companies,” he continued.