Texas suit against Twitter to go forward

 Washington Times:

A federal appeals court has dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which accused him of retaliating for the social media platform’s ban of former President Donald Trump.

Twitter’s procedural defeat on Wednesday allows Texas’ investigation into Twitter to proceed, though the probe may still get slapped down in the future.

Mr. Paxton launched an investigation into Twitter after it expelled Mr. Trump last year and the Texas Republican issued a civil investigative demand for information about the company’s content moderation policies.

Twitter sued in response and said the demand was government retaliation for speech protected by the First Amendment.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday that Twitter’s case was not ready for a judicial decision. The three-judge panel affirming a lower court’s ruling to toss the case noted that Mr. Paxton had not yet made an allegation against Twitter.

“While Twitter could suffer hardship from withholding court consideration, adjudicating this case now would require determining whether Twitter has violated Texas’s unfair trade practices law before [Texas’ attorney general] has a chance to complete its investigation,” wrote Judge Ryan D. Nelson in the court’s opinion.

“Any hardship to Twitter from the alleged chill of its First Amendment rights was insufficient to overcome the uncertainty of the legal issue presented in the case in its current posture,” Judge Nelson wrote.

The judges’ ruling against Twitter does not spell victory for Mr. Paxton or mean that his investigation will force Twitter to restore Mr. Trump’s access.

The court made clear that determining whether content moderation is protected speech or political censorship is at the heart of the case, and the court said that misrepresentations about content moderation policies are not constitutionally protected speech.
...

Twitter seems to be making an unusual argument that "censorship is protected speech."  I think it will be hard to keep their content moderation policy a secret in these circumstances.  It could be as simple as we don't like this guy so we are going to block him.  We do know that they block legitimate stories about Hunter Biden and his deal-making, that people now say had they known they would not have voted for Joe Biden.  Their censorship has had a negative impact on the US because Joe Biden has been a rolling disaster as President.

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