Texas Opens Investigation into Conspiracy to Boycott Certain Social Platforms

The same Ken Paxton:

> Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fled his home in a truck driven by his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, to avoid being served a subpoena Monday, according to an affidavit filed in federal court.

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-attorney-gener...

Perhaps we should start giving investigations like this performing arts awards. The theater deserves recognition.

Is this a weird Texas thing? Like how they sued Oprah for saying she wouldn't eat beef?

Oh wow there I was wondering how The Onion had been able to purchase the right to that website, thinking was it some kind of bankruptcy proceeding?

Do we know if Ken Paxton is really an attorney? Can we check?

"conspiracy to boycott"...

So does this mean that people are planning to boycott, but haven't?

It's real simple, there is no conspiracy. Anyone with even half a working brain can see what a toxic cesspool social media platforms are becoming. An estimated 1 in 3 posts are done by bots now.

There's no conspiracy, people are leaving social media to make their lives better and less stressful. There's absolutely no law, anywhere, that people need to stay in abusive relationships...That's what social media has become for far too many people.

Good god these guys hate the free market.

Texans getting exactly the government they’ve voted for and deserve.

Just too bad it’s going to be allowed to affect people outside the TX border. But hey, it’s the party of “freedom for me but not for thee”, so what did anyone expect. Certainly not integrity or honesty.

This is a pretty scary threat to free speech. There also appears to be a blatant conflict of interest here, considering the owner of the "certain social platform" in question hasn't left the side of the president-elect in weeks and the Attorney General of Texas is directly aligned with the same two oligarchs - Musk and Trump.

How is this anything other than using the power of the Texas State Government to run an extortion racket, designed to funnel money straight to Musk?

Corporations are allowed to choose where they want to spend their advertising budget, and if they don't want to have their ads showing between conspiracy theories and outright hate, that's allowed.

For those that are out of the loop on all this, here's a Reuters article about the formation of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) from 2019: https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/advertisers-agenc...

And here's the WFA's post about it shutting GARM down: https://wfanet.org/knowledge/item/2024/08/09/wfa-discontinue...

From what I can tell, the World Federation of Advertisers formed GARM to push advertising platforms to take a more proactive role in dealing with misinformation. Naturally, with the way X has been going since the change in ownership, they have been hit hard by this kind of pushback and Elon Musk vowed to sue WFA for this. Seems like because he got involved, the rest of the republican leadership decided to as well as there's this Texas thing and a motion by the House republicans to do a similar investigation.

I really don't know what they expect to accomplish with this though. Do they think the government should force advertisers to buy ads on X or something?

I cannot get into it, plus I am getting a cert issue. I guess the Gov of Texas has no idea how to run a site. But they can arrest people for boycotting ?

I can only assume this has to do with people leaving Twitter, which I did a week ago.

FTFA:

> Attorney General Paxton is investigating a possible coordinated plan or conspiracy to withhold advertising dollars from certain social media platforms by pressuring advertisers not to purchase online advertising space. Although companies are free to choose when and where they want to advertise, a conspiracy among companies along these lines can result in harm to competition and may violate the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act of 1983. The civil investigative demand requests documents and information related to WFA [World Federation of Advertisers] and its sub-organization known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (“GARM”) organizing their membership to potentially boycott social media platforms that are deemed to violate their “Brand Safety Standards.”

It doesn't seem so far fetched that an organization called Global Alliance for Responsible Media would support a boycott of platforms they don't think are their brand of "responsible". If they coordinated that boycott, then they could be in actual trouble.