The Attorney General of Indiana, Todd Rokita, has now begun probing five Big Tech companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter to establish if they have “harmed Indiana consumers through business practices that are abusive, deceptive and/or unfair.”
The Attorney General said that he was concerned with censorship of speech that may have been triggered by the alleged meetings of Joe Biden’s nominee Vanita Gupta with Big Tech companies.
“Gupta, who is President Joe Biden’s nominee to be associate U.S. attorney general, has allegedly met with Facebook and Twitter executives to urge ‘more rigorous rules and enforcement,’ to use her own words as quoted in Time,” said the Indiana Attorney General.
He also said that it is “harmful” and “unfair” to manipulate content on social media platforms. “It is potentially harmful and unfair for these companies to manipulate content in ways they do not publicly discuss or that consumers do not fully understand.”
“In a free society, few assets are more important to consumers than access to information and the opportunity to express political viewpoints in meaningful forums,” said Rokita.
The Attorney General then concluded stating that Gupta had stressed that social media platforms must be “tagging things and taking them down.”
During Gupta’s confirmation hearings, her past comments about free speech have been brought into question:
“Senator Cruz had some follow up questions from the first hearing, where he focused on her record. She was the head of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration.
In the hearing, Cruz started by asking Gupta, who, whether more censorship by big tech platforms would “be a good direction in this country.”
The senator referred to a tweet Gupta posted in 2019 containing a post by The New Yorker that criticized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his alleged belief in “unchallenged freedom of all speech.” Gupta wrote that the post was “spot on” adding that the First Amendment is not a “floating right” as it comes with “responsibilities.”
