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An online group is protesting Texas' ludicrous social media censorship law in a very funny way [1]

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Date: 2022-09-28

Texas’ HB 20, titled “Relating to complaint procedures and disclosure requirements for and censorship of users' expressions by social media platforms,” was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott last year. It was one of the myriad right-wing anti-democracy laws Republicans in the Lone Star state responded with, hoping to turn the tide of majority rule. While other moves led to librarians being fired for putting books on shelves and rolled back voting rights, HB 20 promised to force private social media companies to disseminate anything anyone wanted to say, ever—or face Big Government stepping in to control said platform.

Sounds sort of like fascism, right? It is. While conservatives say that the law will only affect the largest social media platforms—any that “functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month”—the language surrounding what is “protected” is so vague and open-ended that it creates impossible standards for social media platforms to manage. Vox points out that because the Texas law applies to all “viewpoint discrimination, regardless of whether that viewpoint is political,” this means that a company like Twitter couldn’t ban a stalker or a historically inaccurate KKK bigot without also banning someone who isn’t a stalker or those who speak to the history of race in our country in any sober terms.

You would be hard-pressed to find a Constitutional scholar, lawyer, or person with a reading level above 6th grade who could logically and in good faith explain how this law isn’t a fundamental violation of First Amendment rights. It is the reason Sen. Mitch McConnell and the Heritage Foundation game plan has been to seed the courts with radical conservative judges throughout the country: in order to support the anti-Constitutional laws they want to put into effect.

A subreddit account has decided to do some masterclass trolling in order to test Gov. Greg Abbott with this horrendous law.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/28/2125782/-Online-protesters-discriminate-against-comments-not-calling-Texas-Gov-Abbott-a-little-p-ss-baby

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