Louisiana & Alabama Attorneys General Set Up Silly Hotline To Report 'Social Media Censorship' They Can't Do Anything About

from the stop-wasting-everyone's-time dept

While various states are pushing unconstitutional laws to try to compel social media websites to host content they don't want to host, it appears that some state Attorneys General are seeing what kinds of questionable things they can do even without a law. Florida's law was already declared unconstitutional, but other states are still trying to pass these laws. One feature seen in a bunch of them is the ability for residents in a state to complain to the Attorney General and to ask the AG to investigate.

It appears that Louisiana and Alabama aren't waiting around for a law on that front. The Attorneys General from both states, Jeff Landry from Louisiana and Steve Marshall from Alabama, have announced plans to set up a special hotline for ignorant people who are sure they've been "censored by big tech."

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall on Tuesday launched an initiative aimed at addressing censorship on social media platforms.

As part of the initiative, the official websites of each attorney general now provide a “Social Media Censorship Complaint Form” for the public to report abuses by Big Tech, according to press releases sent by the attorney generals’ offices in both states.

Of course, what they never mention is that websites are allowed to do whatever the hell they want on their own websites, because it's their private property. And if you violate their laws, they can ask you to leave. Remember when Republicans used to support that kind of thing? Anyway, this is just performative nonsense:

Landry and Marshall are encouraging citizens in their states who have been censored online to file formal complaints with their respective offices.

The information provided in these complaints will be kept confidential, in accordance with each state’s laws, Landry’s office said. Each complaint will be reviewed and will be reviewed and analyzed to determine whether the reported conduct by social media companies constitutes a violation of federal or state law.

Here, I'll help both offices "review and analyze" the complaints for free: "No, nothing the websites do with regards to moderation violates federal or state law, because moderation choices are fully protected by the 1st Amendment." In fact, the more questionable thing is setting up this complaint form, because it sure looks like an effort to pressure private websites to change their content moderation practices and that could violate the 1st Amendment.

I'm not linking to the forms themselves, but they are just as dumb as you would expect. The Louisiana one is... not even on a government website, but on AG Landry's own .com (though it also claims -- falsely -- that all content is copyright to the Louisiana Department of Justice, even though state governments are not supposed to copyright their own content, so who the hell knows if this is a government website or a private one). That form is pretty short, though I'm amused that it asks people to say whether they felt the moderation actions taken against them were justified. Like, who's going to say that it was?

The Alabama form is way more ridiculous. Even the framing of it is ridiculous, saying it's a "social media censorship complaint form."

The Alabama page asks all sorts of information -- including asking you to say if a website fact checked your content, which is obviously 1st Amendment protected speech (and is "more speech" not "censorship.")

All of this is nonsense, of course. As noted above, websites have every right to manage the content on their sites how they see fit. And these forms are just useless grandstanding from two Attorneys General who must know better and simply don't care. They're misleading the public and pretending to do be able to do something they cannot. And, if they actually did try to do something, that would be completely unconstitutional. The chief legal officer in a state shouldn't be setting out to (1) mislead the public with nonsense, and (2) set up to do something unconstitutional. Alabama and Louisiana: elect better people.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, alabama, censorship, complaint line, content moderation, jawboning, jeff landry, louisiana, steve marshall
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