Texas A&M Sued for Social Media Censorship
In what could emerge as an interesting First Amendment test case, Texas A&M University was sued in federal court for allegedly censoring user comments on its official Facebook page. The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to defending civil liberties online, on behalf of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The plaintiffs believe government-owned social media sites should be a forum for public discourse. Since 2016 PETA has been waging a campaign against alleged animal abuse at Texas A&’s muscular dystrophy dog laboratory, and claims that the university’s social media team has been suppressing user comments about the lab.
“About 800,000 people have taken action through our online action alert about Texas A&M,” said Jeremy Beckham, a research associate in PETA’s Laboratory Investigations Department. “It seemed unusual that we would have such a large engagement on our end, but that nothing seemed to be showing up on A&M’s Facebook page.”
Through trial and error, Beckham and his colleagues discovered that A&M’s social media team seemed to be hiding any comment containing certain keywords: “PETA,” “abuse,” “dogs,” and several more. When A&M denied PETA’s open records request to see its social media filters, the organization turned to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “An important question the courts are looking at now is government-owned social media,” said EFF attorney Adam Schwartz. “Our view is that government-owned social media is as important a place for members of the public to be able to speak as the streets and sidewalk are.”
In a written statement, A&M seemed to confirm that it was indeed filtering out negative comments about its animal labs, acknowledging that it has “taken reasonable steps to manage the University Facebook account in light of online attacks on our platform organized and encouraged by PETA. We have taken these steps only after these attacks of PETA and its supporters became so extreme that they significantly interfered with University business, the ability of our communications employees to perform their duties and the ability of other members of the Texas A&M community to have meaningful access to our Facebook platform.”
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/peta-sues-texas-am-for-social-media-censorship/