Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced Wednesday that he is investigating whether five Big Tech companies have potentially harmed Indiana consumers through business practices that are abusive, deceptive, and/or unfair.
In particular, Rokita is probing methods by which the companies have limited consumers’ access to certain content – often deleting or obscuring posted material reflecting a politically conservative point of view. Such manipulation prevents consumers from making informed choices, Rokita said.
Rokita
“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,” Rokita said. “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 addition to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Rokita is also investigating alleged actions taken by attorney Vanita Gupta to encourage the companies to censor conservative viewpoints.
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. Gupta, according to the Time article, stressed that it was important for social media platforms to be “tagging things and taking them down.”