https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2024/11/12/ag-ken-p...
Yeah, it's theater and not to be taken seriously.
For better or worse, it is how our legal system works.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/state-attorne...
> State attorneys general have sued Trump's administration 138 times — nearly double those of Obama and Bush
And sub-heading:
> It's routine for attorneys general to sue the federal government, but experts say the sharp rise signifies the growing partisan and legal divide with Washington.
¹ Meaning: force people to listen to them, suppress dissent, evade justice, and generously enrich themselves along the way.
> Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fled his home in a truck driven by his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, to avoid being served a subpoena Monday, according to an affidavit filed in federal court.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-attorney-gener...
I can only assume this has to do with people leaving Twitter, which I did a week ago.
You might want to update your browser or something. The cert on this site is valid through Feb 2025.
> Attorney General Paxton is investigating a possible coordinated plan or conspiracy to withhold advertising dollars from certain social media platforms by pressuring advertisers not to purchase online advertising space. Although companies are free to choose when and where they want to advertise, a conspiracy among companies along these lines can result in harm to competition and may violate the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act of 1983. The civil investigative demand requests documents and information related to WFA [World Federation of Advertisers] and its sub-organization known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (“GARM”) organizing their membership to potentially boycott social media platforms that are deemed to violate their “Brand Safety Standards.”
It doesn't seem so far fetched that an organization called Global Alliance for Responsible Media would support a boycott of platforms they don't think are their brand of "responsible". If they coordinated that boycott, then they could be in actual trouble.
Boycotts by people are fine. Market manipulation by criminal conspiracy is not.
How is this anything other than using the power of the Texas State Government to run an extortion racket, designed to funnel money straight to Musk?
Corporations are allowed to choose where they want to spend their advertising budget, and if they don't want to have their ads showing between conspiracy theories and outright hate, that's allowed.
CVS can choose to do a boycott. Walgreens can choose to do a boycott. That's fine, not illegal, totally cool.
What is illegal is for all the companies to get together and make a binding rule saying nobody can buy ads from someone.
That is conspiracy.
WFA isn't a little non-profit giving out optional guidance. It's several times the net worth of X/Twitter (>200B) and is putting binding rules to prevent companies from breaking the boycott.
IANAL, but that seems... incomplete. Conspiracy to what? A conspiracy-to-X involves an agreement between parties to commit an underlying act X that is itself already unlawful. The idea being that mutual agreements are enough to show you "started" to do X, instead of merely just thinking about it.
So the X here would have to be something else that's illegal on its own, or else the charge would be its own kind of thing like "anti-competitive practices."
It is also run by a WFA board member.
Nonsense: Twitter/X was itself one of those members, for starters.
Given how a certain politician has whined about the Emmy awards, that seems sadly/weirdly possible now.
And here's the WFA's post about it shutting GARM down: https://wfanet.org/knowledge/item/2024/08/09/wfa-discontinue...
From what I can tell, the World Federation of Advertisers formed GARM to push advertising platforms to take a more proactive role in dealing with misinformation. Naturally, with the way X has been going since the change in ownership, they have been hit hard by this kind of pushback and Elon Musk vowed to sue WFA for this. Seems like because he got involved, the rest of the republican leadership decided to as well as there's this Texas thing and a motion by the House republicans to do a similar investigation.
I really don't know what they expect to accomplish with this though. Do they think the government should force advertisers to buy ads on X or something?
Yes. Free market, you see.
Attorneys general are not always required to be attorneys. The US AG is not, though many states do have requirements. (I don't believe Texas does.)
An Attorney General is the manager of a department. The actual lawsuits are filed by employees on their behalf. (Plaintiffs generally do not represent themselves, even if they are themselves attorneys.)
So does this mean that people are planning to boycott, but haven't?
It's real simple, there is no conspiracy. Anyone with even half a working brain can see what a toxic cesspool social media platforms are becoming. An estimated 1 in 3 posts are done by bots now.
There's no conspiracy, people are leaving social media to make their lives better and less stressful. There's absolutely no law, anywhere, that people need to stay in abusive relationships...That's what social media has become for far too many people.
Just too bad it’s going to be allowed to affect people outside the TX border. But hey, it’s the party of “freedom for me but not for thee”, so what did anyone expect. Certainly not integrity or honesty.