Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced on Wednesday that he has launched an investigation into five Big Tech companies.
The investigation targets Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter and will look to see if these companies “have potentially harmed Indiana consumers through business practices that are abusive, deceptive and/or unfair.”
According to a statement from the Office of the Indiana Attorney General:
In particular, Attorney General 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, Attorney General Rokita said.
“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,” Attorney General 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.”
The investigation also includes the alleged actions taken by Attorney Vanita Gupta, Joe Biden’s nominee to be associate U.S. attorney general, to encourage the companies to censor conservative standpoints.
A statement from the office of the Attorney General indicated that Gupta has allegedly met with Facebook and Twitter executives to urge “more rigorous rules and enforcement.”
In 2018, Gupta’s leftist interest group The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg. The letter urges the CEO to take immediate steps to build public faith in Facebook. For Gupta public faith means engaging in more censorship and content moderation.
Rokita said the investigation could lead to lawsuits against the Big Tech companies.