Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas
Marco Bello/Reuters
Texas’ H.B. 20 law prohibits social-media platforms from censoring users based on their viewpoints.
A subreddit post is trolling the law by only allowing “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” comments.
The author of the post wants to “flagrantly” break the law, and “raise awareness.”
A post on the PoliticalHumor subreddit is only allowing comments that say Texas Gov. “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” to raise awareness of the state’s social media content-moderation law.
TechDirt first reported on the subreddit post titled, “We’re messing with Texas,” where user BlatantConservative, who made the post, wrote, “Until further notice, all comments posted to this subreddit must contain the phrase ‘Greg Abbott is a little piss baby.'”
BlatantConservative said the post is in response to Texas H.B. 20, which they called “a ridiculous attempt to control social media.” Neither Governor Abbott’s press office nor Reddit immediately responded to Insider’s request for comment.
Texas’ H.B. 20 allows private citizens in Texas and the Texas attorney general to sue social media companies for censoring specific points of view. The law affects social media platforms that have more than 50 million active users a month in the US. Tech industry groups have said the law takes content-moderation control away from larger social media platforms, forcing them to allow posts on their platforms that they do not want or agree with.
On the post, BlatantConservative says the law has “real world problems with it, the obvious ones being forced to host white nationalist ideology or insurrectionist ideation.”
After signing the bill in September 2021, Governor Abbott released a statement where he said the bill was needed because “there is a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas.”
One day before it was supposed to go into effect last December, a US District Court blocked the law, after social-media trade organizations sought an injunction. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reinstated the law in May in the NetChoice v. Paxton decision. As Politico reported, the US Supreme Court then granted the plaintiffs an emergency stay, but in mid-September, the Fifth Circuit upheld the law.
BlatantConservative says Reddit, which has “volunteer moderators” instead of having Reddit employees moderate content, “falls into a weird category” when it comes to H.B. 20. Therefore, users and moderators on Reddit don’t have a clear distinction under the law, and BlatantConservative points out that they and others don’t live in Texas.
The post is meant to “break the law,” BlatantConservative said, “Partially to raise awareness of the bullshit of it all, but mainly because we find it funny.”
At the bottom of the post, BlatantConservative added a link for users to file a complaint to the Texas Attorney General’s office about being “censored” .