Yelp sues Texas to defend its labeling of crisis pregnancy centers | CNN Business::Yelp is suing Texas to ensure it can continue to tell users that crisis pregnancy centers listed on its site do not provide abortions or abortion referrals, opening a new front in the fight between states and the tech industry over abortion restrictions.
Never thought I’d be on the side of Yelp. But here we are
Oh look! The government policing our words… Too bad the conservatives don’t gave a fuck about the first amendment
Isn’t abortion severely constrained in Texas right now? How can the state possibly complain about this label when they are actively trying to limit abortions? And how can the centers complain about it when it’s factually true across the board?
Yelp’s prior label (which the State also complained about) was:
“typically provid[ing] limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”
And while that also seems broadly accurate, all it takes is for Yelp to apply this label to the few centers that do have medical professionals on site to make the label misleading at those centers.
This would funnel people away from anti-abortion practitioners and locations. They don’t want that, they WANT you to come in and be talked down to by a ‘Family Planner’. They want people to come into the church run clinics.
I understand all that. What I don’t understand is the legal basis for the State’s lawsuit contending that simply stating these places don’t provide abortion services is deceptive, when abortion services are extremely hard to get in the state in the first place. (I mean, other than the obvious cynical motive of the AG harassing companies he doesn’t like for political points, but not even he would admit that in court.)
It seems to me that Yelp’s pre-emptive legal action is really an attempt to get the adjudication of this matter out of Texas entirely.
The legal basis for the State of Texas’s lawsuit is that it was filed by hard-right Republicans and they’re hoping to get a hard-right Republican judge who agrees with their Handmaid’s Tale worldview.
This basically.
The state legislature passes a illegal, unconstitutional law. Or they just start enforcing a previous law in a new novel way. It takes months to years to decades for that to work through the courts for the court to say no that’s illegal you can’t do that. And then they do it again. Being told no is not the problem, it’s the years of enforcement before they can be told no.
They are winning, constructively, cuz the day-to-day lives of people in the affected areas is impacted.
They’re winning for now.
Push a people too far though, and you’re going to get a reaction. If you remove all legal recourse, people will seek illegal recourse, as the fourth “box of liberty” fairly directly implies that it’s perfectly defensible to shoot removed-ass motherfuckers who are ignoring and/or intentionally undermining the (small-d) democratic process.
Don’t try to find logic in the actions of zealots.
There’s none to be found, and you’ll just frustrate yourself in the process.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Yelp’s complaint said its labels are based on a manual evaluation of “thousands of business pages” on its site and reflect truthful statements.
But Paxton’s impending lawsuit threatens to silence Yelp and infringe on the company’s First Amendment rights, the complaint alleges.
The preemptive lawsuit from one of the internet’s largest user review platforms highlights how the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade has had ripple effects for tech companies.
According to Wednesday’s complaint, Paxton formally notified Yelp of his intent to sue as recently as last week and that the state would be seeking fines for alleged violations of Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
Yelp argues that its labels for crisis pregnancy centers are not deceptive and that Paxton himself had publicly commended the disclosures as “accurate” in a February press release.
Yelp’s lawsuit asks the court to affirm that its labeling of crisis pregnancy centers was not misleading and that it was an exercise of constitutionally protected speech.
The original article contains 459 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yelp argues that its labels for crisis pregnancy centers are not deceptive and that Paxton himself had publicly commended the disclosures as “accurate” in a February press release.
They’re being sued for… listing accurate details about a location? Should they swap it for inaccurate details?
The “label” in question, from the article:
Yelp said it currently applies the following label to crisis pregnancy center listings: “This is a Crisis Pregnancy Center. Crisis Pregnancy Centers do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers.”
Paxton is mad that their preachy religious bullshit centers masquerading as abortion clinics are being called out for what they are.
But more importantly, this isn’t about winning. It’s about election-time performance art. Paxton wants to show voters he’s still totally against abortion and please re-elect him.
Paxton is mad that their preachy religious bullshit centers masquerading as abortion clinics are being called out for what they are.
He also needs to pay back the senators that just blindly kept him in office. Those votes weren’t free.
Yes. Their advertisement is aimed at women with unplanned pregnancies. Some of the less scrupulous ones outright lie about what services they provide, though I think laws have been made to address that. Basically they try to convince them not to abort. In the worst cases, they jerk them around by scheduling various appointments “before they can get an abortion” until they are too far along to legally receive one.
Putting plain labeling on them ruins the whole carefully crafted ruse.
If you don’t actually help with the problem, then you are not a crisis center. If they provided things like diapers, baby food, daycare, to make having children less of a financial burden, and wanted to reduce the number of abortions that way… sure
But telling a desperate person to come to you for help and then gaslighting the shit out of them is just evil
“Damned civil liberties ruin everything!”
-Ken Paxton, probably
