Indiana is taking further action in its investigation into five of the biggest tech companies in America.
Attorney General Todd Rokita says a list of civil demands has been sent to eight additional individuals as part of an ongoing investigation into censorship practices by Big Tech Companies, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
The latest civil investigative demands apply specifically to Facebook. They are directed to people believed to have participated in an October 2019 meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives.
The eight individuals receiving the latest civil investigative demands are:
- Al Sharpton — founder/president, National Action Network;
- Kristen Clarke — nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (formerly led the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law);
- Rashad Robinson — president, Color of Change;
- Farhana Khera — president/executive director, Muslim Advocates;
- Derrick Johnson, president/CEO, NAACP;
- Sherrilyn Ifill — president/director-counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund;
- Marc Morial — president/CEO, National Urban League; and
- Janet Murguia — president/CEO, UnidosUS
The eight individuals are not themselves targets of the investigation but rather are believed to have information that would be helpful to the larger probe.
Also reportedly present at the October 2019 meeting with Facebook executives was attorney Vanita Gupta, who at the time led a civil rights organization. She now has become associate U.S. attorney general — the third-highest-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Justice.
At the meeting, Gupta and others urged Facebook to adopt “more rigorous rules and enforcement,” to use Gupta’s 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.”
The Office of the Attorney General already served a civil investigative demand to Gupta at the same time it launched its investigation into the Big Tech companies in April. Like the eight other individuals, Gupta is not herself a target of this investigation.
