Texas A&M University reached a settlement with PETA agreeing to remove filters from its Facebook page that PETA claimed violated its right to speak out against the school’s research on dogs.
CAMERON LANGFORD: ‘Texas A&M University reached a settlement with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) agreeing to remove filters from its Facebook page that PETA claimed violated its right to speak out against the school’s research on dogs. PETA launched a campaign in 2016 to stop Texas A&M’s canine research lab from breeding golden retrievers predisposed to muscular dystrophy, after learning about the study from a whistleblower, who sent it photos and videos of disabled dogs.
The animal rights group helped two students launch a Change.org petition, eventually signed by more than 978,000 people, which claimed Texas A&M University veterinary professor Joe Kornegay had been studying muscular dystrophy in dogs for 30 years, stretching them with a lever until their muscles tear, without a breakthrough in his quest to find a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy… PETA noticed in December 2017 that comments it tried to post on Texas A&M’s Facebook page about the dog research did not appear, which was unusual, as the university lets members of the public post messages there.
PETA brought a federal complaint in May 2018 on First Amendment grounds, claiming that through testing various comments it learned the school was filtering out and hiding posts containing the words PETA, Cruel, Abuse, Torture, MD, Shut, Close, Stop, Lab, Testing and Tests… Texas A&M denied any wrongdoing in the settlement and retained the right to remove any of PETA’s posts that do not comply with its Facebook usage policy. The school also agreed to pay $75,000 in attorneys’ fees to PETA’s counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco’. SOURCE…
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