State's AG sues tech giant over its 'misleading' warning labels for crisis pregnancy centers

(Unsplash)

Kate Anderson
Daily Caller News Foundation

Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Thursday against Yelp for allegedly discriminating against pro-life pregnancy centers, according to court documents.

Yelp placed a label on pregnancy centers following the Dobbs decision in 2022 stating that these clinics “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite,” prompting Paxton to threaten legal action against the company in February, according to the lawsuit. Yelp eventually changed its label, but Paxton sued the company for violating the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which prohibits “false or misleading and deceptive business practices” in trade or commerce.

Get the hottest, most important news stories on the Internet – delivered FREE to your inbox as soon as they break! Take just 30 seconds and sign up for WND's Email News Alerts!

“Yelp cannot mislead and deceive the public simply because the company disagrees with our state’s abortion laws,” Paxton said in a press release. “Major companies cannot abuse their platforms and influence to control consumers’ behavior, especially on sensitive health issues like pregnancy and abortion.”

Yelp filed its own lawsuit against Texas on Sept. 27, alleging that Paxton had sent a letter to inform the company of a notice to file suit within the next seven days, according to its lawsuit. Yelp demanded that the court acknowledge its labels are “accurate” and that Paxton is attempting to “chill” the company’s First Amendment rights.

Yelp explained that, following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, the company was “recommitted” making sure their labels included “accurate, useful, and trustworthy information about reproductive health services,” and added a “Consumer Notice” for crisis pregnancy centers, according to the lawsuit.

Is Yelp deceiving its users about crisis pregnancy centers?

“Then, even after certain pregnancy resource centers notified Yelp of the notice’s falsehoods, Yelp refused to remove the misleading disclaimer for several months, likely diverting consumers from seeking pregnancy resource centers’ services in favor of other facilities that lacked the misleading disclosure,” Paxton’s lawsuit reads. “Yelp’s actions violated Texas law. Although Yelp appears to have eliminated this misleading disclaimer from pregnancy resource centers’ Yelp pages, Yelp remains liable for penalties and other relief for the duration of its unlawful behavior.”

Paxton asked the court to “award money damages and restitution of monies for pregnancy resource centers” and that Yelp pay the state hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for violating civil law. Yelp also requested in its own lawsuit that the court grant a favorable judgment and “award Yelp its reasonable costs and attorneys’ fees.”

Yelp and Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].

IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Believe it or not, today's high priests of climate-change apocalypse are correct in predicting that in just a few short years, the earth will become miserable, wretched and almost uninhabitable by human beings. But the grim future they envision won't come about because of "catastrophic climate change," but rather, because of the implementation of their completely insane and truly catastrophic agenda.

As Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore recently admitted, "If they actually achieve Net Zero, at least 50% of the population would die of hunger and disease." Likewise, writes energy expert and author Alex Epstein: "Today's proposed policies to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use would, if fully implemented, have truly apocalyptic consequences – making the world an impoverished, dangerous, and miserable place for most people."

Question: When the scientific case for global warming apocalypse consists primarily of a 1-degree Celsius rise in temperature over more than 130 years, what explains the obsession with an imminent, climate-caused end of the world?

Although many groups have been drawn into the Climate Change Cult – from the news media (which has warned of climate catastrophe, either global warming or a "new ice age," for over a century!), to innocent school kids indoctrinated by hysterical leftist teachers, to liberal Democrats who claim "climate change" will destroy the earth in a few years – the REAL villains are the national and global elites who KNOW the apocalyptic global warming religion is just a cruel hoax, but promote and exploit it as a means of accomplishing their ultimate goal: Transforming and ruling the world.

The heart and soul of today's bizarre, pagan climate-change religion, and the global elites' strategies for using it to rule all of mankind, is powerfully exposed and illuminated in the September issue of WND's critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, an issue titled "CULT OF THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE: The elites' breathtaking strategy for ruling the world." WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.

SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!