Today, @X filed a First Amendment lawsuit against California AB 587. As made clear by both the legislative history and public court submissions from the Attorney General in defending the law, the true intent of AB 587 is to pressure social media platforms to “eliminate” certain…

— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) September 8, 2023

Anybody who cherishes free speech, especially in the digital age, should be cheering on this move by X.

California’s “Content Moderation Legislation” as Forbes calls it, is actually a draconian censorship bill— AB 587. It requires social media companies to give the California… https://t.co/SjYTYfUSnZ

— Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) September 8, 2023

This bill is intended to go into effect on January 1. You can read the full text here. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what that text says. I just read it, and I am confused. As far as I’m able to tell, the only thing the bill actually says is that companies have to submit reports on their terms of service and the content that they censored.

The implication, however, is that social media companies should be doing a whole lot of censoring. What’s more – the government doesn’t have a right to put this kind of burden on a company. This report would be millions of words long, based on what the requirements are (they want not only every single action of censorship to be recorded, but every report they got asking for censorship).

If you just look at the bill in a vacuum, however, you would think it was about forcing social media companies to justify mass censorship. But this is California, so the intent is clearly the opposite of that. They want Twitter to report that they’re not censoring “hate speech” and then do something against them because of that.

The Guardian:

Elon Musk’s X sued California on Friday, challenging the constitutionality of a state law establishing new transparency requirements for social media companies, including how they police disinformation, hate speech and extremism.

X, the social media platform once called Twitter, said the law, known as Assembly Bill 587, violates its free speech rights under the US constitution’s first amendment and California’s state constitution.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Sacramento, California, X said the law’s “true intent” was to pressure social media companies into eliminating content the state found objectionable.

By doing so, California is forcing companies to adopt the state’s views on politically charged issues, “a form of compelled speech in and of itself”, X said.

…

AB 587 requires larger social media companies to issue semiannual reports that describe their content moderation practices, and provide data on the numbers of objectionable posts and how they were addressed.

The law also requires companies to provide copies of their terms of service. Failure to comply risks civil fines of up to $15,000 for each violation a day.

Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, signed the law last September, saying the state would not let social media be “weaponized” to spread hate and disinformation.

See – there you go. He’s the one saying that is the purpose of the law, even though the law itself just says you have to submit reports.

Newsom is publicly framing this as a way to silence freedom of speech based on this “hate and disinformation” gibberish.

The mechanism through which these reports will turn into censorship is not clear. Most likely, they are just going to whine about how Elon is not censoring enough, and then allow the ADL to use that to further pressure the federal government to pass hate speech laws. Or whatever.

Jesse Gabriel, an assembly member and author of the bill, said in a statement that “if Twitter has nothing to hide, then they should have no objection to this bill”.

“Assembly Bill 587 is a pure transparency measure that simply requires companies to be upfront about if and how they are moderating content. It in no way requires any specific content moderation policies – which is why it passed with strong, bipartisan support,” he said.

It does read like a very arduous “transparency measure.” But you see what Newsom is saying.

Meanwhile, the federal government – which is also run by the Democrats – is continuing to face challenges over their own policies of ordering social media companies to censor things.

Bombshell Ruling: 5th Circuit Court finds the Biden White House, FBI and CDC violated the First Amendment Rights of Millions of Americans by bullying Tech Companies into censoring Free Speech during the Pandemic. pic.twitter.com/O5KBdPJjpW

— Teagan1776