Social media company X sued New York to challenge a state law that requires social media companies to submit semi-annual reports about how they are suppressing certain kinds of speech to the New York attorney general. According to the lawsuit, provisions in the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” violate social media companies’ First Amendment rights and threaten free speech.
The law, in part, outlines “terms of service reports” in which companies must disclose to the state whether the terms of service for each of their platforms define certain “categories,” including hate speech, racism, extremism, misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. If their terms of service do include these categories, the companies would also be required to include those definitions in the report. The reports would also require companies to disclose a “detailed description” of their “content moderation practices” regarding these categories. Failing to submit the report could engender $15,000 per day. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law in December, and it is set to go into effect this year.
X challenged the constitutionality of the “Content Category Report” portions of the law, arguing that they force companies to disclose “highly sensitive and controversial speech” protected under the Constitution. X also noted that content moderation “engenders considerable debate among reasonable people about where to draw the correct proverbial line,” and that “[t]his is not a role the government may play.”
Musk, who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” bought Twitter in 2022 to return the platform to “a digital town square” where ideas could be debated freely. He loosened the platform’s content moderation rules and readmitted suspended users, including President Donald Trump.
New York State Sen. Brad Holyman-Sigal and Assemblywoman Grace Lee, both Democrats, sponsored the law. In a letter that X quoted in the lawsuit, the two politicians said that X and Musk have a “disturbing record,” which “threatens the foundations of our democracy.” In a Tuesday statement responding to the lawsuit, the two lawmakers called social media companies, including X, “cesspools of hate speech,” and claimed the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” is necessary for “transparency.”
The “Content Category Report” provisions of the New York “Stop Hiding Hate Act” are almost identical to a California law that Gavin Newsom signed in 2022, requiring social media companies to submit similar reports to the California attorney general. X challenged the law on the same grounds of unconstitutionality, and a U.S. court of appeals ruled in their favor. Despite this, Holyman-Sigal and Lee insist that the “Stop Hiding Hate Act does not infringe upon the First Amendment rights of social media companies.”
Both the New York and California laws were sponsored in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Founded to fight antisemitism, the ADL has recently warped into a partisan, left-wing “pressure group.” In 2020, the group joined a campaign demanding that Facebook censor pro-Trump ads. In 2021, they partnered with PayPal to investigate how so-called “extremist and hate movements” utilize financial platforms, as the Federalist reported.
X tried to meet with the bill’s authors earlier last year to discuss amendments, according to a release from Sen. Holyman-Sigal’s office. The company’s request was rejected.
Attorney General James did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Jacqueline Annis-Levings is a correspondent for the Federalist. She is a rising junior at Patrick Henry College, where she is majoring in English.