Report from Reuters
In Brief – US District Judge John Cronan in Manhattan has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X’s that sought to invalidate a 2024 New York law requiring large social media companies to disclose how they monitor hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign political interference and disinformation. Judge Cronan rejected X’s First Amendment argument that the Stop Hiding Hate Act exposed the company to lawsuits and substantial fines unless it disclosed controversial speech policies the state considered objectionable. He said the law requires only “purely factual and uncontroversial information” about content moderation practices, which he said was reasonably related to New York’s interest in helping consumers make informed choices about social media, and compared to laws requiring restaurants to post calorie counts. The law requires disclosures about policies addressing a range of hate speech and interventions by the platform to enforce its policies and allows civil fines up to $15,000 per violation per day. The dismissal was with prejudice, meaning X cannot amend and re-file its complaint.
Context – Motivated by claims that big tech companies were stifling conservatives, Florida and Texas enacted laws in 2021 to block platforms from regulating political viewpoints. New York and California later passed laws to push the platforms in the opposite direction, pressing them to police hate speech and harassment more aggressively. First Amendment challenges to the Texas and Florida laws reached the Supreme Court first, resulting in the indecisive Moody Decision on “facial challenges”, although six justices did agree that regulating social media content moderation likely violated the First Amendment. That conclusion led to an appeals panel of the Ninth Circuit siding with X and overturning a District judge’s ruling that California’s law was an acceptable regulation of commercial speech. Judge Cronan has picked up that commercial speech banner. But watch for any effort by New York to actually challenge a company’s definitions of the specified speech categories, or their enforcement actions, to lead to a legal rebuke because terms like “hate speech” and “extremism” are not clear cut like “calorie”.