Report from The Hill
In Brief – X has sued the state of New York to block its law requiring social media companies to explain how they moderate some content. The platform successfully challenged a similar law in California on First Amendment grounds last year. New York’s “Stop Hiding Hate Act”, which was enacted last December and went into effect on June 19, requires social media platforms with at least $100 million in annual revenue to publicly disclose how they define and flag hate speech and extremism. X argues that the law compels the company to disclose “highly sensitive and controversial speech” that is both fully protected by the First Amendment and that is disfavored by the State of New York, and that the law interferes with the platform’s editorial judgment. The lawsuit describes the New York bill as nearly identical to a California law that the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked as unconstitutional last year. The bill’s sponsors responded to X’s suit saying, “social media companies, including X, are cesspools of hate speech consisting of antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia and anti-LGBTQ bias, yet those platforms have consistently failed to inform the public about their policies regarding hatred and misinformation.”
Context – Motivated by claims that big tech companies were stifling conservatives, Florida and Texas enacted laws in 2021 regulating social media content moderation to stop so-called “viewpoint discrimination”. The next year, California and New York passed laws to push platforms from the opposite direction, attempting to press for more aggressive policing of alleged hate speech and harassment. Challenges to the Texas and Florida measures reached with Supreme Court first. The High Court sent them back to lower courts on procedural grounds, but a majority agreed they likely violated the First Amendment when applied to content moderation by traditional social media platforms. That conclusion led the Ninth Circuit to rule that the core provisions of California’s content moderation transparency law were likely unconstitutional, and X reached a settlement agreement in which the state conceded that point and agreed not to enforce those sections.