Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is embroiled in a legal battle against the State of New York over the newly enacted Stop Hiding Hate Act. In fact, this week, the new law comes into effect. It would require social media companies to make their terms of service public and file public reports on how they address extremism, disinformation and hate speech.
Musk’s legal team claims that the Stop Hiding Hate Act would require X to disclose “highly sensitive proprietary information.” They argue that this would contravene constitutionally protected rights to non-commercial expressive speech. They claim that this provision unconstitutionally infringes their First Amendment free speech rights. The lawsuit follows a prior unsuccessful attempt by Musk to sue a non-profit organization that catalogued racist and extremist content on X. The original lawsuit was thrown out by a U.S. district judge. The judge found that it was designed to attack free speech, rather than defend it.
If that was not enough, state Senators Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Kevin Thomas have publicly denounced Musk’s lawsuit. They are indeed the authors of the Stop Hiding Hate Act. They contend that it represents an attempt to “use the First Amendment as a shield against providing New Yorkers with much needed transparency.” In their complaint against Texas, they claim that the law infringes upon the free speech rights of social media platforms. Rather, it’s about holding these companies accountable to stop the dangerous way that they do business.
The law requires, under a strict liability standard, that companies who don’t get it right can be held liable for $15,000 per violation per day. This comes just a few days after enforcement of similar regulations passed in California. There, X was able to successfully quash a law that required social media companies to publicly disclose their hate speech and extremist content definitions. Since taking over Twitter in 2022, Musk has quickly rolled back the platform’s content moderation requirements. He has, over the years, relentlessly deregulated rules meant to otherwise regulate X’s orbit-treading operations.