On November 14, X, formerly known as Twitter until its acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk, filed suit in federal court to overturn a recently passed California law, AB 2655 (Berman). AB 2655, which is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, originated from the election disinformation advocacy group CITED, and seeks to compel social media sites like X to proactively take down false materials, including deep fakes, about candidates and elections during the periods before, during and after elections.
Musk’s opposition to the bill, as a foremost purveyor of disinformation, is probably not hard to understand. However, pretty much every civil liberties group was also appalled by the bill’s aggressive prior restraint of political speech, and take-down first approach, including us. In fact, Oakland Privacy advocacy director Tracy Rosenberg testified not once, but twice, against the bill in legislative hearings this past session. Among other things: she called it “a broad censorship regime of blocking content”.
Since everything you say can and will be held against you, these comments found themselves in District Court in Mr. Musk’s complaint pp 30-31.
The complaint is legally correct and likely to succeed in enjoining a bill that is a severe overreach of the First Amendment, however noble its intent. The messenger, well …. we are not fans.