SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) — As another part of a handful of lawsuits challenging new California laws that target misinformation online, X Corp. sued the California attorney general and secretary of state on Thursday over a new law requiring it to police certain deceptive content about elections.
X Corp. says Assembly Bill 2655 — called the Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024 — requires it to create a reporting system enabling the removal and alteration of “materially deceptive content” about political candidates, elections officials and elected officers from its platform, a move the social media giant called a First Amendment violation.
The Texas-based successor to Twitter seeks a preliminary injunction against the law, saying it would lead to the state determining what content should appear on the platform, instead of letting the platform make that decision.
“This system will inevitably result in the censorship of wide swaths of valuable political speech and commentary and will limit the type of ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open’ ‘debate on public issues’ that core First Amendment protections are designed to ensure,” X Corp. writes, citing New York Times v. Sullivan.
The lawsuit comes as X Corp. owner Elon Musk is politically ascendent under a new Donald Trump administration.
Musk became a vocal supporter of Trump leading up to November’s election, touting his social media platform as a bastion of free speech.
Assembly Bill 2655 would infringe on that speech, X Corp. says in its suit.
The law mandates qualifying platforms — those with at least 1 million California users in the past 12 months — to make a system that enables the “take down” of speech the state wants removed.
“The state is involved in every step of that system: it dictates the rules for reporting, defining, and identifying the speech targeted for removal; it authorizes state officials (including defendants here) to bring actions seeking removal; and, through the courts, it makes the ultimate determination of what speech is permissible,” X Corp. writes.
Additionally, X Corp. argues that the law forces platforms to immediately remove speech if it’s substantially similar to speech previously removed, with no determination that it’s unprotected.
The law incentivizes platforms to censor all content that might fall under its purview, allowing them to avoid lawsuits and their costs, the social media giant says. That will chill speech, like exaggerated pictures of political opponents, which the U.S. Supreme Court has determined have some of the strongest First Amendment protections.
“There is a long history of the strongest of First Amendment protects for speech critical of government officials and candidates for public office that includes tolerance for potentially false speech made in the context of such criticisms,” X Corp. writes. “And there is a long history of skepticism of any governmental attempts to regulate such content, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.”
According to X Corp., Assembly Bill 2655 violates the United States and California constitutions because it forces platforms to censor only certain election-related content that the state doesn’t like. Additionally, the company says it also meddles with a social media platform’s content-moderation rights.
The suit isn’t the first legal challenge responding to bills linked to social media platforms.
X Corp. in December 2023 appealed a lower court’s ruling about Assembly Bill 587, which imposed a reporting requirement about hate speech and misinformation on platforms earning over $100 million annually.
A lower court judge found that the law didn’t violate the social media giant’s First Amendment rights. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit disagreed. In September, it remanded the case for the lower court to issue a preliminary injunction on semi-annual reporting requirements that would have required platforms to define content categories like hate speech and disinformation.
A federal judge in October ruled that the state couldn’t enforce Assembly Bill 2839, which Christopher Kohls, known as “Mr. Reagan,” argued made computer-generated parody illegal.
The law would have banned digitally manipulated communications, like mailers and video ads, that are false or misleading and target election workers, elected officials, voting equipment or political candidates four months before an election.
Kohls’ suit is similar to another filed by conservative humor website The Babylon Bee, who also targeted AB 2839 and AB 2655.