Elon Musk’s X Corporation is suing the state of California over AB 587, a bill that would require social media platforms to report biannually to the state attorney general on how they handle certain categories of speech. The lawsuit alleges that the bill violates federal and state free speech laws because it "forces companies like Company X to speak against their will" because they are forced to define "political" issues such as hate speech or racism.
X explained in its complaint that it is "difficult to reliably define" categories of hate speech, misinformation, political interference and other content. The complaint adds that defining them "is often fraught with political bias" because there is no generally accepted consensus in the public sphere as to what these terms mean. Company X said that in defining these it had to take a position on them.
The lawsuit claims that AB 587 is intended to allow social media companies to "eliminate" certain constitutionally protected content that the state deems "problematic." Gov. Gavin Newsom's office promoted it as "the nation's leading social media transparency" measure when he signed it into law last September. Texas and Florida both have laws governing how social media companies handle moderation, and those laws await a challenge to them before the Supreme Court.
The problem of social media moderation itself is certainly not solved, and X has always used tools such as automated systems and community tagging for moderation and fact-checking. This week, the company launched "Community Notes" for videos, allowing "top sitters" to submit potentially misleading context for a video, but that could also introduce misinformation itself. Recently, Reddit has begun firing long-time moderators and replacing them with potentially inexperienced personnel, which has drawn criticism, and Bluesky's own moderator manifesto acknowledges that its moderator methods can suppress fact-checking on the site.