Judge Rejects First Amendment Challenge To California’s Social Media Censorship Law

If you’re tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A lawsuit filed on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds by Minds, the Babylon Bee, Tim Pool and National Religious Broadcasters in a bid to contest what’s known as California’s new censorship law has been dismissed by a judge. We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here. In explaining the August 18 decision that granted the defendant’s (California Attorney-General Robert Bonta) motion to dismiss, US District Judge Hernan D. Vera wrote that the plaintiffs did not manage to successfully allege “an actual injury or a realistic danger of a future injury.” The contested law, AB 587, was passed last September in California and among other things mandates that social sites must report to the state by the beginning of next year, detailing terms of service, categories of content, “guidelines” they have for dealing with perceived violations, as well as data concerning those violations. This ruling actually contradicts a similar ruling out of New York earlier this year. There, the bill, signed by Governor Kathy Hochul, required, “social media networks to provide and maintain mechanisms for reporting hateful conduct on their platform.” The New York court highlighted the ways in which the law violated the First Amendment, saying, “the law also requires that a social media network must make a ‘policy’ available on its website which details how the network will respond to a complaint of hateful content. In other words, the law requires…Judge Rejects First Amendment Challenge To California’s Social Media Censorship Law