A bill that would make social media companies publicly disclose the steps they take to remove erroneous, hateful, or extremist content from their platforms is being advanced by California lawmakers as a means of combating misinformation. Texas lawmakers, on the other hand, want to outlaw the removal of posts because of political viewpoints from the three biggest platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
In Washington, the state attorney general succeeded in getting a court to impose a $28,000 fine on a nonprofit and its attorney for bringing an unfounded lawsuit against the 2020 governor’s race. Alabama lawmakers want to make it possible for users to file lawsuits against social media companies that delete their accounts after they post false content in order to recover financial losses.
Officials in every state are attacking the sources of misinformation and the platforms that spread it in the absence of significant federal action on the issue; however, they are doing so from radically different ideological perspectives. Even the battle for the truth deviates along partisan lines in this highly divisive time.
The result has been a cacophony of state bills and legal maneuvers that may reinforce information bubbles in a country that is becoming increasingly divided along geographic lines and over a number of different issues, such as abortion, guns, and the environment.
The majority of state-level activity is being driven by the upcoming midterm elections in November. Protecting conservative social media users, including those who spread unfounded allegations of widespread electoral fraud, has been a priority in red states.
Legislators in blue states have attempted to compel the same businesses to take additional steps to halt the dissemination of untrue information and other harmful materials about a variety of topics, such as voting rights and Covid-19.
Washington’s Democrat governor, Jay Inslee, stated in an interview that “we should not stand idly by and just throw up our hands and say that this is an impossible beast that is just going to take over our democracy.”
He supports legislation that would make it illegal to spread false information about elections, calling disinformation a “nuclear weapon” that threatens the nation’s democratic foundations. He applauded the $28,000 fine imposed on the advocacy organization that questioned the validity of the state’s 2020 election.
He said, referring to disinformation, “We ought to be creatively looking for potential ways to reduce its impact.”
Regardless of who is pushing for new regulations, the First Amendment is the biggest roadblock. The social media companies’ lobbyists argue that while they do their best to moderate content, the government shouldn’t be telling them how to do it.
A bill that would have made it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, for candidates or elected officials “to spread lies about free and fair elections when it has the likelihood to stoke violence” was defeated in the heavily blue state of Washington due to concerns over free speech.
Governor Inslee backed the legislation, citing the Supreme Court’s 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, after he was falsely accused of election fraud following his victory for a third term in office in 2020. According to that decision, when speech “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action,” states may punish that speech.
In February, the state Senate deadlocked on the legislation, but Mr. Inslee insisted that given the scope of the issue, immediate action was necessary.
The idea that free speech is politically untouchable has started to erode due to the size of the problem of disinformation and the power of the tech companies.
The new Texas law has already reached the Supreme Court, which disallowed it from going into effect in May but remanded the matter to a federal appeals court for additional deliberation. Republican governor Greg Abbott signed the bill last year, partly in response to Facebook and Twitter’s decisions to delete former president Donald J. Trump’s accounts following the violence on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.
The court’s decision hinted that it might revisit one important question: whether social media platforms retain a high level of editorial freedom like newspapers.
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ET, July 8, 2022, at 5 p.m.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented from the court’s emergency decision suspending the law’s enforcement because “it is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”
A similar Florida law that would have fined social media companies up to $250,000 per day for preventing political candidates from using their platforms, which have evolved into crucial tools of contemporary campaigning, was overturned by a federal judge last month. Similar legislation has been proposed in other states with Republican-controlled legislatures, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Alaska.
Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, has set up a website called alabamaag.gov/Censored where people can file complaints about having their access to social media censored. In a written response to inquiries, he claimed that during the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, social media platforms increased their efforts to censor content.
Social media platforms “abandoned all pretense of promoting free speech during this time (and continuing to the present day) — a principle on which they sold themselves to users — and openly and arrogantly proclaimed themselves the Ministry of Truth,” he wrote. Any opinion that even slightly differed from the accepted wisdom was immediately censored.
The false claim that Mr. Trump, and not President Biden, won the 2020 presidential election has been the driving force behind a lot of the activity at the state level today. Republicans have used this claim, which has been repeatedly refuted, to put forth dozens of bills that would restrict voting by mail or absentee ballot in the states they currently govern.
Democrats have made a 180-degree turn. Voting rights have increased in 16 states, which has fueled conservative lawmakers’ and commentators’ preemptive claims that the Democrats are out to steal the election.
According to Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election advocacy group at the New York University School of Law, “there is a direct link between conspiracy theories, lawsuits, and legislation in states.” “Where you live now more than ever affects your ability to cast a ballot. This year, we’ve observed that half of the nation is moving in one direction while the other half is moving in the opposite direction.
The lobbying organization for internet companies, TechNet, has opposed state-level legislation in numerous states. Executives in the sector claim that different state laws produce a confusing patchwork of regulations for businesses and consumers. Instead, businesses have emphasized how they themselves police false information and other harmful content.
The organization’s vice president for state policy and government relations, David Edmonson, stated that “these decisions are made as consistently as possible.”
With each side accusing the other of spreading lies and both sides criticizing the social media moguls, the issue has turned into a potent weapon for many politicians to use against rivals.
Republican Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, has raised money for his campaign by promising to continue his fight against what he has referred to as the “authoritarian companies” that have sought to silence conservative voices.
J.D. Vance, a memoirist and Republican senatorial candidate in Ohio, blasted social media companies for allegedly stifling news about the president’s son Hunter Biden’s international business dealings.
Vicky Hartzler, a former congresswoman running for the Republican Senate nomination in Missouri, blasted Twitter for suspending her personal account after she made comments about transgender athletes in a television advertisement. She claimed in the advertisement that her statements were “what God intended” and that “they want to cancel you.”
According to a survey conducted in 2021 by OnMessage, a polling organization with the National Republican Senatorial Committee among its clients, 80% of primary voters thought that technology companies were too powerful and needed to be held accountable. Only 20% of respondents did so six years prior.
Voters are visibly afraid of the censorship of political views by technology and pop culture. Chris Hartline, a representative of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, made the statement.
Democrats have put more of an emphasis on the harm disinformation causes to society in blue states. This includes false claims about elections or Covid, as well as racist or antisemitic content that has inspired violent attacks like the Buffalo supermarket shooting in May.
In order to spread accurate information about voting and to fill a position for an expert to weed out false narratives about voting before they go viral, Connecticut plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing. At the Department of Homeland Security, a similar attempt to establish a disinformation board sparked political outrage before its work was put on hold in May while an internal review was conducted.
A bill that would make social media companies disclose their stances on hate speech, misinformation, extremism, harassment, and foreign political interference is currently being considered by the California State Senate. (The law would not require them to limit content.) Another bill would permit civil lawsuits against significant social media companies like TikTok, Meta’s Facebook, and Instagram if it could be shown that their products had led to child addiction.
Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel of California, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation to demand more transparency from social media platforms, stated that “all of these various challenges that we’re facing have a common thread, and the common thread is the power of social media to amplify really problematic content.” “That has important repercussions both online and offline.”
Before the elections this fall, it seems unlikely that the flurry of legislative activity will make much of a difference; social media companies won’t have a single response that is agreeable to both sides when accusations of disinformation inevitably arise.
The November midterm elections appear to be particularly explosive, according to Matt Perault, director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina. “Any election cycle brings intense new content challenges for platforms,” he added. Platforms will face significant difficulties in controlling speech because abortion, guns, and democratic participation are on voters’ minds a lot. The choices that platforms make are probably not going to satisfy either side.
