X sued to block a new California law that would require social media platforms to censor “materially deceptive content,” aka deepfakes, about politicians in the lead up to an election.
The company, owned by Elon Musk, claimed in its Thursday court filling the new law would trample the First Amendment, as well as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives social platforms the broad legal immunity to moderate content however they see fit.
“It is difficult to imagine a statute more in conflict with core First Amendment principles,” the lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of California Federal Court, said.
The new law in question, Assembly Bill 2655, which has been dubbed the “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024,” would require platforms like X to remove “inauthentic, fake, or false” content of politicians 120 days before an election. Platforms would also have to “develop procedures” that allow California residents to file complaints about altered content, and would also require platforms to “label certain additional content inauthentic.”
AB 2655 is set to go into effect next year.
“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’s lawsuit said, while citing the 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan case.
The new law, the lawsuit added, would impose “unintelligible prohibitions” on political speech,”greatly incentivizing covered platforms to censor all content that
could reasonably fall within the statute’s purview to avoid substantial enforcement costs.” This will “lead to censorship at the direction of the State,” the lawsuit said, due to AB2655’s “draconian and one-sided” provisions.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because a California judge blocked a similar anti-deepfake law last month, two weeks after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law. U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez agreed with Musk that the law, which prohibited the “distribution of materially deceptive audio or visual media of a candidate” within two months of an election, unless the post included a disclosure that the content was a deepfake, went too far.
Mendez said the law, AB2839, gave legislators “unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment.”
