Elon Musk’s X Corp filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the state of New York, arguing a recently passed law compelling large social media companies to divulge how they address hate speech is unconstitutional.
The complaint alleges that bill S895B, known as the Stop Hiding Hate Act, violates free speech rights under the first amendment. The act, which the governor, Kathy Hochul, signed into law last December, requires companies to publish their terms of service and submit reports detailing the steps they take to moderate extremism, foreign influence, disinformation, hate speech and other forms of harmful content.
Musk’s lawyers argue that the law, which goes into effect this week, would require X to submit “highly sensitive information” and compel non-commercial speech, which is subject to greater first amendment protections. The complaint also opposes the possible penalty of $15,000 per violation per day for failing to comply with the law.
The bill’s authors issued a statement on Tuesday rejecting Musk’s suit as an attempt to “use the First Amendment as a shield against providing New Yorkers with much needed transparency” and argued that the act does not infringe upon the free speech rights of social media companies.
X successfully sued last year to block a similar law in California, which also required social media companies to disclose to the government how they define hate speech and extremism. Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he has heavily downgraded content moderation efforts and fought against attempts at regulating the platform.
The Stop Hiding Hate Act was written by Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a New York state senator and Grace Lee, a state assemblymember, in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League, with the intent of providing great transparency and accountability over harmful online speech. Lee and Hoylman-Sigal rejected a request last year from X to discuss and amend the bill, according to the state senator, on the grounds that they believed the company was not acting in good faith and only seeking to weaken the bill’s requirements.
“Now more than ever, with the rise in political violence and threats emanating from the spread of hate speech and disinformation by President Trump and Elon Musk, New Yorkers deserve to know what social media companies like X are doing (or not doing) to stop the spread of hatred and misinformation on their platform,” Hoylman-Sigal and Lee said Tuesday.
Although Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist”, his platform X has targeted journalists and media outlets that post critical information about him. The platform suspended the accounts of several journalists in recent years that have reported on Musk and throttled links to news sites he has criticized. Musk also sued a non-profit that catalogued racist and extremist content on X, in a case that a US district judge threw out as an attempt to punish freedom of speech.