If enacted and it somehow clears legal challenges, California Senate Bill 771 will be the first online censorship law of its kind in America. It would also likely pave a path for other states run by people with no tolerance for dissent.
On September 22, the California Legislature sent SB 771 to Governor Gavin Newsom. He has until October 13 to sign it. If he doesn’t veto or sign the proposal, it becomes law anyway.
Mainstream media outlets claim that SB 771 “targets social media platforms for the role they could play in aiding and abetting in hate crimes by pushing content that could lead to a hate crime.”
The bill allows people to sue social-media companies for up to $1 million per violation. If the litigant is a minor, the fine could double.
Tucker Carlson’s analysis of the bill is more accurate than the mainstream media’s. Carlson:
That’s a censorship law.… The state of California, under Gavin Newsom, is about to — we think — censor the opinions of Americans, not to protect anybody, but to shield themselves from criticism so they continue to do what they want to do in secret.
Coerced Censorship
The bill uses broad terms that make it easy to justify censorship. It reads:
California law prohibits all persons and entities, including corporations, from engaging in, aiding, abetting, or conspiring to commit acts of violence, intimidation, or coercion based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected characteristics.
Merriam Webster defines “intimidated” as “to make timid or fearful.” Synonyms include “bully” and “frighten.” Fear and intimidation are subjective emotions that have significantly increased among America’s younger and more unstable generations. People are swimming in pools of victimhood and mental illness today. We constantly hear about a spike in anxiety. What happens when we create laws that allow litigation on the basis of largely subjective emotions?
But the more likely primary intent here is to coerce social-media companies into pre-censoring. The senior vice president of social-media company Parler, Elise Pierotti, said of the bill:
SB 771 isn’t about protecting civil rights, it’s California’s brazen attempt to export its one-party censorship regime to every corner of the internet. This bill hands Sacramento the power to bully platforms into preemptively scrubbing dissent on everything from border security to parental rights. We’ve seen Big Tech abuse vague “hate speech” rules to throttle conservatives for years, including shutting down our platform in 2021; now, lawmakers want to make it mandatory with teeth-shattering fines. This must be stopped before it buries the First Amendment.
Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at the R Street Institute, also suspects this is the drafter’s main agenda. She told the Daily Caller that “rather than risk liability for showing users content one could argue (even if it doesn’t actually) violate a law, platforms will over-moderate and remove posts in order to stay out of court.”
Hellbound and Down 