ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Newsom Challenges Biden For Censor-In-Chief Title.

Nearly one year since Newsom signed AB 587 into law to “protect Californians from hate and disinformation spread online,” California’s attempts to legitimize its attacks on the First Amendment are in full swing.

“California will not stand by as social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation that threaten our communities and foundational values as a country,” Newsom said in a September 2022 statement.

The law requires Big Tech companies to submit reports to California Attorney General Rob Bonta detailing how they define terms such as hate speech, racism, extremism, radicalization, disinformation, misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference and what they do to enforce censorship policies related to those categories. Starting Jan. 1, 2024, companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube will be required to disclose how many posts were deemed worthy of suppression, how many people viewed those posts before they were censored, and whether they reinstated the contended post following an appeal from the offending user.

Notably missing from the law’s requirements is a description of what the attorney general’s office plans to do with this information — besides blasting it out to the public. Given Bonta’s history of shamelessly demanding the CEOs of Meta, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit curb the “spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms [that] has led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories, political violence, and threats to democracy ahead of the 2022 midterm elections,” it’s not a stretch to say he intends to use the data to pressure Big Tech into censoring even more content that the state deems wrongthink.

The real benefit of this law, as far as California Democrats are concerned, is that its mere existence will encourage social media platforms to do whatever they think Democrats want them to do. Not that most of them need much encouraging.