NRB Joins Suit to Block Calif. Hate Speech, Disinformation Law

The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), an international group of Christian communicators, joined a lawsuit (docket 2:23-cv-02705) to block AB 587, a California law that would require social media companies to report content deemed “hate speech” and “disinformation” to the government. “In an environment where much religious viewpoint expression is considered ‘controversial’ speech, NRB is acting to stop the weaponization of new laws against Christian communicators,” said CEO Troy Miller in a Thursday news release. It said NRB members represent “hundreds of millions of listeners, viewers, and readers.”

The lawsuit against California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) seeks to “block the enforcement of a mechanism that will be used under the force of law in the state of California to require social media companies to file reports to the California Attorney General on categories of speech published on their platforms," Miller said, citing misinformation, disinformation, extremism, radicalization and hate speech. Fines for noncompliance are up to $15,000 per violation per day, he said.

The amended complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles by plaintiffs satirical website The Babylon Bee, podcast host Tim Pool and social networking app company Minds, Inc., said, it’s “well understood that California has an outsized impact on public policy” and the state’s laws and regulations “often drive change across the entire American economy.” The private sector can “either comply with Sacramento’s edicts or miss out on participating in the world’s fourth largest economy,” it said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Bonta “have both expressed a desire to use state power to chill speech they do not approve of, constitutionally protected expression they refer to with derogatory labels like 'disinformation,' 'hate speech,' and 'extremism,'” said the complaint. AB 587 is “viewpoint discriminatory and designed to chill expression of lawful speech the State of California disapproves of.”

The law targets social media platforms and “chills speech of those platforms’ users by incentivizing large platforms to censor speech based on viewpoint,” the complaint said. The statute also affects smaller social networks “by imposing an industry standard of viewpoint-based censorship.” The data platforms are required to provide the state under the law “is not about satisfying some academic curiosity, but rather to cast platforms that do not censor enough as pariahs,” plaintiffs said.

AB 587 violates the First Amendment because it's designed to mute constitutionally protected speech based on viewpoint, the complaint said. The law doesn’t define terms such as “disinformation,” “hate speech” and “extremism,” which creates an “overbroad definition, leading to overly broad enforcement powers in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” it said.

Plaintiffs seek a declaration that AB 587 is “unconstitutional on its face and as applied to Plaintiffs under the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment; an order preliminarily and permanently enjoining Bonta from enforcing it; and an award of attorneys’ fees, the complaint said.