While he pretends to embrace “freedom of speech” by promoting the inclusion of obscene books in classrooms and on library shelves, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is leading a statewide campaign to make the government’s unconstitutional involvement in the Censorship-Industrial Complex a permanent fixture of American life.
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
