By Bill Pan

Elon Musk’s social media platform X is suing New York state over a new law that would require X and similar digital services to disclose how they police user-generated content.

At the center of the lawsuit, filed on June 17 in federal court in Manhattan, is the Stop Hiding Hate Act, signed into law in December 2024 and set to take effect this week.

The law mandates that social media companies report to the state on the steps they are taking to monitor and address user-shared content related to “hate speech or racism,” “extremism or radicalization,” “disinformation or misinformation,” “harassment,” and “foreign political interference.”

Supporters of the law, including the New York State Bar Association, argue that hate speech online can lead to hate crimes in real life and that greater transparency is necessary.

Free speech advocates, however, argue that such legislative efforts, including a 2022 California law imposing identical mandates, essentially allow the state to indirectly censor particular viewpoints it doesn’t like.

“Social media companies are in the business of editing and curation: Like newspaper or television editors, they choose what their users see,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in opposition to the California law. “The government cannot compel them to report their editorial policies and practices to the attorney general.”

As a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” Musk has overhauled content-moderation practices since acquiring the Twitter (now renamed X) platform in October 2022, laying off moderators and restoring previously banned accounts. Pre-Musk Twitter had more stringent enforcement policies, under which users could, for example, be suspended or banned for not addressing transgender people by their preferred gender or for reporting on concerns about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

In 2023, X sued California over the social media-moderation law. While a lower court initially ruled in favor of the state, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later paused that decision. The company and the state reached a settlement earlier this year, eliminating the provisions that X claimed were unconstitutional.

In its June 17 complaint, X said the New York law, similar to its California precursor, violates social media platforms’ First Amendment-protected editorial autonomy by compelling them to adopt and regulate “controversial and difficult-to-define categories of content” disfavored by the state.

“We are confident we will prevail in this case as well,” the company said in a June 17 statement, calling the New York law a “carbon copy” of the California law it previously challenged.

New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal and state Assemblymember Grace Lee, the two Democrats who cosponsored the Stop Hiding Hate Act, said in response to the lawsuit that the law is constitutionally sound.

“Social media companies, including X, are cesspools of hate speech consisting of antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-LGBTQ bias, yet these platforms have consistently failed to inform the public about their policies regarding hatred and misinformation,” the lawmakers said in a statement.

“We’re confident that the court will reject this attempt by X to use the First Amendment as a shield against providing New Yorkers with much needed transparency around their conduct, and uphold the Stop Hiding Hate Act as consistent with similar laws in other states that have already been found to be constitutional.”

The New York attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.