 Seth Dillon speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida. PHOTO CREDIT: Gage Skidmore Call it Euro-creep – the tendency of Europe’s draconian censorship laws to seep into American law. Germany is prosecuting digital speakers for “public insults against politicians.” Not to be outdone, California passed two laws that punish speakers for posting satirical memes and parodies of politicians, while requiring large online platforms to act as the government’s censors and remove political humor from their sites. On Friday, the satirical site, Babylon Bee, and video-sharing platform Rumble, prevailed in a lawsuit before a federal district court. The court swept the two California laws into the dustbin of unconstitutional attempts to control speech. Lowbrow Humor Gets Equal Protection The California laws targeted the use of digital technology and AI to create “materially deceptive” content. Think of concocted images of President Donald Trump standing next to a giant cannon on the White House lawn to fire deportees into the air, or Gov. Gavin Newsom deploying a giant can of Febreze over San Francisco to mask the city’s “poo smell.” As Judge John Mendez of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California wrote, “Novel mediums of speech and even lowbrow humor have equal entitlement to First Amendment protection and the principles undergirding the freedom of expression do not waver when technological changes occur.” Targeting Some Speakers, Protecting Others Concluding that California’s approach “suffers from a ‘compendium of traditional First Amendment infirmities,’” the court found that the laws discriminated on the basis of “content, viewpoint, and speaker.” One of the laws only punished content that could “harm” a candidate’s electoral prospects. But “materially deceptive content that helps a candidate or promotes confidence would not be subject to penalty.” Broadcasters and some internet websites are covered by more lenient rules, exempt from general or special damages. But no such leniency is afforded parodists. Deputizing “Censorship Czars” Worst of all, California sought to deputize legions of internet users as plaintiffs, allowing them to seek general and special damages, including attorneys’ fees and cost, even from those who merely repost the offending image. The court rightly concluded that “this attempts to stifle speech before it occurs or actually harms anyone as long as it is ‘reasonably likely’ to do so and it allows almost anyone to act as a ‘censorship czar.’” Imagine the flood of lawsuits that would have drowned nearly all satirical speech if this litigation factory had been allowed to continue. The Solution to Bad Speech Is… the Envelope Please… More Speech! Judge Mendez acknowledged the problem of digital technology spreading deceptive stories and deepfakes misleading people. But burying the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech under a heap of lawsuits is not the answer. “When it comes to political expression,” Judge Mendez wrote, “the antidote is not prematurely stifling content creation and singling out specific speakers but encouraging counter speech, rigorous fact-checking, and the uninhibited flow of democratic discourse.” The mere fact that the California legislature and Gov. Newsom saw nothing amiss with these laws should serve as a wake-up call that the First Amendment is poorly understood and respected, even by elected officials. “It is alarming to think that government officials could decide which political speech is permitted, silenced, or erased altogether,” said Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski. We agree. Vigilance is called for, especially considering that Babylon Bee still has to defend itself against similar laws in Hawaii. Comments are closed.
|
Archives
May 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed