A Court Told X It Can’t Hide the Hate
On Aug. 26, a federal judge in Manhattan dismissed Elon Musk’s bid to strike down New York’s Stop Hiding Hate Act, ruling that “the First Amendment poses no obstacle” to a law that forces large platforms to disclose how they handle hate speech, extremism and disinformation. The decision lets stand a transparency measure that a nearly identical California law could not survive, and hands X another defeat in its running fight against public scrutiny of online hate.
Elon Musk’s X Corp. has lost its attempt to block a New York law requiring large social media companies to disclose how they police hate speech and disinformation. On Aug. 26, U.S. District Judge John Cronan in Manhattan dismissed the company’s lawsuit against the state’s Stop Hiding Hate Act, ruling that “the First Amendment poses no obstacle” to the disclosure requirements, Bloomberg reported. X had sued to have the provisions declared unconstitutional and barred from enforcement, CNN reported when the suit was filed last year.
What X argued
In its complaint, X contended that New York’s reporting mandate compelled it to reveal “highly sensitive and controversial speech” that is protected under the First Amendment but disfavored by the state, and it framed the requirements as an unconstitutional intrusion into its editorial choices, according to CNN. The company argued the law exposed it to lawsuits and penalties unless it disclosed how it defines and treats categories of speech the state finds objectionable, Al Jazeera reported. Judge Cronan rejected that theory, holding that requiring factual disclosures about content-moderation practices was reasonably related to the state’s interest in letting people make informed choices about the platforms they use, Bloomberg reported.
What the law requires
Signed in December 2024 by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Stop Hiding Hate Act requires large social media companies operating in New York to report twice a year on whether and how they define hate speech, racist or extremist content, disinformation, harassment and foreign political interference, and to detail their moderation practices, Al Jazeera reported. The disclosures are meant to include data on the number of flagged posts, the actions companies took and how far the offending material spread, according to CNN. The measure does not tell platforms how to moderate; it requires them to say, publicly, what they are already doing, The Washington Post reported.
The law California could not keep
New York modeled its statute on a California law, AB 587, that drew the same objection from X, CNN reported. X sued California’s attorney general in 2023 to block that state’s content-moderation reporting rules, Al Jazeera reported. A federal appeals panel later blocked portions of the California law on free-speech grounds, and the state settled, agreeing not to enforce the reporting requirements, according to CNN. That history made New York the tougher test — and, for now, the one where a nearly identical transparency mandate has been upheld rather than struck down.
A pattern of fighting scrutiny
The dismissal is the latest setback in a series of legal fights X has waged against critics who track hate on its platform. In March 2024, a federal judge threw out X’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that had published research on rising hate speech after Musk’s takeover, finding the case was an effort to punish and silence the group’s protected speech, NPR reported. The judge in that case wrote that the suit was “about punishing the Defendants for their speech,” according to CNN. The New York ruling turns on a narrower question — not whether the state can police speech, but whether it can require a platform to say how it polices hate itself. If the decision stands, it offers other states a template for transparency laws that the courts have so far treated warily.