Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, on the Viva Technology conference in Paris, France, June 16, 2023.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform quietly waged a lobbying campaign to derail an internet content moderation bill in California and is now suing the state, alleging First Amendment violations, in response to disclosure reports and folks accustomed to the hassle.
Musk took control of X Corp., known on the time as Twitter, in October in a deal price over $40 billion. Within the months preceding Musk’s purchase, Twitter lobbyists privately met with state lawmakers, including Democratic Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, who wrote the unique bill, to voice their concerns concerning the proposed laws, in response to the records and a recent interview with the bill’s creator.
“Did they [the company] share concerns about this? 100%. However it was a really different tone and tenor than the lawsuit. They actually had concerns but additionally shared their views on learn how to make the laws more workable,” Gabriel said.
Gabriel said the corporate’s change in tactics comes all the way down to one reason: Musk’s purchase. “The interesting thing for me is what has modified — the acquisition of the corporate and the brand new leadership,” Gabriel said.
A former Twitter executive told CNBC that Musk’s move to show to the courts to fight what he sees as First Amendment battles may very well be the beginning of a trend by which the social media giant looks to the legal system to fight laws it doesn’t like. This person declined to be named so as to speak freely and to avoid retaliation from Musk or other X executives.
The California bill, signed into law last 12 months by Gov. Gavin Newsom, requires social media firms to post their content moderation policies in addition to submit a report back to the state twice a 12 months on how their content rules address hate speech, racism, disinformation and harassment. X is suing California alleging the law violates First Amendment rights. The state has said it’s reviewing the grievance and plans to reply in court.
X’s move to go from lobbying policymakers to suing the state is a notable shift for the corporate. Prior to the Musk acquisition, Twitter was not known for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence legislators, or for using hardball legal challenges to aggressively oppose certain laws, in response to lobbying records, a court records search and folks briefed on the matter.
Twitter, before the name change to X earlier this 12 months, was never in the highest tier of lobbying spending by Big Tech, in response to the disclosure reports.
This 12 months, nevertheless, X has spent greater than $500,000 combined on federal and state lobbying, in response to data from the nonpartisan OpenSecrets. They spent greater than $80,000 on lobbying California state lawmakers since 2021, with a partial concentrate on Gabriel’s bill, in response to the general public records.
A search through the federal court database shows the social media company was never a plaintiff difficult state laws within the years prior to the recent lawsuit against California.
The corporate did file a legal grievance against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2017 to attempt to stop the federal government from unmasking an anonymous Twitter account that was critical of the department, in response to a court filing. Twitter, a day after filing the grievance that 12 months, voluntarily dismissed the legal matter after speaking with the Department of Justice, in response to one other filing.
Musk himself often acts as an off-the-cuff lobbyist, posting on X his political stances and going to Washington to satisfy with lawmakers about policy initiatives. On Wednesday, he was amongst a bunch of tech executives invited to Capitol Hill to debate artificial intelligence behind closed doors with senators.
An X spokesman didn’t reply to a request for comment. An email to X’s press mailbox was answered by an automatic response: “Busy now, please check back later.”
Musk’s X is involved with no less than two other lawsuits.
X is suing a nonprofit over allegations that a few of the group’s previous research on the platform’s lack of combating hate speech was derived from unscrupulous methods, including the usage of illegally scraped Twitter data. The nonprofit has denied it used data-scraping tools to conduct its research. X can also be facing 2,200 arbitration cases that were unveiled in a recent court filing after Musk’s acquisition.
Musk has also publicly threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for what he believes is a pressure campaign on advertisers to walk away from working with X. The ADL has denied wrongdoing.
The ADL was a supporter of the content moderation bill that X is now suing California over.