California’s governor has a new title: humor police.
In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom published a tweet, declaring that a parody video of presidential candidate Kamala Harris should be “illegal.” True to his word—and just months before election season—California passed two laws that restrict political expression under the guise of prohibiting “materially deceptive content.”
The first law bans people from posting digitally edited content online when it depicts candidates, elected officials, or election-related property in a way that California deems “materially deceptive.” The law also forces satirists to slap a label on their content so obvious it defeats the point of satire.
The second law converts social media platforms into California state snitches by requiring them to field reports about individual posts with the same “materially deceptive” content and then remove or label them.
All this is done in the name of stopping “disinformation” and “deepfakes”—whatever those vague terms mean—but the laws go beyond that. Each law “includes, but is not limited to, deepfakes.”
Let’s be clear: California’s laws empower censorship, pure and simple. The state is using vague standards to punish people for posting political memes it disfavors. Outlawing certain subjective content that harms the “electoral prospects of a candidate,” “influences an election in California,” undermines “confidence in the outcome” of an election, and more, the laws enable California politicians and anyone else who sees your online post to sue you (and get attorneys’ fees) when they think certain political posts are false. In our day of extreme political polarization, this is a recipe for political retaliation in the form of frivolous lawsuits.
But California’s new laws perhaps affect people who publish satire most of all Satire frequently lampoons politicians and those in power and can often be mistaken as false or “materially deceptive.” Satire is often the most effective form of political speech.
For California to burden this speech, it isn’t just taking the fun out of sharing political memes; it’s violating the U.S. Constitution.
The First Amendment gives breathing room in our political debates to let many ideas air and ventilate—even political depictions that some may deem deceptive. The First Amendment protects this freedom because it trusts the American people to be able to think and decide for themselves in the context of debating political candidates and issues. In this context, it’s often incredibly difficult to distinguish political fact from fiction. Better to trust the people than the politicians to make that call.
California officials don’t share that trust. They want to be the arbiters of political truth online. They want to be the fact-checkers, but those backed by state power, censoring speech based on their perception of truth.
Because this violates the First Amendment, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys recently filed a lawsuit against California’s new laws on behalf of The Babylon Bee and Kelly Chang Rickert, a California attorney who regularly engages in online political debate. They each follow a longstanding and long-respected American tradition: using humor to reveal hypocrisies and fundamental truths—especially on political topics.
In fact, another lower court has already condemned one of California’s laws as unconstitutional. That was a step in the right direction. We will continue to work to make sure our clients’ rights are permanently protected in their separate case.
California’s meme-policing is just the latest in a growing global trend where terms like “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “hate speech” are used as excuses for censorship.
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If this goes unchecked, we’re going to see the censorship that Brazil is experiencing happen here. From Europe to Asia and now California, politicians are increasingly dictating what can be said online or in the public square in the name of saving democracy.
But whatever problems political lies cause, the better solution is true speech, not censorship. California’s laws go way too far. Our history shows that government officials won’t hesitate to engage in censorship to stay in office and silence dissent. From COVID-19 lockdowns to Hunter Biden’s laptop, what we are told is false often turns out true (many of The Bee’s satirical headlines have become actual news stories). In this country, we let elections decide our political debates; we don’t use laws to silence that debate from ever taking place.
In a free society, individuals must be able to express political beliefs without fear of being dragged through court to defend a meme. The Babylon Bee, Rickert, and Alliance Defending Freedom want to make sure that stays the case across the country. Even in Gavin Newsom’s California.
Kristen Waggoner is CEO, president and general counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom.
