Friday, 04 July 2025

Elon Musk Sues New York AG Letitia James!


The name Letitia James should ring a bell.

Letitia James serves as the New York Attorney General and became infamous after she sued President Trump for civil fraud in 2022.

Well now Elon Musk is giving her a taste of her own medicine.

Musk’s social media company X Corp has sued James in a federal court over her recent ‘Stop Hiding Hate” campaign that Musk claims is a violation of the First Amendment.

The Daily Caller had the full report:

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Elon Musk’s social media company X Corp reportedly sued New York Attorney General Letitia James in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, saying the state’s “Stop Hiding Hate” law tramples the First Amendment by forcing platforms to reveal how they police user speech.

The law, modeled after a now-revised California measure, requires large social networks to publish their content moderation rules and file twice-yearly reports to the attorney general detailing “hate speech” removals, “disinformation” takedowns and other enforcement actions. X argues the disclosures mandate mirrors the California law a federal appeals court partially blocked last year, according to Reuters.

Defining the boundaries of acceptable discourse online “engenders considerable debate among reasonable people about where to draw the correct proverbial line,” the company wrote in its filing, according to Reuters. “This is not a role that the government may play.”

The full filing is not yet publicly available, while X did not respond to a request for comment.

The law obliges any platform with New York users to post plain-language terms of service, spell out how it defines hate or “misinformation,” and submit granular data on flagged posts, appeals and takedowns each April and October.

James, reportedly the lone defendant, did not respond to a request for comment.

Supporters — including the Anti-Defamation League — say the transparency rules answer a surge in online “identity-based harassment,” while Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul hailed the law at its December signing as “giv[ing] consumers the transparency and security they need and deserve.” Neither Hochul’s office nor the ADL responded to requests for comment.

Previously X successfully blocked California from requiring information about their content moderation policies.

BBC had more details:

X’s lawsuit against New York state comes nine months after the company successfully blocked a California law that required large social media companies to submit reports about their content-moderation policies.

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The company extensively cited its earlier victory in its Tuesday’s lawsuit and criticised New York lawmakers for failing to revisit the legislation’s language even after the California law was largely struck down.

Musk, who acquired X in 2022, has dramatically scaled back the rules that govern what content and behaviours are acceptable on the platform, according to Professor Laura Edelson, who teaches computer science at Northeastern University.

He has “also significantly reduced the resources the platform puts into enforcing even the rules it does still have,” she said. “This is why, even though rules around spam haven’t changed on X, there is so much more floating around than there used to be.”

Last year, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Musk against a research group that documented an uptick in hate speech on the site.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport.

View the original article here.


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