Sunday, 29 December 2024

Rumble Files Lawsuit Against Democrat-Led State

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Video-sharing platform Rumble has filed a lawsuit against California over a state law that regulates how platforms handle videos with AI-created ‘deepfakes,’ claiming it violates the First Amendment.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of Rumble and Rumble Canada.

“California recently passed two laws that target and punish speakers for posting certain political commentary online. One of those laws, AB 2655, also requires large online platforms like Rumble to act as the government’s censorship police and remove such content from their sites,” ADF stated in a press release.

“California is forcing Rumble to alter its speech and censor its users’ speech, while also compelling the platform’s speech, in violation of the First Amendment,” it added.

“California’s war against political speech is censorship, plain and simple. We can’t trust the government to decide what is true in our online political debates,” said ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler.

“Rumble is one of the few online voices stepping up against this trend of censorship while other platforms and sites cave to totalitarian regimes censoring Americans. Rumble is standing for free speech even when it is hard. Other online platforms and media companies must see these laws for what they are—a threat to their existence,” Sechler added.

Per ADF:

In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to a parody video of Vice President Kamala Harris by declaring that the video “should be illegal,” and the California Legislature responded by fast-tracking the bills, which Newsom signed into law on Sept. 17. AB 2839 censors speech by using vague standards to punish people for posting certain content about elections, including political memes and parodies of politicians, and AB 2655 requires large online platforms to censor much of that speech.

As ADF attorneys explain in the lawsuit, AB 2655 deputizes Rumble to restrict its users’ speech. At the same time, California requires Rumble to alter the content and viewpoint of its own speech and speak a message with which it doesn’t agree. California’s new law mandates that Rumble remove and label content state officials consider “reasonably likely to harm the reputation or electoral prospects” of candidates or “reasonably likely to falsely undermine confidence” in an election.

The law forces Rumble to train its team to remove and label content based on inherently subjective terms that pollsters and government officials can’t even agree on, like what harms electoral prospects or what undermines confidence in an election. And if Rumble doesn’t comply, AB 2655 authorizes officials to file suits against it.

“Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal. I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is,” Newsom previously said.

“I just signed a bill to make this illegal in the state of California. You can no longer knowingly distribute an ad or other election communications that contain materially deceptive content — including deepfakes,” the Democrat governor commented.

WATCH:

“The governor of California just made this parody video illegal in violation of the Constitution of the United States,” Elon Musk commented, referencing a viral Kamala Harris ad parody.

“Would be a shame if it went viral,” he added.

WATCH:

Bloomberg Law reports:

But the law, which is set to go into effect in 2025, is “substantially overbroad because it does not adequately define various material terms in the statute,” the complaint said.

The suit said Rumble doesn’t have the technology to “automatically identify digitally altered images or audio shared by users” and even if it did, “it is unlikely that Rumble would be able to identify all content that might arguably violate AB 2655, particularly given the law’s vagueness.”

The suit follows a pair of similar First Amendment complaints from the conservative satire publication The Babylon Bee and a YouTube creator Christopher Kohls who made a parody deepfake video criticizing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

The Babylon Bee’s suit targeted another new California law AB 2389, which requires a label on satirical content.

A federal judge in October blocked the California attorney general from enforcing AB 2389 against Kohls, finding that the law likely violates the First Amendment. State officials later agreed to not enforce the law against the Babylon Bee.


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