SACRAMENTO, California — California has agreed to drop portions of a law that requires large social media companies to disclose their policies for handling hate speech, disinformation, harassment and extremism following a legal challenge from Elon Musk’s X.
A settlement reached Monday between state Attorney General Rob Bonta and Musk’s social media platform stops short of tossing the entire law, as X demanded when it first filed the case in 2023 , citing First Amendment complaints.
But it deals a blow to California’s push to publicize how social media platforms define and referee speech on their platforms. It also comes as other Big Tech CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have attempted to curry favor with President Donald Trump by loosening their own content moderation policies and cutting third-party fact-checkers from their platforms…