This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Fighting state demands to be ‘the government’s censorship police.’
Leftists before and throughout the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration have schemed with social media companies to censor political views they don’t like.
Evidence shows sometimes the social media companies have been pleased to help, other times they’ve been targeted by government mandates. One of the biggest scandals was over the FBI’s push, targeting legacy and social media, to suppress the accurate reporting during the 2020 election season of the scandals involving the Biden family.
A survey later showed that agenda likely handed the White House to Biden.
But one of those mandate agendas, in the state of California, now is under fire in a courtroom.
“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,” explained ADF lawyer 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.”
The case being brought by the ADF on behalf of Rumble is against California’s mandates.
“To defend the constitutionally protected right to freely post political content online, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of Rumble and Rumble Canada,” the legal team said.
The problem is that California lawmakers have adopted laws recently that target and punish speakers for posting certain political commentary online.
One of the laws, in fact, is AB 2655 which requires also requires large online platforms like Rumble to act as the government’s censorship police and remove such content from their sites.
“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,” the ADF reported.
The state’s infringement on the U.S. Constitution developed a few months ago when Gov. Gavin Newsom lost his cool over a parody video of Kamala Harris.
He said the video should be outlawed, and the Democrat-controlled California legislature then fast-tracked its agenda, which Newsom quickly signed.,
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, the legal team said.
ADF said in the lawsuit one law deputizes Rumble to restrict others’ speech, and also puts the company under the requirement to alter the content and viewpoint of its own speech.
“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,” the ADF said.
The action follows a similar legal charge against the state, on behalf of the Babylon Bee and California lawyer Kelly Chang Rickert, that was filed earlier.
California officials admitted as a result of that filing they cannot enforce AB 2839 after a federal district court ruled that the law likely violates the First Amendment.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
