Newsom can help discourage political violence

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OPINION – Responding to our increasingly violent politics, Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox recently called social media a “cancer on our society.” By signing SB 771, California Governor Gavin Newsom can prevent the cancer from spreading.

Violence in our politics is sadly spreading.  Just this year:

• a Minnesota Democratic legislator and her husband were shot dead at their home;
• the Pennsylvania governor’s residence was set ablaze while the Democratic Governor and his family were inside;
• a Texas police officer was shot in a coordinated, politically-motivated attack;
• the New Mexico Republican Party headquarters was set on fire;
• the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta was shot at with dozens of bullets;
• Republican youth activist and organizer Charlie Kirk was murdered.

There have been two assassination attempts on President Trump. The man who assaulted former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband demanded “Where’s Nancy?”

Between 2019 and 2023, there was a 150% increase in threats against federal judges. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated 8,000-plus threats to members of Congress in 2024. Forty-three percent of state legislators experienced threats. Women officials reported increases in threats more than men; Republican officials more increases than Democrats.

According to the Brennan Center, 53% of state legislators believe that abuse had deterred their colleagues from taking on controversial topics.

Social media can be blamed for much of this, in three ways.

First, online violence does not just stay online. Harvard Law School found that “Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar” and that the genocide was a “predictable result of Facebook’s business model in combination with a striking lack of moderation or enforcement[.]”

Second, notwithstanding record profits, the largest social media platforms have drastically reduced their teams focused on catching the worst content.

Third, Meta is actively making this problem worse. Meta’s new content moderation policies, according to leaked documents, now allow the following statements: “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians;” “Mexican immigrants are trash;” and “Black people are more violent than Whites,” among others. There is much more but you get the idea.

Meta’s new policies pour gasoline on a roaring fire. L.A. County reported in 2024 that anti-immigrant hate crimes increased by 31%. The Human Rights Campaign documented a 400% rise in anti-LGBTQ+ harmful content on platforms.

According to California Department of Justice data, anti-Jewish bias events rose by 52.9% and anti-Islamic bias events rose by 62%.

And, in a shocking example, a 2023 study documented that paid advertisements calling for women journalists to be beaten and murdered were successfully placed and distributed on major platforms.

Enter SB 771. Here’s how it works.  Imagine if (before social media) a person created flyers credibly warning LGBTQ+ residents they would be murdered if they voted on election day.  Imagine if a friend of that person then researched where LGBTQ+ residents lived and delivered the flyers. If the threats were credible, both people would violate current longstanding laws and their acts would not be protected by the First Amendment.

Now imagine the same flyer is uploaded to a social media platform, where the platform’s own AI steps into the role of effectively delivering the murderous threat to those who, based on the platform’s own data, are most likely to be terrorized.

That’s what SB 771 protects against. The narrow bill does not change a single thing about the current laws that protect against being terrorized or intimidated. What it does do is:

• Clarifies that if the AI-written algorithms deciding who gets what steps into the shoes of the flyer-distributing friend, the platform could be as liable for their actions as the friend; and
• Establishes penalties applicable to the biggest platforms that might make obeying the law in their financial interests.

With political violence cancerously spreading, Governor Newsom must side with we, the people and not Big Tech by signing SB 771.

Robert Herrell is the Executive Director of Consumer Federation of California.