California’s Sneak Attack on the First Amendment

A bill on the cusp of becoming law in California could represent one of the most audacious government assaults on free speech in American history – and almost no one is talking about it.

Introduced in September by State Senator Henry Stern, California Senate Bill 771 is being sold as a measure to protect the public from hate crimes online. Its supporters claim it simply holds social media platforms accountable if their algorithms promote content that “aids or abets” threats of violence or intimidation. They insist it’s about preventing violence and ensuring online safety.

But even a cursory examination of the text of the bill immediately raises glaring red flags for free speech and exposes SB 771 as a left-wing censorship tool. What it actually does is create a mechanism for the state to punish social media platforms for allowing the “wrong” kind of speech to spread. It criminalizes algorithms – the invisible systems that determine what users see online – and threatens companies with fines of up to $1 million per violation if those algorithms happen to amplify content California Democrats don’t like.

It’s back-door censorship, and it’s every bit as dangerous as it sounds.

The bill ties itself to Section 51.7 of California’s Civil Code, a section of the law originally intended to protect people from violence and intimidation. But the language of that statute is ripe for abuse.

Section 51.7 specifically guarantees everyone the right to be free from “intimidation by threat of violence,” but it nowhere defines what intimidation actually means. One subsection expands the term to include actions that “terrorize” someone, with “terrorize” itself defined as causing “a person of ordinary emotions and sensibilities to fear for personal safety.”

“Terrorized” is not a legal standard – it’s a subjective feeling. What one activist judge or ambitious district attorney might consider “terrorizing” could easily encompass nonviolent protest, fiery rhetoric, or even harsh political criticism. This fuzziness effectively hands the power to define “violence” and “intimidation” to whoever happens to be enforcing the law, meaning that the boundary between legitimate expression and unlawful speech can shift with the politics of the moment.

It gets worse. Section 57.1 also says that the list of “protected categories” – race, religion, gender, political affiliation, and so on – is “illustrative rather than restrictive.” This means that bureaucrats and judges are free to expand that list however they please. Today, it might include race or religion; tomorrow, it could include “gender identity ideology,” “climate denial,” or any other concept fashionable on the left.

The legal door is wide open for speech critical of progressive orthodoxy to be redefined as intimidation. Once that happens, any post, video, or article that “promotes” such speech could become the basis for multimillion-dollar fines against the platforms that host it.

That’s the real danger of SB 771. It doesn’t have to outlaw speech that leftists don’t like directly. It just makes it financially ruinous for private companies to host it.

Platforms like X, YouTube, and Rumble will have to decide whether a single post is worth a million-dollar penalty, and the answer will be obvious. They’ll delete anything remotely controversial, silence dissenting voices, and err on the side of erasing political content rather than risk the wrath of California’s invariably progressive attorney general. The law doesn’t need to individually censor everyday citizens for their opinions if Democrats can terrify tech companies (most of whom want to censor conservatives anyway) into doing the dirty work for them.

If this sounds far-fetched and dystopian, just look across the Atlantic. This exact playbook has already been deployed in the United Kingdom, where the government passed its so-called Online Safety Act in 2023, promising to make the internet “safer.” In reality, it gave regulators sweeping power to demand that platforms remove content deemed “harmful” and target individual citizens.

The result has been an extraordinary crackdown on free expression. According to The Times of London, more than 30 people are arrested every single day – around 12,000 per year – for posting things on the internet that are considered “offensive.” British police have been filmed knocking on doors in the middle of the night, interrogating citizens about X and Facebook posts that hurt someone’s feelings. Videos of officers confronting ordinary people over “hate incidents” have become commonplace.

This is the world California’s Democrats want to replicate. SB 771 borrows the same logic by using vague language about safety and civil rights to justify government control of online expression. The bill declares that “California’s civil rights protections apply with equal force in the digital sphere” – a phrase that sounds high-minded but effectively merges the state’s vague definitions of “intimidation” and “terrorize” with the algorithmic systems that shape digital communication.

Once those two are connected, the potential for abuse is unlimited. Activist lawyers could file endless complaints alleging that platforms “aided” intimidation simply by allowing politically incorrect ideas to spread. Judges sympathetic to the cause could interpret the law broadly, turning every controversial post into a legal headache. And because the penalties are so steep, companies won’t wait for the courts – they’ll censor as a first resort.

What California Democrats are really after is leverage. They want to force X, especially, but also other platforms, to delete accounts that challenge left-wing narratives. If a platform fears a million-dollar fine every time an edgy conservative post goes viral, it will start preemptively scrubbing users who might create problems. The goal is not safety. It’s control.

The British precedent shows where this leads. Across the pond, people have been arrested for pointing out that mass migration has strained public services, or for stating the basic truth that biological sex is real. Authorities justify it all by claiming such statements “promote violence” or “cause harm.” That’s the same rhetorical sleight of hand now appearing in California’s SB 771: start with a principle almost everyone agrees with – don’t incite violence – and then quietly redefine “violence” to include any speech that challenges progressive dogma.

The only thing left standing between SB 771 becoming law is Governor Gavin Newsom. If Newsom signs the bill, it will trigger a legal firestorm on First Amendment grounds. But if this approach proves successful in California, it won’t stop there. Other blue states will follow, and eventually Congress will be pressured to “standardize” online safety laws nationwide.

Newsom may hesitate for political reasons – he knows this bill could haunt him in a future presidential campaign – but whether or not he signs it, it is clear that the campaign against free speech in America is escalating. The left has learned that it doesn’t need to repeal the First Amendment outright. It just needs to redefine “harm,” contort old civil rights laws beyond recognition, and use regulatory power to frighten tech companies into compliance. The effect is the same.

The American people need to recognize what’s happening before it’s too late. SB 771 is not a routine state bill; it’s a test case for digital authoritarianism. If California succeeds, the United States will no longer be a country that truly protects dissent.

SB 771 is the Democrats’ sneak attack on the First Amendment, and if Americans don’t sound the alarm now, the door to online free speech may soon slam shut for good.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.