Advancing American Freedom led a coalition of 24 other amici, filing an amicus brief in Babylon Bee v. Bonta, a case challenging California’s social media censorship law. California’s law requires large online platforms to remove or label certain AI generated or modified content related to candidates for office and election officials and to create a snitching system so that Californians can report speech they think violates the law to social media platforms.
Anonymous and satirical speech are well established in Anglo-American history. Well before America’s founding, British citizens and American colonists were objecting to government censorship of satire and efforts to ferret out the identities of anonymous speakers. The Founding Fathers, operating in this tradition, regularly published their writings under pseudonyms like Publius, Cato, and Brutus, both to protect themselves from government reprisal or mob violence and to ensure that their arguments were assessed on their merits, rather than based on the identity of the author.
These principles were enshrined in the First Amendment and continue to protect speakers against state-sponsored censorship today.
“The Founding Fathers, drawing from a deep well of Anglo-American history, understood the critical importance of free speech, including parody and anonymous speech, protecting it in the First Amendment to the Constitution,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “We urge the Ninth Circuit to affirm the district court’s decision and protect speech against state-sponsored censorship.”