On Wednesday, a federal court ruled in favor of Elon Musk’s X Corp in its challenge against California’s content moderation law, citing violations of free speech. X Corp had filed a lawsuit to block this controversial law, which went into effect on January 1, 2024.

The law mandates that social media companies provide the state with details of their content moderation practices or face civil penalties.

Today, a bipartisan panel of judges unanimously ruled in favor of X and against a California law that seeks to regulate speech on social media platforms.

This is not just a victory for our platform, but also for free speech nationwide.

Whether in the United States or around the…

— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) September 4, 2024

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed an earlier decision by a lower court that had refused to halt enforcement of the law. A panel of three judges found that the law violated the First Amendment on its face, according to a report from Reuters.

“X Corp. is likely to succeed in showing that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment,” Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. wrote in his opinion on the case.

X Corp, in its September 2023 complaint, argued that Assembly Bill 587 infringes upon the company’s First Amendment rights by pressuring “companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful.” This, they claimed, interferes with their “constitutionally-protected editorial judgments.”

The lawsuit further contended that the law imposes “an unjustified and undue burden” on social media companies. Initially, U.S. District Judge William Shubb dismissed the lawsuit in December 2023.

Assembly Bill 587, which was signed into law last September, aims to combat extremism, hate speech, and online misinformation. The law also requires online companies that collect personally identifiable information from Californians to make their privacy policies easily accessible to the public, as noted by Forbes.

X Corp’s lawsuit argued that the real intention behind the law “is to pressure social media platforms to ‘eliminate’ certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic.”

In a statement from X’s Global Government Affairs, the company noted, “Today, a bipartisan panel of judges unanimously ruled in favor of X and against a California law that seeks to regulate speech on social media platforms. This is not just a victory for our platform, but also for free speech nationwide. Whether in the United States or around the world, X will always fight for free speech and against government efforts to restrict people’s right to express themselves.”