Not that I am a particular fan of Twitter, and I think forcing some transparency per how you moderate content is quite a good idea - but doing that at a state level is annoying. Every nation already has its own rules and laws, which quite makes sense for physical goods, but is much harder to track for software. The US should at least have one unified rule when it comes to these topics. I understand it's not really the way legislation is usually determined, but look at GDPR: even Europe (which is not a country) managed to do it in a centralized way.
This is actually one of Twitter legal arguments against this law: section 230 explicitly gives companies ability to moderate user submitted content as they please.
By putting additional restrictions on moderation activities (the requirement to report to government how they are moderating) this state law contradicts the federal law and the way things work, federal law wins.
We will have to wait to see if the judge / juries agree with this argument, but that's one of the reasons Twitter believes this law should be eliminated.
This is legally nonsensical - nothing about Section 230 precludes any further restriction on moderation by another entity. Section 230 is and has always been about the act of moderation not specifically creating liability for the carrier of user-generated content - nothing about Section 230 grants the publisher any specific right not to be subject to further moderation at another level.
The first amendment angle is a stronger argument, but unfortunately for X, it's also extremely weak and would require overriding decades of precedence and essentially create a crisis - there are far more onerous regulations in place that are still relied upon in a way that having them constitutionally challenged would be extremely damaging.
I think this is a good take - the legal theories mentioned in this thread (1st amendment, Section 230) seem mostly baseless, but this doesn't seem like appropriate legislation at the state-level either way. I don't know enough about the commerce clause restrictions on state regulations, but I do wonder if that comes into play given that moderation policies will almost always have interstate and international commerce implications.
