Several states run by Democrats are pushing for stiffer rules on the spread of false information, while Republican-run states are pushing for fewer rules.
To fight disinformation, California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would force social media companies to divulge their process for removing false, hateful or extremist material from their platforms. Texas lawmakers, by contrast, want to ban the largest of the companies — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — from removing posts because of political points of view.
In Washington, the state attorney general persuaded a court to fine a nonprofit and its lawyer $28,000 for filing a baseless legal challenge to the 2020 governor’s race. In Alabama, lawmakers want to allow people to seek financial damages from social media platforms that shut down their accounts for having posted false content.
In the absence of significant action on disinformation at the federal level, officials in state after state are taking aim at the sources of disinformation and the platforms that propagate them — only they are doing so from starkly divergent ideological positions. In this deeply polarized era, even the fight for truth breaks along partisan lines.
The result has been a cacophony of state bills and legal maneuvers that could reinforce information bubbles in a nation increasingly divided over a variety of issues — including abortion, guns, the environment — and along geographic lines.
The midterm elections in November are driving much of the...
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