Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden try to fight censorship with bipartisan JAWBONE Act

A bill summary said that under current legal precedent, plaintiffs must prove that coercion succeeded in causing removal of or changes to content. The bill would let plaintiffs sue and obtain financial damages from “any government agency or employee that jawbones companies involved in social media, AI, or broadcasting, regardless of whether the jawboning succeeds.” The bill specifically authorizes financial damages, because under current law, plaintiffs can only obtain injunctions that prevent future or ongoing violations, the summary said. With financial damages, government officials who engage in unlawful censorship could be held accountable even after leaving office. The bill effectively imposes a limit on financial payouts by allowing compensatory damages but not punitive damages. The bill has a range of supporters, from the American Civil Liberties Union to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. ACLU Senior Policy Counsel Jenna Leventoff said the government has repeatedly “abused its authority to coerce private actors into censoring themselves,” and that the bill “would protect the First Amendment by stopping this kind of unconstitutional jawboning against broadcasters, platforms, and AI providers.” Norquist said that “Twitter and Facebook were pressured by the FBI during the Biden administration to delete posts from the opposition,” and that the bill “will create a real recourse for victims of this indirect censorship and not let bad actors escape just by changing jobs.” Another supporter, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said: If the JAWBONE Act becomes law, Americans will be able to sue federal officials for violating the First Amendment when they coerce social media companies, AI platforms, or broadcasters to change or take down protected speech. If the federal official did the jawboning “willfully and wantonly,” they’ll have to personally pay the damages. (Otherwise, the government will pay on their behalf.) That means federal employees will be personally incentivized to make sure they’re staying on the right side of the First Amendment when they reach out about speech on social media, AI platforms, TV, or radio. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University endorsed the bill as “an important mechanism for accountability when government officials unlawfully coerce private intermediaries to suppress protected speech.” Government officials are free to speak directly to the public, but they must not “use threats or regulatory power to coerce private intermediaries into suppressing protected speech,” the group said. Public Knowledge said the bill could rein in Carr’s campaign against broadcasters and Trump administration attempts to censor social media. “From FCC Chairman Carr using the threat of the agency’s regulatory authority to coerce broadcasters over programming he (and the president) dislikes, to officials punishing social media platforms over their content moderation policies, government actors time and again weaponize their power to pressure platforms, AI providers, and broadcasters to suppress speech they themselves disfavor,” the group said.