The 1776 Foundation, together with the Montana First Amendment Society and Montana Public Policy Center, filed an amicus curiae brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in The Babylon Bee, LLC v. Rob Bonta, urging the court to affirm a lower court decision permanently blocking California Assembly Bill 2655 — a law that would have required major online platforms to remove or label AI-generated political content during the months surrounding an election.
The name of the plaintiff says something important about what is actually at stake here. The Babylon Bee is a satirical publication. It makes its living doing to politicians today what pamphleteers, cartoonists, and broadside writers did to politicians in the founding era: mocking them, exaggerating their words, and holding them up to ridicule. AB 2655 is precisely the kind of law that would have been used against publications like the Babylon Bee — and the Founders would have recognized it immediately for what it is.
READ THE BRIEF