Shades of Bill C-11: Illinois Passes Social Media Tax

Canada isn’t the only one trying to tax social media. Illinois is trying their own hand at this as well… to protect the children of course.

When the Canadian government passed the unconstitutional mess that was Bill C-11 (now the Online Streaming Act), the fallout was about as obvious as it could possibly get. The US government challenged it as a trade irritant and has been subject to at least 6 lawsuits.

For one, the law requires manipulation of the algorithms so that traditional media outlets benefit the most out of recommendations while suppressing everyone else (including Canadian content not expressly blessed by the government). For another, the law is discriminatory in nature, targeting the likes of Google, Netflix, and other American businesses. All of this in a cynical plot to reimburse media organizations who have been effectively run into the ground by idiotic management. Too big to fail, indeed.

With the social media moral panic now in full swing thanks to technophobic media outlets trying to appease people boomer age or older (as well as pumping out biased news that serves their own financial interests as opposed to the public), “protecting the children” has become a universal (and terrible) excuse for all manners of bad public policy that does more harm than good. For example, age verification laws that put everyone at greater risk thanks to the overwhelming amounts of bad surveillance policies. Don’t worry, it’s to protect the children, so that makes it all better (no it does not you dingbats).

While science has long ago debunked the myth that social media is inherently harmful, the mainstream media continues to keep repeating these baseless claims over and over again with the hope that people will believe that their ridiculous lies would be believed broadly. This has also given space to the “blame the internet” movement where all of societal ills can just be blamed on the internet so that no additional action is needed by government to actually solve very real problems in society.

There’s lots of stupidity to go around and it’s partly how we got to this point where governments have apparently been starting to pass straight up social media taxes. Illinois is one such example where their social media tax is being compared to the Stamp Act. From TechDirt:

In the US we don’t look too kindly on such things. In Minneapolis Star vs. Commissioner, the Supreme Court made it clear that Minnesota’s attempt to put a stamp tax on newspapers was similarly unconstitutional, as a tax on the media that was specifically targeted at their activities of publishing First Amendment protected speech. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor made clear, singling out media for a tax was a tax on their speech and thus prohibited under the First Amendment:

When the State singles out the press, though, the political constraints that prevent a legislature from passing crippling taxes of general applicability are weakened, and the threat of burdensome taxes becomes acute. That threat can operate as effectively as a censor to check critical comment by the press, undercutting the basic assumption of our political system that the press will often serve as an important restraint on government.

Apparently the Illinois legislature and Governor JB Pritzker are either unaware of how the First Amendment works, or they just don’t care. Because they just passed a straight up tax on social media based on how many Illinois residents are using the service.

Almost everyone who looks at this is pointing out that it’s obviously, blatantly, unconstitutional. And Pritzker himself admitting that he’s targeting social media companies for this tax to punish them for supposed (but still unproven) harms caused to kids makes it even worse

Interestingly enough, even the mainstream media in the US is questioning the validity of this. Apparently, this legislation would also require, you guessed it, mass surveillance to track who is and is not a resident of Illinois:

The law is beyond vague.

And that’s before we even get to the part where this law effectively requires platforms to track and surveil their users’ locations just to figure out who counts as an ‘Illinois resident.’

Pritzker and friends can celebrate the budget math all they want. The First Amendment doesn’t care about Illinois’s fiscal problems, and neither will the courts. The colonists who revolted over the original Stamp Act at least had to wait years for the courts to vindicate them. Pritzker has helpfully accelerated the timeline by going on the record explaining that the whole point of this tax is to punish tech companies for their editorial choices. Illinois is going to spend real money defending a law that its own governor torpedoed in a tweet.

Taxing social media platforms in Canada didn’t go over very well with the US government thanks to all of the threats that ensued. Now that a state in the US is trying to pull a similar stunt while wrapping this whole stupid thing up in proclamations of “protect the children”, the effort is just as legally dubious in the US as well. It’s very obviously a tax grab and it’s even more blatant than the Online Streaming Act (at least it technically isn’t the government directly benefiting from it financially unlike this sorry excuse of a bill). In this case, lawmakers are barely even hiding their actual intentions.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.