The lawmakers will remain active on other platforms, according to the state Assembly Speaker.
California state Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and 57 Assembly members, all Democrats, said on March 27 that they have stopped all communications from official state accounts on social media platform X.
Rivas’s office called it “one of the single largest departures of elected representatives from X.”
The members
said they have concerns about false information on the site and accused the platform of having lackluster content moderation policies that result in alleged proliferation of hate speech, racist content, and fake or inauthentic accounts.
“There are real risks with relying on a private company, owned by Elon Musk, as a channel for communications,” Rivas, from Salinas, California, said in a statement. “Democracy depends on impartial information. ... I don’t think taxpayer resources should go to X.”
Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, from Winters, said she encountered false information on X related to local disasters.
“There is rampant misinformation, and this clearly causes harm and endangers our friends and neighbors during emergencies,” Aguiar-Curry said in a statement. “It is irresponsible to continue to encourage our constituents to seek reliable public safety info on X.”
The speaker’s office said he and the other Assembly members will remain active on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, BlueSky, YouTube, Threads, and other platforms.
Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, from San Francisco, also said he was “shifting focus away from X” at the end of February, pointing his followers to his Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and Bluesky accounts.
State Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson from San Diego left X on Christmas Day last year.
X’s policy on hateful conduct says the platform does not allow hate speech.
“You may not directly attack other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” reads the social media website’s policy. “We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, particularly abuse that seeks to silence the voices of those who have been historically marginalized,” reads the website. “For this reason, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals or groups with abuse based on their perceived membership in a protected category.”
X says it also has policies to safeguard the platform from bad actors peddling misleading information, employing a community-driven effort called Community Notes.
“Community Notes was created to deliver context and information in a way that people would trust and feel to be fair — we pursued it when we saw in research how positively people from different viewpoints respond to it.”
In recent weeks, X
removed thousands of accounts that showed inauthentic activity, according to an emailed statement to The Epoch Times from Dave Heinzinger, X’s head of media strategy.
The group of Assembly members leaving X also cited data showing that X lags behind other major platforms in terms of usage.
The Digital 2025: Global Overview
Report by digital trends firm Kepios found that X is the ninth most used social media platform globally for those 18 and over. Another 2025 report
found that X has 104 million users in the United States, fewer than YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Nonetheless, use of X as a resource for news and information has remained steady.
According to a survey by
PEW Research Center, most X users say that reading the news is either a major or minor reason they use the platform. Approximately half say they regularly obtain news from X.
The platform also won an appeal in September 2024, partially blocking a California law requiring social media platforms to publish their policies for combating disinformation, harassment, hate speech, and extremism. A three-judge panel on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a lower court judge’s decision to continue enforcement of the California law, which X argued violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Reuters contributed to this report.
