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.”
“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.
“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. 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,” the company stated.
The group of Assembly members leaving X also cited data showing that X lags behind other major platforms in terms of usage.
Nonetheless, use of X as a resource for news and information has remained steady.
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.
