This Bill Would Fine Social Media Companies $5 Million Every Day for Not Fighting 'Terrorism'
The STOP HATE Act wants social media platforms to report their moderation policies and outcomes to the government. And it’s not the only censorial measure Rep. Josh Gottheimer wants.
The idea that the federal government even talked to social media platforms about their moderation was a major scandal. After the Twitter Files leak revealed that the Biden administration was privately leaning on one platform to suppress "misinformation," the courts blocked officials from communicating with social media companies for several months on free speech grounds.
A bipartisan bill, however, would make it mandatory for social media companies to work with the federal government. The Stopping Terrorists Online Presence and Holding Accountable Tech Entities (STOP HATE) Act would require companies to provide triennial reports on their moderation policies—and violations they catch—to the U.S. attorney general.
The bill requires companies to issue specific policies for groups the federal government designates as terrorists and the director of national intelligence to also begin reporting on terrorist usage of social media. Companies would be fined $5 million per day that they fail to comply.
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) and Don Bacon (R–Neb.) had first proposed the bill in November 2023. It died in committee at the time. Gottheimer and Bacon announced that they would be reintroducing the bill at a press conference on Wednesday alongside Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
"There is no reason why anyone, especially terrorists or anyone online, should access social media platforms to promote radical, hate-filled violence," Gottheimer said at the press conference. He cited supportive social media comments about the May 2025 murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, and the AI platform Grok's sudden decision to declare itself "MechaHitler" earlier this month.
Meta, the company that runs Facebook and Instagram, is already known to have a list of "dangerous individuals and organizations" banned from the platform. When the list was leaked to The Intercept in 2021, it included around 1,000 entries taken straight from the U.S. government's foreign terrorist list, as well as various foreign and domestic entries sourced to private think tanks.
Hannah Byrne, former head of Meta's Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations team, told The Intercept that her team was "basically an extension of the government" in 2024 after leaving the company.
At the press conference, Bacon made it clear that the STOP HATE Act was meant to push social media companies to act even more like an arm of government censorship.
"People should feel like they're scorned for having these ideas and espousing these ideals. We need to work with our social media companies to clean this up," he said. "It's further influencing other young—more people are being influenced by what they're saying. They're saying that this is acceptable behavior. It is not. We need to hold these companies accountable and work with them to take it off the airwaves."
The specific idea that Bacon had in mind was antisemitism, and he made clear that it includes criticism of the State of Israel in his book. "I saw the protests out here the past few days. They were vile. You could see the antisemitism in their comments, the way they were treating some of our members of Congress who are Jewish," Bacon said.
Protesters stormed the congressional cafeteria on July 1 to call for food aid to Gaza, and interrupted Rep. Randy Fine (R–Fla.)—who has called for Palestinians to "starve away"—during a hearing on campus antisemitism last week.
Greenblatt warned that terrorists were using social media as a "force multiplier" and claimed that the legislation wasn't asking companies "to change their business," only to "knock off the Nazis." He said that the STOP HATE Act is a "bipartisan" measure backed by "patriots."
Civil libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald had quite a different take. "There was [a] full consensus on the Right for the last decade that Big Tech censorship was a great evil, especially if pressured and demanded by the US Government," he wrote on social media in response to the STOP HATE Act. "All that changed with it came time to censor for Israel."
When Gottheimer and Bacon first proposed the bill in 2023, they indeed cited the recent Hamas attacks on Israel. Along with the proposed legislation, their press release called on the government to register social media platform TikTok and news channel Al Jazeera as foreign agents. "When our students and young people are openly supporting Hamas, we have to look to the source of the propaganda," Bacon said in the 2023 press release.
Meanwhile, within New Jersey politics, Gottheimer pushed for the U.S. Department of Education to investigate pro-Palestinian high school protests under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act last year. He is currently lobbying the state Legislature to pass an official definition of antisemitism, which ran into heavy opposition from Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, who is Jewish.
But Gottheimer's censorial tendencies extend beyond Middle Eastern issues. The congressman has a reputation for being awkward and afraid of the public. At a 2017 town hall, Gottheimer reportedly demanded that journalists be banned from the room, then had a public meltdown when he found out that an elderly man was taking notes for a local newsletter.
And he was an early supporter of the push to ban TikTok. Back then, his rationale had little to do with Israel, antisemitism, or terrorism.
"Increased social media use among kids has been linked to development of eating disorders, depression, and other mental health challenges," Gottheimer said in a March 2023 speech. "Our children are worse off because of these apps' addictive qualities."
