Nick Shirley, California Republicans to challenge ‘censorship’ law

Nick Shirley makes videos that embarrass people. That's basically his whole job, walking up to strangers with a camera and letting them talk themselves into a bad clip. You can think that's obnoxious or you can think it's the last honest form of journalism left, but either way California just passed a law aimed at making it harder to do, and that should bother you regardless of what you think of Shirley personally.

The pattern here is familiar. A state legislature doesn't like a category of speech, so instead of banning it outright, which would obviously violate the First Amendment, they dress it up as a privacy protection or a harassment measure. This one gets called a "censorship" law by critics for a reason: the practical effect is that people filming interactions in public, especially the kind that catch officials or activists saying something they'd rather not have on record, now have a legal cloud hanging over them. That's the whole point. It's not about protecting grandma from a stalker. It's about making the guy with the phone think twice before he hits record.

California Republicans joining Shirley to challenge this isn't some culture-war stunt. Recording public interactions and publishing them is speech, full stop, and "you made someone look bad" has never been a valid reason to suppress it. If the law can survive a real court challenge on those terms, fine, let it. But dressing up a chilling effect as a shield against "bad behavior" when the actual bad behavior being exposed is the target's own doesn't pass the smell test.

We'd say the same thing if some right-wing lawmaker tried this trick against a liberal citizen journalist. The camera doesn't care who's holding it, and neither should the law.