A new bill, dubbed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” passed its first hurdle in California’s legislature last Tuesday.
The bill’s movement comes after a 24-year-old independent journalist, Nick Shirley, published a 40-minute video, on hospice fraud in the state.
His video wracked up 42 million views on X and has brought public scrutiny to California’s federally funded Medicare programs. Other investigations have found that a single program is causing the state to hemorrhage $6 billion in fraud annually.
The act, sponsored by Assembly Member Mia Bonta, the wife of California’s attorney general, would outlaw the sharing of photos or personal data of “immigrant service” providers on the internet in the state, if it was done as harassment.
Specifically, it builds off of the state’s existing “Safe At Home Program,” which is supposed to help domestic violence survivors, and adds the following:
- Shields public home and work addresses from public records.
- Prohibits any individual or entity from posting, displaying, selling or distributing the personal information or images of program participants online when done with the intent to threaten, intimidate or incite violence.
Last Tuesday, Bonta defended the bill to her committee.
“This program allows participants to keep their home and work addresses out of public records, giving them a critical layer of protection and privacy in an environment where their personal safety is increasingly at risk,” she said.
More protections are necessary, since “individuals who provide immigrant support services ... are facing targeted harassment,” she said. “This is not hypothetical. Advocates and workers are receiving death threats, being targeted at court houses and facing coordinated online doxxing campaigns.”
Bonta claimed that current California state law does not provide adequate protections for sensitive data, “leaving immigrants, advocates and service providers vulnerable.”
If passed, the bill would allow fines of “up to a maximum of three times the actual damages, but in no case less than four thousand dollars.”
Critics: The bill could stifle investigative journalism
Shirley responded to the bill on Monday.
“California is trying to pass a bill that would criminalize investigative journalism with misdemeanors, $10,000 fines, imprisonment, and content takedown,” he wrote. “The proposed bill is titled AB 2624 and was made after I exposed mass fraud by immigrant groups in America. Under AB 2624, government-funded entities like the Somali “Learing” daycare centers would be protected from being exposed if they operated inside California."
In last Tuesday’s hearing, Republican Assembly Member Carl DeMaio expressed concern that the bill would dampen efforts to address fraud in the state.
“You do not provide an exemption for journalists,” he told Bonta. “You also do not distinguish between whether posting video, like (Republican Assembly Member Alexandra) Macedo, in her investigation, posted a video of, what, 90 fake hospices, and Mr. Shirley had dozens or, you know, fifty, sixty fake ‘learning’ centers for the Somali community in Minnesota. Posting the video apparently would be punishable under your law. Are you aware of those provisions?”
DeMaio continued, “This is not about protecting people from violence. This is about threatening and intimidating people who are trying to shine a light on bad behavior. If you have nothing to hide, why fear the transparency?”
The bill is still working its way through the legislative process, next heading to the assembly’s Judiciary Committee for consideration.