State Senate: Democratic majority
State House: Democratic majority
Governor: Phil Scott (R)
Attorney General: Charity Clark (D)
Summary:
Long known as a bastion of New England liberals, the Green Mountain state recently passed a law to protect employee free speech rights. The legislature has also considered bills regulating social media and limiting the use of generative-AI.
Key Policymakers:
Legislative Activity:
S 102 (Became law): This bill proposes to establish a good cause standard for termination of employment, require employers to provide severance pay to terminated employees, and permit employees or representative organizations to bring an enforcement action on behalf of the State for violations of the good cause termination requirement. It would prohibit employers from taking adverse employment actions against an employee in relation to the employee’s exercise of free speech rights. Introduced by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale [D] in Feb. 2023, passed the Senate with all Democrats supporting and all Republicans against in March 2023, the House on a large bipartisan basis in May 2024, and became law without the Governor’s signature on May 28, 2024.
HB 797: This bill proposes to enhance the authority of the Attorney General to regulate social media platforms for the purpose of protecting the health and safety of child users. Declares that it shall be an unfair or deceptive act or practice in commerce for a social media company to use any design feature on a social media platform that the company knew, or by the exercise of reasonable care should have known, is harmful. The Attorney General may adopt by rule specific design features that constitute unfair or deceptive conduct under this section, including with respect to algorithmic recommendation systems, infinite scrolling, status metrics, push notifications, ephemeral content, and autoplay features. Democrat-only bill introduced by Rep. Angela Arsenault [D] in Jan. 2024 but has not progressed.
HB 710: This bill proposes to regulate developers and deployers of “high-risk” artificial intelligence systems and developers of generative artificial intelligence systems. Democrat-only bill introduced by Rep. Monique Priestley [D] in Jan. 2024 but has not progressed.
HB 863: This bill proposes to require the Agency of Digital Services, in coordination with the Division of Artificial Intelligence, to produce a report to the General Assembly on or before October 1, 2024 that includes recommendations on (1) educating the public on the possible harms of deepfake technology; (2) providing security resources to protect the public from abuse of deepfake technology; (3) mitigating potential risk to the functioning of State government caused by deepfake technology; (4) the need for State regulation of deepfake technology; and (5) the current and projected impact on the State from President Biden’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence issued on October 30, 2023. Democrat-only bill introduced by Rep. Monique Priestley [D] and Rep. Brian Cina [D] in Jan. 2024 but has not progressed.
Legal Actions:
ACLU, FIRE, and AG Clark Court Battle Over Online Harassment Law. A Brattleboro, Vermont, woman filed a federal lawsuit against the state, asserting that its online harassment law violates the First Amendment and hinders free speech. Isabel Vinson was cited for disturbing the peace after she criticized a local business owner on Facebook. In July 2020, a Brattleboro police officer cited Vinson for allegedly violating Vermont’s Disturbing the Peace by Telephone or Other Electronic Communication law, which prohibits using electronic communications to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, or annoy others. A violation can result in a fine of $250 and a jail sentence of up to 180 days. Vinson was cited after she criticized a local business owner’s “derogatory Facebook posts about the Black Lives Matter movement.” According to court documents, after Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd in May 2020, a Brattleboro business owner wrote “How about all lives matter,” on his personal Facebook page, adding, “Put your race card away and grow up.”
Vinson allegedly reposted the statements she considered racist, publicly criticized them, and tagged the business on her profile and in a group whose goal was to inform the public of individuals or organizations they deemed racist. Several weeks later, the business owner and his wife reported to the Brattleboro police that they were being harassed on Facebook. The motion filed by the ACLU states that the officer who issued the citation said, “I can’t determine if they are in fear or not; [or] if they’re saying it just to say it.” The officer then asked Vinson to delete her posts in the Facebook group and warned her to be careful of what she decides to say online. But upon reviewing the citation, the officer’s supervisor reported that the probable cause for the charge was “very thin,” and the citation was rescinded.
In January 2022, the ACLU of Vermont filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Vinson, arguing that the state law violates the First and 14th Amendments. “As a result of the citation, Ms. Vinson’s political speech has been chilled. She has been reluctant to post on Facebook, fearing additional citations, prosecution, and imprisonment,” the complaint states. The ACLU contended that Vinson’s Facebook post represented her response to the business owner’s speech with “speech of her own.”
During the week of Oct. 16, 2023, the ACLU and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) filed a motion for summary judgment, asking the U.S. District Court to issue an injunction preventing the law from being enforced. On Oct. 16, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark filed her own motion for summary judgment in the state’s favor, pointing out that no criminal charges had been brought against Vinson, and that the county did not investigate her further over the incident. The state attorney general’s office argued that over the previous 10 years, the statute had been used in Windham County to address threatening behavior in domestic violence cases, and that its purpose was to target conduct, not protected speech, and to prosecute people who “terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass or annoy” others. Clark’s office wrote that there was no valid reason to enjoin the statute just because the officer had wrongly applied it, arguing that the officer made an error based on “the subjective perception of the purported victim of a threat from a third party.”
