On April 20, 2026, Mexico's Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) drew a line that every legislature writing online hate-speech rules should study. By a 5–3 vote in Acción de Inconstitucionalidad 152/2024, the Court upheld Sinaloa's power to criminally punish those who provoke or incite hatred, violence, or discrimination against the LGBT+ community — but struck down the adjacent clause penalizing anyone who would apoye a difundir, "support the dissemination of," such messages. The distinction is not a technicality. It is the difference between a law that targets conduct and one that targets the act of carrying a message.
The strongest case for the law
Start with what Sinaloa got right, because the impulse is legitimate. The state's reform, approved by its Congress on January 25, 2024 and codified in Article 189 of the state Penal Code, responds to a real harm. Mexico records some of the world's highest rates of anti-trans and anti-LGBT+ violence, and dehumanizing rhetoric is a documented precursor to physical attacks. Justice Arístides Guerrero García, who authored the ruling, put it bluntly: hate speech "no se queda en las palabras" — it does not stay in words. A narrowly drawn incitement offense, requiring proof that a speaker pushed others toward concrete acts of hatred, is a defensible and proportionate tool. The Court agreed, and it was right to.
Why the 'dissemination' clause had to fall
The problem was the verb the Court excised. "Provoke" and "incite" describe an actor who originates and drives harm. "Support the dissemination of" describes something else entirely: the act of passing a message along. Read literally, it reaches the journalist who quotes a slur to report on a hate crime, the academic who reproduces extremist rhetoric to analyze it, the user who screenshots an abusive post to condemn it — and, critically, the online platform whose servers host and algorithmically surface all three.
The SCJN found this clause failed the principle of taxatividad — the constitutional requirement that criminal conduct be defined clearly and precisely. As Justice Yasmín Esquivel Mossa, who backed the result, explained, the language was "demasiado amplia y ambigua" and carried "un efecto inhibidor en la libertad de expresión, sobre todo de las personas dedicadas al periodismo." In other words: a chilling effect aimed squarely at the press. Court President Hugo Aguilar Ortiz, who dissented on broader grounds, warned that under such elastic wording "cualquier expresión o acción podría ser considerada como provocativa o incitadora."
This is the precise failure mode that intermediary-liability scholarship has flagged for two decades. When the law punishes carrying a message rather than creating harm, the rational response of any host — a newspaper, a social network, a messaging app — is to over-remove. The cost of a wrongful takedown is zero; the cost of a missed prosecution is prison. Sinaloa attached penalties of one to three years' imprisonment and fines to Article 189. A "dissemination" offense with that exposure would have made the safest legal strategy for any platform operating in Sinaloa the suppression of LGBT+ reporting altogether — the opposite of what the law intended.
A pattern, not an accident
What makes this ruling instructive is that it is the third time the SCJN has had to narrow imprecise reforms to Sinaloa's Penal Code, a track record documented by Ríodoce. The state keeps legislating speech and conduct in language broad enough to feel comprehensive and loose enough to be unconstitutional. Each time, the Court does the editing the legislature should have done.
Digital-rights groups have warned about exactly this. R3D, Mexico's leading digital-rights organization, argued years ago that ambiguously worded hate-speech bills risk an "efecto de inhibición y disuasión" and noted that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights counsels states against criminalizing expression where civil or administrative remedies would do. The steelman for criminalization survives this critique only when the offense is tightly bounded to incitement — which is exactly the half the Court kept.
The lesson for platform regulation
The ruling lands as governments worldwide write rules holding platforms responsible for the speech they host. The SCJN's surgical edit is a model for proportionate regulation: punish the originator of incitement, not the conduit that transmits it. A regime that criminalizes "supporting dissemination" collapses the distinction between a person who attacks a minority and the systems — and people — that report on, study, or moderate that attack.
Mexico's Court did not strike a blow against fighting hate. It made the fight legible. By preserving the incitement offense and excising the dissemination clause, it kept the part that protects people and removed the part that would have conscripted journalists and platforms into self-censorship. Legislatures drafting online-harms statutes should copy the line the SCJN drew — before a court has to draw it for them.