On May 11, 2022, the Fifth Circuit reinstated Texas state law HB 20 which allows private parties to sue tech platforms with 50M+ MAUs for their censorship of user-generated content based on “the viewpoint of a user or another person”. On May 13, technology lobbying groups NetChoice and the Computer...
The European Union has announced a package of measures intended to step up efforts and pressure on tech giants to combat democracy-denting disinformation ahead of the EU parliament elections next May. From TechCrunch.
The UK government has spent almost £100,000 of taxpayers’ money in the last week buying Facebook adverts in a bid to convince the public to support Theresa May’s Brexit deal – only for the key vote to be delayed. From The Guardian.
The revision of EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), adopted earlier this month after a legislative journey of more than two years, introduces (among other things) a completely new element to media regulation – the regulatory framework for video-sharing platforms (VSPs). From Inforrm's...
Facebook just quietly adopted a policy that could push thousands of innocent people off of the platform. The new “sexual solicitation” rules forbid pornography and other explicit sexual content (which was already functionally banned under a different statute), but they don’t stop there: they also...
There’s a reason why, when courts function properly, they offer more due process than corporations when it comes to making decisions about free expression. Deciding what speech can take place in public forums in democratic societies is not an easy task. From Witness.
The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. From The New York Times.
As you may have heard by now, on Monday, Tumblr announced that in just a couple weeks it will be banning porn from its platform as part of a change to its rules. Now, of course, Tumblr has every right to run its platform however it sees fit, but it does seem notable that it wasn't all that long ago...
IN AN UNPRECEDENTED move Wednesday, British lawmakers published hundreds of pages of internal Facebook emails and other documents that previously had been ordered sealed as part of an ongoing legal case between Facebook and a now-defunct app developer called Six4Three. From Wired.
This is another 1-800 LAW FIRM lawsuit against social media providers for allegedly materially supporting terrorists. Like the others, it fails. In light of the Ninth Circuit’s Fields opinion, dismissing a similar suit on proximate cause grounds, this opinion doesn’t break any new ground. From Techn...