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 idea of an open "global" internet keeps taking a beating -- and the worst offender is not, say, China or Russia, but rather the EU. We've already discussed things like the EU Copyright Directive and the Terrorist Content Regulation, but it seems like every day there's something new and more...
Freedom of expression is a fundamental right “enshrined”, at the international level, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (art 19) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (art 19). Also regional treaties protect this fundamental right as evident in reading the American...
Current policy discourse in the European Union is steadily shifting from intermediary liability to intermediary responsibility. The long-established principle prohibiting general monitoring obligations is currently being challenged by two initiatives in particular, namely the Copyright in the...
Following more than two years of negotiations, the revised EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive was adopted in November 2018, aiming to better reflect the digital age and create a more level playing field between traditional television and newer on-demand and video-sharing services. Here, Lubos...
After Facebook’s and other social media companies’ recent moves to ban Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and other extremists some pundits are calling for the end of the safe harbor that allows the companies to moderate content, while others are calling for more active regulation of big...
The rush to bring law and order to online spaces is well and truly on. Two important documents on the topic of online speech regulation have come out of Paris in the past week alone. From Lawfare Blog.
Yesterday, there was a big process, called the Christchurch Call, in which a bunch of governments and big social media companies basically agreed to take a more proactive role in dealing with terrorist and violent extremist content online. From TechDirt.
Following years of hot debates on whether to accentuate Personality Right as an independent provision in the Civil Code, China’s legislative body is now giving the draft a second reading in light of the controversies around human genome research, artificial intelligence technology, and exploitation...