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...
Iran’s parliament has suspended its review of a highly controversial bill that a minister, citizens and businesses say will only lead to more internet restrictions in the country. The bill, first proposed three years ago, is titled “Protecting Users in Cyberspace and Organising Social Media” but...
Six months ago, as the pandemic raged, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris became President and Vice President of the United States. On inauguration day, we launched the U.S. Digital Rights in the Biden Era tracker to hold the administration and Congress accountable for defending human rights on tech policy...
Former President Donald Trump has filed proposed class action lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and Google subsidiary YouTube as well as CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai. The lawsuits come six months after Trump was permanently or temporarily suspended from all three platforms...
One of the more perplexing provisions of the draft Online Safety Bill is its multi-level definition of legal but harmful content (lawful but awful content, to give it its colloquial name).
The proposal that service providers’ safety duties under the Bill should apply to such content is in itself...
Special Rapporteurs from the United Nations have written to India noting that the government’s new IT Rules go against international human rights norms in their current form. India’s response contends that such concerns are “misplaced” and that the country’s democratic structure remains unaffected...
Twitter disclosed on Monday that it blocked four accounts in India to comply with a new legal request from the Indian government.
The American social network disclosed on Lumen Database, a Harvard University project, that it took action on four accounts — including those of hip-hop artist L-Fresh...
Canada wants to force YouTube, TikTok and other video- and audio-sharing sites to prominently feature more of the country’s artists, a move that digital-law experts and former government officials call one of the most aggressive internet regulations yet from a Western country. Read more.
Two years on from the April 2019 Online Harms White Paper, the government has published its draft Online Safety Bill. It is a hefty beast: 133 pages and 141 sections. It raises a slew of questions, not least around press and journalistic material and the newly-coined “content of democratic...
Twitter has removed more than 50 tweets critical of the Indian government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and did so at the request of the Indian government. First reported by Indian news site MediaNama, the Indian government sent Twitter an emergency order on Friday to censor 52 tweets...
Court authorizes Cyber Unit to continue operating in the shadows, conducting quasi-judicial censorship without allowing social media users to defend their rights or even to know that the state has been involved in removing their online content. Read more.