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...
A bill before the Texas Senate seeks to prevent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from censoring users based on their viewpoints. Supporters say it would protect the free exchange of ideas, but critics say the bill contradicts a federal law that allows social media platforms to...
As you know, the future of Section 230 looks bleak. This paper addresses the potentially non-hypothetical question of what happens when Section 230 gets carved back–or up. In theory, the First Amendment–the global bellwether protection for free speech–should partially or substantially backfill any...
On 1 April, the government of Singapore introduced the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill. Often referred to as the Singaporean anti-fake news law, it is expected to be enacted with a few changes in the coming weeks or months. From Verfassungsblog.
Last Monday, having spent the best part of a day reading the UK government's Online Harms White Paper, I concluded that if the road to hell was paved with good intentions, this was a motorway.
Nearly two weeks on, after full and further consideration, I have found nothing to alter that view. This...
In the immediate aftermath of the horrific attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, internet companies faced intense scrutiny over their efforts to control the proliferation of the shooter's propaganda. From Wired.
On Monday, the European Union’s member states approved a package of controversial reforms to the bloc’s copyright laws, known as the Copyright Directive, that the European Parliament passed last month. It came just after Australia implemented a new law to police certain content on social media...
Now that the EU's awful Copyright Directive has been passed, it would be easy to give up, and assume that nothing more can be done. That's far from the case. Under EU law, this directive must now be implemented through national legislation in all of the EU Member States. From TechDirt.
Nearly a decade after pro-democracy protests first roiled Tahrir square, political activists in Egypt face a severe new threat to their freedom of speech: a new law governing the use of social media. From Coda.
Facebook recently said in a statement that the company had spent more than 18 months assessing “risk” across its platforms to help ensure that the Lok Sabha election was free from interference, both foreign and domestic. From The Hindu.
The UK government has just outlined its plans for sweeping new laws aimed at tackling illegal and harmful content and activity online, described by the government as ‘the toughest internet laws in the world’. While the UK proposal has some promising ideas for what the next generation of content...