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...
In April 2018, House Republicans held a hearing on the “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms” that focused on misguided claims that Internet platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook actively discriminate against conservative political viewpoints. Now, a year later, Senator Ted Cruz is...
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has proposed an independent watchdog that will write a "code of practice" for tech companies.
Senior managers could be held liable for breaches, with a possible levy on the industry to fund the regulator. From BBC News.
On Monday, the U.K. Government published proposals for "tough new measures to ensure the U.K. is the safest place in the world to be online," claiming these to be the world's "first online safety laws." An independent regulator will be put in place with the "powers to take effective enforcement...
Mark Zuckerberg has a vision that he’d like Congress to share.
Lawmakers seem to agree that there are too few tech companies with too much power, and that Big Tech needs to be regulated. From The New York Times.
Australia has adopted a law that would penalize platforms and their executives for a failure to control what it calls “abhorrent violent material.” The law is deeply problematic, as was the extraordinarily compressed timeframe for its adoption (basically two days). The Special Rapporteur on Counter...
In September 2018, under French and German influence, the European Commission put forward a proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online. From La Quadrature.
EU Commissioner Gunther Oettinger -- well known for being a bit of a bigoted Luddite -- basically crafted the plan that became the EU Copyright Directive when he was the Commissioner for the "Digital Economy" (despite not knowing anything about it). As you may recall, for many months now, supporters...
U.S. lawmakers and privacy advocates have spent the last year hammering Facebook Inc. to change its behavior, prompting billionaire Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to reveal his vision for government oversight of the internet. From Bloomberg.
It is perhaps understandable that European lawmakers have large Internet companies in their sights. The Cambridge Analytica scandal and subsequent data breaches at Facebook led to admonishments and fines. From Media Policy Project Blog.