On today’s internet, the boundaries of acceptable speech are set by a few massive platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and a handful of others. If those companies find something unacceptable, it can’t travel far — a restriction that’s had a massive impact for everyone from copyright violators to sex workers. At the same time, vile content that doesn’t violate platform rules can find shockingly broad audiences, leading to a chilling rise in white nationalism and violent misogyny online. After years of outcry, platforms have grown more willing to ban the worst actors online, but each ban comes with a new political fight, and companies are slow to respond in the best of circumstances. As gleeful disinformation figures like Alex Jones gain power — and the sheer scale of these platforms begins to overwhelm moderation efforts — the problems have only gotten uglier and harder to ignore. At the same time, the hard questions of moderation are only getting harder.
It’s one of numerous bills being taken up by the House Energy & Commerce Committee starting at 10AM ET — a well-intentioned proposal that, as I wrote last month and discussed on Decoder, is a dead end for fighting nonconsensual sexual imagery and a threat to free speech. Fight for the Future is currently running a petition against it and has a tool for finding your representative (if you live in the US) too.
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest reveals the Kafkaesque nightmare that awaits those arrested by ICE.
Texas state representative Stan Gerdes bought into some years-old viral disinformation with the new Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying In Education or FURRIES Act, which — among numerous other bans on things that could give children “a belief that non-human behaviors are societally acceptable” — would penalize Texas kids for making animal noises or wearing cat ear headbands in school, notes Chron’s Gwen Howerton. And no, I don’t know what the ‘S’ stands for, either.
[capitol.texas.gov]
The law’s 26 words were written to address the same challenges we face today.
Associate editor and columnist Ruth Marcus has left the Post after it refused to publish a column “respectfully dissenting” from owner Jeff Bezos’ new limits on opinion coverage, reports The New York Times’ Ben Mullin and Semafor’s Max Tani. Marcus writes that the new policy “threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable.” It’s also reportedly lost the Post at least 75,000 subscribers.
The new State Department program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of students who are in the US on visas, Axios reports. State Department sources tell Axios that officials plan on combing through internal databases to see if any international students were arrested in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023 — and that the department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”
Rubio, the new Secretary of State, has been calling for the revocation of student visas for pro-Palestine protesters since October 2023.
Our corrupt administration has no reason to make Big Tech obey an anti-deepfakes law.
Earlier this week, the White House tried to pressure the Associated Press into referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in its coverage; the AP said the move “plainly violates the First Amendment,” noting that Donald Trump doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally rename the body of water.
Nieman Lab asked major newsrooms what language they’d use. Most are sticking with Gulf of Mexico, unlike tech companies.
Lawyers representing President Trump, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and what is now X moved to dismiss Trump’s pending case before the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, reports Bloomberg.
He was appealing the dismissal of a lawsuit that accused Twitter, which is now owned by DOGE head Elon Musk, of violating the First Amendment when it banned his account in 2021.
President Donald Trump now claims that because of the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, “significant viewership was improperly diverted to Defendants’ media platforms, resulting in lower consumer engagement, advertising revenues, and profits by TMTG and President Trump’s other media holdings.” reports Deadline.
The amended suit also doubles its damages claim to $20 billion. CBS parent company Paramount Global has reportedly been considering settling, rather than fighting, the lawsuit.
It got the facts right but the story wrong.
Last fall, Megan Garcia sued Character.AI, its founders, and Google over the death by suicide of her 14-year-old son, who had chatted continuously with its bots, including just before his death. In December, the firm added safety measures aimed at teens and concerns over addiction.
TechCrunch reports that Character.ai has filed a motion to dismiss the case, which you can read in full here.
He’s reinstated three complaints against broadcasters that former chair Jessica Rosenworcel dismissed as attempts to influence news coverage:
Rosenworcel said the commission was rejecting complaints that “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment”. Then, on Wednesday, the FCC said in a series of orders the complaints had been dismissed “prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record”.
A fourth complaint, against a Fox station, has not been reinstated.
The “Repeal the TikTok Ban Act,” introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), would undo the forced divestiture law. Unlike President Donald Trump’s executive order or his proposal for the US to own 50 percent of the app, this would be the most legally-sound way to overturn the ban — but it’s still likely a long shot to pass.
Nothing says protecting the First Amendment like Elon Musk’s congressional DOGE liaison threatening reporters for describing a physical gesture. Musk has previously used a friendly judge in Texas to fight being associated with the far right. But when you’ve got a White House office and a congressional subcommittee to fight your battles, who needs lawsuits?
But President Donald Trump has issued one anyway:
The previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.
