Online safety laws keep ordinary people from expressing themselves, while companies like xAI cause real harm.
Nazis’ presence on Substack has only grown. “Sending out Nazi push alerts may not have been the company’s goal,” write Marisa Kabas and Jonathan Katz, the latter of whom sounded the initial alarm in November 2023. “But it is more of a feature than a bug.”
[The Handbasket]
It’s a relatively narrow legal defeat, though. The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruled that X — Twitter, at the time of the lawsuit — isn’t protected by Section 230 for failing to report known child sexual abuse material to authorities, nor for designing a bad system to let users flag it. (It hasn’t been held liable for either; that will be argued later.) But the court found Section 230 blocked claims that it “amplified” CSAM by failing to scrub offending hashtags, and it said the controversial FOSTA exception didn’t come into play.
