Nilay Patel
Elon and Trump crashed X immediately.
Nilay Patel
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Editor-in-Chief
More From Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
RFK Jr. loses lawsuit against Meta for moderating vaccine information.
Notable measles enthusiast RFK Jr. spent a bunch of money on lawyers to learn that the First Amendment prohibits government speech regulations, not content moderation guidelines imposed by private companies like Meta, even if it talks to the government about them. The case was initially dismissed by the trial court, a ruling now affirmed on appeal:
Circuit Judge Eric Miller, appointed to the court by Republican former President Donald Trump, wrote for the appeals court that Meta was a “purely private” company with a First Amendment right not to use its platform to promote views it found distasteful.
“Meta evidently believes that vaccines are safe and effective and that their use should be encouraged,” Miller wrote. “It does not lose the right to promote those views simply because they happen to be shared by the government.”
Don’t worry, though: our nation’s brainworms candidate filed another lawsuit against Meta earlier this year for “election interference.”
The head of chatbot maker Replika discusses the role AI will play in the future of human relationships.
Nilay Patel
AAG Jonathan Kanter says the Google monopoly verdict belongs on the ‘Mount Rushmore of antitrust.’
Nilay Patel
Finally, a legal ruling on whether TikTok is a real search engine. (It’s not.)
Nilay Patel and Sarah Jeong
Nilay Patel
What is a photo, Olympics photo-finish edition.
At this point maybe we should be asking if anything is a photo.
Nilay Patel and Richard Lawler
The head of online hotel and flight giant Booking Holdings on how competition, regulation, and AI are changing travel.
Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
The Supreme Court came pretty close to making it impossible to moderate platforms.
CNN has a rare inside look at the Supreme Court deliberations that led to the (bad!) Texas and Florida social media regulations being put on hold and sent back to the lower courts to figure out how they would affect other kinds of websites and services. It almost went the other way, until Samuel Alito went too far in his first draft and Amy Coney Barrett flipped, eventually joining the 6-3 majority opinion.
[Alito] questioned whether any of the platforms’ content-moderation could be considered “expressive” activity under the First Amendment.
Barrett, a crucial vote as the case played out, believed some choices regarding content indeed reflected editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment. She became persuaded by Kagan, but she also wanted to draw lines between the varying types of algorithms platforms use.
The ruling is already having an impact on other moderation cases.