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.
First was X, then came Meta, now TikTok has put out a blog post on its moderation policies in response to EU commissioner Thierry Breton. The video platform says it’s removed over 500,000 videos and 8,000 livestreams in the region since the attacks on October 7th, and has also added more Arabic and Hebrew-speaking moderators to its ranks.
How a tall tale from a California water official tested the Constitution’s limits.
Courtesy of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where law goes to die. The rule (requiring age verifications and health warnings on sites with a high percentage of adult content) was blocked in August through a lower court decision that’s now been overturned — without any explanation from the appeals court, which I guess we should expect by now.
Copyright law can’t seem to keep up with how fast YouTube and streaming trends evolve, so creators have long taken it upon themselves to set up industry norms for “react”-style videos.
Recently, Twitch and Kick star xQc caught a lot of heat for breaking those norms after posting what essentially amounted to reuploads of content by smaller creators.
He challenged YouTuber Ethan Klein to a debate over the merits of fair use, but the conversation devolved into... xQc doing the worm? I think there’s a real discussion to be had about copyright and content creation, but this definitely wasn’t it.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee keep saying they’re investigating “collusion” between the Biden administration and Big Tech to “censor” conservatives, but they’re starting to act more like an Elon Musk fan club than anything else.
On top of investigating the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into Musk’s Twitter takeover, they’re now going after the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for its role in this “censorship regime.”
Musk, of course, sued CCDH just two days ago, accusing the non-profit of unlawfully accessing Twitter data and cherry-picking posts to make the platform look more hateful than it is.
I won’t rehash the law’s problems. But the District of Columbia Appeals Court says it’s constitutional because it can be interpreted narrowly to only target aiding and abetting “prostitution of another person,” disregarding its overall chilling effects on online speech:
Nothing in the First Amendment required Congress to confer Section 230 immunity on speech that violates federal criminal laws in the first place, and nothing in the First Amendment ossifies such immunity once granted against any later clarification.
The decision echoes an earlier district court ruling, and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation — which sued over FOSTA-SESTA along with other organizations in 2018 — says it’s still evaluating its future options.
The messaging app has become a key channel for news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the government’s relationship with it is complicated.
I can almost feel the EFF’s David Greene gritting his teeth as he graciously explains why a recent court ruling on government censorship and social media addresses a real problem in the most transparently bad-faith manner possible. Even if you don’t know or care what “jawboning” is, stick around for this deadpan gem:
In an unfortunate moment that has caused many to question the seriousness of the court’s endeavor, the court characterizes the complaint as describing “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”
[Electronic Frontier Foundation]
Remember SB 396 in Arkansas, which banned minors from an oddly specific set of web platforms? NetChoice — which also has active suits against Florida, Texas, and California — has sued to block it. You can read the full complaint here.
Over the last year, the US Congress and state legislatures have put out bill after bill to protect kids online — some going as far as banning under 18s from using the internet at all without parental consent.
For Wednesday’s Vergecast, I spoke to legal experts, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), and our friend David Pierce about how many of these bills threaten the free speech and privacy of all internet users.
And it requires not just a “reasonable person” viewing the words as objectively threatening, but some kind of subjective intent to threaten, or at least recklessly disregarding a risk of it. The ACLU is happy with the outcome, which follows arguments held in April. Ken White of Popehat has some more complicated thoughts well worth reading:
This century, the Supreme Court has protected the First Amendment right to free speech more vigorously and strictly than any other constitutional right. This decision is more of a middle-ground approach, neither as speech-protective nor as censorship-friendly as it could be.
[popehat.substack.com]
