Speech

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:

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:

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.

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:

One of Section 230’s lesser-known elements is protection for users, not just providers, of online platforms. That element got an interesting test this month, when an appeals court ruled on whether a high-schooler who created an Instagram account was liable for letting friends bully teachers with it. Per the ruling, things did not go well for him:

It’s leaving in place a lower court ruling that said Reddit is immunized by Section 230 for failing to take down nonconsensual pornography, despite attempts invoke the limits placed on 230 by FOSTA-SESTA. The decision comes after the court dodged reconsidering the law in Gonzalez v. Google:

The Meta (formerly Facebook) Oversight Board is going to make a call on it:

Well, maybe not in 2024 if a new law banning TikTok within the state takes effect. Makena Kelly can explain more.

The Senate Judiciary Committee just approved the STOP CSAM Act, a bill that would penalize tech companies for not removing child sexual abuse material from their platforms once alerted to it.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick and Leigh Beadon teamed up with game designer Randy Lubin for Moderator Mayhem, a swipe-based game about the challenges of moderating a social network. It’s sort of like Reigns, except instead of ruling a kingdom, you’re deciding whether to take down reviews of Cocaine Bear.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the controversial EARN IT Act, an attempt to fight child sexual abuse by adding new conditions to Section 230, and teed it up for a vote on the Senate floor.

The stunning news comes less than a week after the conservative network reached a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. While the settlement averted a high-profile court trial over false 2020 election claims, it also kept some of Fox’s biggest names, like Carlson, from being forced to testify.

Wired has a good story about Texas’s attempt to make ISPs block abortion-related speech — something we’ve covered in the past.

Defamation law is one of the rare limits to US speech protections, so we’re watching the outcome of voting machine company Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News closely. How are things going for Fox?

We’ve written about the dicey legal situation around AI-generated text and images. Now, Public Knowledge’s John Bergmayer makes a thoughtful (if, given how new these tools are, I think still debatable) argument against granting Section 230 liability protections to bots like Microsoft’s new Bing:

Justice Elena Kagan does a good job of summing up the big question here after the opening question from Clarence Thomas. “This was a pre-algorithm statute, and everyone is trying their best to figure out how this statute applies,” Kagan notes. “Every time anyone looks at anything on the internet, there is an algorithm involved.”

The court is hearing Gonzalez v. Google, one of the biggest tech law cases in years, at 10am ET. You can livestream the audio if you want to tune in — and we’ll have coverage of Gonzalez and its sister case Twitter v. Taamneh over the coming day and week.