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.
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.
Yes, the committee did this once before in 2020, but that version never made it to a final vote — we’re still waiting to see if this version does any better. And civil liberties groups still oppose the bill, saying it could have disastrous implications for queer kids and encryption.
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.
As of Monday afternoon, it’s unclear what exactly led to Carlson’s departure, but it sure looked like the now former host expected to have a show tonight.
Wired has a good story about Texas’s attempt to make ISPs block abortion-related speech — something we’ve covered in the past.
“We’ve seen over and over in different contexts that platforms are vulnerable to censorship pressure because they’re afraid of being sued,” says Pinsof. “So it’s easier to take stuff down than it is to potentially open yourself up to liability.”
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?
“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” wrote Judge Eric Davis in his 81-page ruling.
Not great so far.
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:
Content that a service helps develop “in whole or in part” is outside Section 230’s scope.
Section 230 also does not allow services to use uprooted facts or data and then escape liability by saying the data came from somewhere else. It is not an “I read it on the internet so don’t blame me!” statute.
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.
[www.supremecourt.gov]
Defamation lawsuits are emerging as a popular strategy against conspiracy influencers like Alex Jones. But legal blogger Ken White has nicely broken down a much trickier case: whether a professor can sue a TikTok personality named Ashely Guillard who accused her of murder based on tarot readings.
America’s robust and exceptional protections of speech often come at the expense of actual injustice and suffering, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. This is such a case. Guillard’s behavior is morally contemptible. That doesn’t necessary solve the puzzle of whether it’s defamatory.
[popehat.substack.com]
A popular niche risks running afoul of the site’s rules against ‘sexually gratifying’ content.
