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.
Ken White of Popehat is a longtime proponent of anti-SLAPP laws, which shift legal costs off people who get hit with bogus, speech-suppressing lawsuits. With anti-speech suits by billionaires in the news lately, he’s restarting a long-running series on them — building up to why we need one at the federal level now.
[The Popehat Report]
The Elon Musk-run social media company is trying to stop a California law that would require platforms to block “materially deceptive” election content during set periods before and after voting, Bloomberg reports. X is arguing the law violates the First Amendment, pointing to “a long history” of Constitutional protections for critiques of government “that includes tolerance for potentially false speech made in the context of such criticisms.”
The Free Speech Coalition is challenging a Texas law that requires proof of age to access adult sites — and more broadly, the Supreme Court will be weighing the tradeoffs of making people identify their ages online. Oral arguments were just scheduled for early next year.
[Free Speech Coalition]
Google is facing compounding penalties in Russia for restricting propaganda YouTube channels. It doesn’t seem terribly worried:
“We have ongoing legal matters relating to Russia,” the company noted in the report. “For example, civil judgments that include compounding penalties have been imposed upon us in connection with disputes regarding the termination of accounts, including those of sanctioned parties. We do not believe these ongoing legal matters will have a material adverse effect.”
It is not the Supreme Court test. The SCOTUS case the quote is from was overturned in 1969, when the court replaced the “clear and present danger” test with the Brandenburg test.
Perhaps most incredibly, Yale Law School graduate JD Vance followed up and uncritically repeated the “fire in a crowded theater” phrase.
By routing traffic through Cloudflare, for now:
A person close to Cloudflare confirmed that X had recently switched to using the company’s services but said that it was not actively trying to help X evade the block in Brazil. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss business with a client, suggested that regulators would most likely eventually be able to figure out how to block X again.
[The New York Times]
The Kids Online Safety Act has passed out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, despite a last-minute amendment that removed specific mental health-related rules among other changes. It’s significantly different from the Senate version, and we’re likely to see more debate before a full House vote.
It wasn’t clear the House would take up KOSA after its Senate passage, but the legislation — along with the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act — is midway down the list of 16 bills slated for consideration by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce starting at 10AM ET today. You can find the committee stream below.
Attorney Daniel Tenny frames the government’s objection to TikTok. “It gathers a lot of information” and “it uses that information to try to assess what sorts of videos and other content is going to be of interest,” Tenny says. “That same data is extremely valuable to a foreign adversary.”
The Department of Justice filed a very redacted transcript of the classified briefing House lawmakers received before passing the bill that could ban TikTok unless it spins out from its Chinese owner. If you squint around the blocks of blacked-out text, you can kind of start to see how the DOJ will likely defend the bill in oral arguments on September 16th.
[CourtListener]
A judge partially blocked a Texas law that would mandate filters for minors on social media. But other rules about parental consent and data collection are still in force, and Meta, for one, tells The Verge it will be making changes:
Due to new laws in Texas, people in the state may experience some changes to our services including how teens and parents access and use our apps.
In today’s issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argues that the lively Brazilian community of X users may find a home on Bluesky, but not so much on Threads, whose heavy-handed algorithmically sorted user interface doesn’t click with Brazilian internet culture.
A caveat from The Verge: we still don’t have official numbers on Brazilian sign-ups for Threads over the weekend.
[Garbage Day]
After announcing last week that it would have to “temporarily cease operations” due to the ban of X in Brazil, popular celebrity-watching account @21metgala — which is apparently run entirely by Brazilian admins — is back, with the caveat that its connection is “unstable.”
Brazilian fans play an outsized role in online fandoms for actors, musicians, and other celebrities.
[Twitter]
Okay, maybe not so measured, but worth reading. Law blogger and Verge favorite Eric Goldman on the recent moderation ruling against TikTok:
Unless the 3rd Circuit en banc quickly and decisively rejects this opinion, it will be celebrated by other judges eager to blow up Section 230 (of which there are many). As a result, I expect this opinion provides another hard shove towards the impending and seemingly inevitable end of Section 230–and the Internet as we know it.
[Technology & Marketing Law Blog]
Following a similar order against the attorney general of Texas, Judge Amit Mehta has blocked an investigation into Media Matters For America by Missouri AG Andrew Bailey, who alleged MMFA broke the law with critical reports about Elon Musk’s X. X’s similarly speech-chilling lawsuit against MMFA remains ongoing.
The company doesn’t know if the issue is related to an App Store bug, or if Apple is “secretly implementing a censorship order,” as it’s apparently affecting “multiple other VPNs” on iOS in Brazil.
On Saturday, X shut down its operations in Brazil over claims the government gave it secret “censorship orders.”
In a new filing, DOJ says it’s “not trying to litigate in secret,” but that the court should be able to review classified information that led Congress to determine the divest-or-ban bill was necessary. In its own filing, TikTok says the government’s arguments for the bill are riddled with errors and omissions.
