Speech

The American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Knight First Amendment Institute are asking the court to pause the law that could ban TikTok on January 19th while considering the case. They “urge the Court to see the Act for what it is: a sweeping ban on free expression that triggers and fails the most exacting scrutiny under the First Amendment.”

Leaders of the House panel that led the divest-or-ban bill against TikTok warned the CEOs to be ready to comply once the bill takes effect — assuming it’s not stopped before then. The warning comes after a federal court ruled the bill is constitutional. Under the law, app marketplaces could get in trouble for letting users download the app.

That’s after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) blocked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s short-lived bid to pass the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act by unanimous consent of the chamber. If passed, it would shield reporters from being forced by the government to reveal their sources.

404 Media is fighting a subpoena from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to seize confidential reporting material:

TikTok is running out of time and legal recourse to avoid a US ban unless its China-based parent company ByteDance sells it. Here’s the tl;dr on why a three-judge panel unanimously ruled to uphold the law that could expel TikTok, and what comes next.

Not spending ad dollars on a website because its owner keeps spouting weird conspiracy theories is a very serious antitrust problem, and as usual, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is on it. Surely the best use of law enforcement’s time and money.

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 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.

Google is facing compounding penalties in Russia for restricting propaganda YouTube channels. It doesn’t seem terribly worried:

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.

By routing traffic through Cloudflare, for now:

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.

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:

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.

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.”