Social Media
January 7, 2021 — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced in a statement posted to his personal page Thursday that Donald Trump will be blocked from using both Facebook and Instagram “for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” The company blocked his acco
Congress
December 29, 2020 — On Sunday evening, President Donald Trump signed into law a major coronavirus stimulus package, barely avoiding a government shutdown before a Monday night deadline. Trump has railed against the $900 billion coronavirus relief bill and the $1.4 trillion government funding bill si
DC Circuit
A lawsuit filed Wednesday by a coalition of ten Republican state attorneys general, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, accuses Google of making an “unlawful agreement” with Facebook, that gave special privileges to the social media giant, in exchange for promising not to support a competing a
COVID
The White House announced Monday, in a notice sent to the Senate, that it was withdrawing the nomination of Mike O’Rielly to Federal Communications Commission for a third term. The notice did not provide reasoning for the action, WKZO reported. The incidence was widely unexpected, coming after O’Rie
Commerce
July 28, 2020 — Senators on Tuesday remained broadly divided on the extent and direction that changes to Section 230 should take. The tenor of the discussion at a Senate Commerce Communications Subcommittee hearing suggested that the law was overdue for an overhaul, as senator after senator criticiz
FCC
July 27, 2020 — The U.S. Commerce Department under the Trump administration on Monday followed through on the president’s orders and filed a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to issue proposed rules narrowing the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “A ha
Section 230
July 13, 2020 — Social media moderation will inevitably be biased to some degree, said Jeff Kosseff, assistant professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy and author of The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet. “I mean, they’re anecdotal reports, and what the anecdotal re
BBLO
July 8, 2020 — Despite the hate that big tech companies receive, social media platforms are essential in enabling online speech at the level seen today, with the help of Section 230, said Cathy Gellis, an attorney who specializes in internet intermediary law. Gellis made her remarks at the second ev
absentee voting
This week, social media platforms started to make long called-for changes to their content policies, reported The New York Times. Reddit banned the platform’s largest subreddit supporting President Donald Trump, known as r/The_Donald, which critics claimed fostered bigotry. Twitch has temporarily su
Section 230
June 25, 2020 — Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and former Congressman Chris Cox, authors of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, joined technology policy journalist Ashley Gold to defend the importance of the law, 25 years after its original passage. “We thought people should be focused on ideas,
EU
June 24, 2020 — Four members of the Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online and Freedom of Expression detailed the group’s newly released report entitled “Freedom and Accountability: A Transatlantic Framework for Moderating Speech Online,” on a Tuesday webinar hosted by t
Andrew Yang
The Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, published a report on Monday urging democracies to adopt a flexible regulatory framework to curb online hate speech and manipulated disinformation. The group c
Section 230
June 22, 2020 — Legal experts disagreed on Monday about whether Section 230 is exacerbating or helping to solve problems with the current state of online content moderation. “I think the real friction point is because Section 230 is counterintuitive — it says that you can exercise control and not be
