Bloomberg Law: President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, already facing a tough confirmation fight, has received a civil investigative demand from Indiana’s Republican attorney general as part of his probe into Big Tech content moderation practices.Kristen … Continue reading
Category Archives: cheap speech
Watch here, via Yale’s Abrams Institute. … Continue reading
Nate Persily at The Monkey Cage: The most important aspect of the board’s adjudication of the Trump takedown was its reliance on international human rights law to guide its decision. The board’s earlier decisions also referred to applicable United Nations … Continue reading
Facebook’s Oversight Board has issued its long-anticipated decision on whether Facebook was correct in removing Trump from the platform given his statements supporting the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. The Board determined that Facebook was correct: “In maintaining an … Continue reading
This looks to be a very important event (registration required): The Facebook Oversight Board will release its decision concerning the takedown of President Donald Trump’s account this Wednesday. On Thursday, May 6, from 2:00 to 3:15 PM Pacific, members of … Continue reading
Sue Halpern for The New Yorker. … Continue reading
I’m really looking forward to participating in this event: As speech on the Internet increasingly dominates public discourse, the decision-making within Facebook, Google and the like about what to carry and what not is of ever-increasing import. The impact of … Continue reading
NYT: Twitch comes with a bonus: The service makes it easy for streamers to make money, providing a financial lifeline just as their access to the largest online platforms has narrowed. The site is one of the avenues, along with apps … Continue reading
BuzzFeed News: Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of a House of Representatives committee that his company had done its part “to secure the integrity of the election.” While the social network did not catch everything, the … Continue reading
NYT: Months after the inauguration of President Biden, One America News Network, a right-wing cable news channel available in some 35 million households, has continued to broadcast segments questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election.“There’s still serious doubts about … Continue reading
Politico reports. … Continue reading
Axios: Political advertising has quickly begun to migrate over to connected TV (CTV), or digital and streaming television, according to new data.Why it matters: “If the current trends of explosive growth in CTV viewership continue, we could see a tipping … Continue reading
NYT Upshot column: What would have happened if the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had responded, “OK, I’ll try,” in a January phone call after President Trump asked him to “find” 11,000 votes?No one can be sure. What is … Continue reading
NBC News: Lawmakers and experts have been critical of Facebook’s groups feature, claiming the mostly private spaces have become hubs for coronavirus misinformation and extremism. But The News Alerts of Beaver County isn’t home base for a gun-wielding militia, and it … Continue reading
Remarkable: (read the whole thread) https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1379065122858147843 … Continue reading
NYT: Denver Riggleman stood virtually alone.It was Oct. 2, on the floor of the House of Representatives, and he rose as one of only two Republicans in the chamber to speak in favor of a resolution denouncing QAnon. Mr. Riggleman, a freshman … Continue reading
WaPo: Facebook page shows a child scampering down a school corridor, alerting Ohio families to a scholarship program.Chatter fills the same page with news ranging from a state anti-corruption bill to the vibrant local real estate market. “It’s a great … Continue reading
NYT: But even in the world of podcasting, Google Podcasts — whose app has been downloaded more than 19 million times, according to Apptopia — stands alone among major platforms in its tolerance of hate speech and other extremist content. … Continue reading
Politico: As former President Donald Trump’s supporters have flocked to alternative social media networks, many are turning to SafeChat, a fast-growing platform known for its tolerance of high-octane MAGA content.In the nine weeks sincethe Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. … Continue reading
WaPo: Facebook is conducting a vast behind-the-scenes study of doubts expressed by U.S. users about vaccines, a major project that attempts to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by … Continue reading
Brendan Nyhan for WaPo: YouTube is overshadowed by Facebook and Twitter in the debate over the harms of social media, but the site has massive reach — 3 in 4 Americans report using it. This growth has been driven by YouTube’s use … Continue reading
AP: The effort showed how social media and other technology can be leveraged to spread misinformation so quickly that those trying to stop it cannot keep up. There were signs that it worked as Donald Trump swung large numbers of … Continue reading
Protocol: In the months before and after the 2020 election, far-right pages that are known to spread misinformation consistently garnered more engagement on Facebook than any other partisan news, according to a New York University study published Wednesday.The study looked at Facebook … Continue reading
NPR: While conspiracy theories aren’t new, experts say their reach is spreading — accelerated by social media, encouraged by former President Donald Trump and weaponized in a way that is unprecedented. … Continue reading
NYT: At 1:51 p.m. on Jan. 6, a right-wing radio host named Michael D. Brown wrote on Twitter that rioters had breached the United States Capitol — and immediately speculated about who was really to blame. “Antifa or BLM or … Continue reading
Deep dive from BuzzFeed: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy … Continue reading
Axios: In the second half of 2020, Donald Trump’s reelection campaign shelled out seven figures to an influencer marketing business linked to his White House’s former chief digital officer.Why it matters: The payments bought promotion from prominent conservative brands and social … Continue reading
WaPo: Nearly a quarter of former president Donald Trump’s 6,081 Facebook posts last year contained extremist rhetoric or misinformation about the coronavirus, the election or his critics, according to a new analysis by the left-leaning group Media Matters for America.The … Continue reading
New from the Covid States Project: Two-thirds of respondents believe that the election was conducted fairly, while one-third believed that it was not. However, this aggregate pattern obscures enormous partisan gaps. Fully 96% of Democrats reported that the election had … Continue reading
Tom Edsall in the NYT: A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like … Continue reading
Smart Steve Mazie in The Economist: The First Amendment grants plenty of room for robust debate; plaintiffs seeking damages for defamatory statements face an appropriately steep climb. On the rare occasions when libel or slander claims stick, the defamed entity … Continue reading
Steven Rosenfeld: Partisan disinformation to undermine 2020’s presidential election shadowed every step of the voting process last year but took an unprecedented turn when the earliest false claims morphed into intricate conspiracies as Election Day passed and President Trump worked … Continue reading
Eugene Volokh in Tablet Mag: In 2016, a Florida man named Douglass Mackey (using the online alias “Ricky Vaughn”) allegedly conspired to distribute a meme aimed at deceiving pro-Hillary voters.Four years later, Mackey is now being prosecuted (as to this and as … Continue reading
New letter I spearheaded from Julia Azari, Associate Professor of Political Science, Marquette University; David Kaye, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Jack Lerner, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Janai Nelson, Associate Director-Counsel, NAACP-LDF; Cailin O’Connor, Associate Professor of … Continue reading
WaPo: Sen. Mark Warner is set to introduce a new bill that could hold Facebook, Google and other tech giants more directly accountable when viral online posts and videos result in real-world harm.The measure is dubbed the SAFE TECH Act, … Continue reading
USA Today: Despite repeated charges of anti-conservative bias from former President Trump and other GOP critics, Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube are not slanted against right-leaning users, a new report out of New York University found.Like previous research, “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media … Continue reading
WSJ: Facebook Inc. FB -2.52% in 2019 redesigned its flagship product to center on what it called Groups, forums for like-minded users. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called them the new “heart of the app.”Now the social-networking giant is clamping down on Groups. The effort began after Facebook’s … Continue reading
Ben Smith NYT column. … Continue reading
Big news: Today, Facebook is referring its decision to indefinitely suspend former US President Donald Trump’s access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts to the independent Oversight Board. The board was established last year to make the final call on some of the … Continue reading
Politico: The pardons went to Democrats, lobbyists and rappers, with nary a “patriot” among them. The mass arrests of Antifa campaigners never came. The inauguration stage at the Capitol, full of America’s most powerful politicians, was not purged of Satan-worshipping … Continue reading
NYT: Forgoing any appeals for healing or reflection, right-wing media organizations that spread former President Donald J. Trump’s distortions about the 2020 election continued on Wednesday to push conspiracy theories about large-scale fraud, with some predicting more political conflict in the months … Continue reading
WaPo: Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act … Continue reading
NYT: YouTube said on Tuesday that it had suspended President Trump’s channel over concern about “ongoing potential for violence,” the latest move by one of the large technology companies to limit the president online.In a post on YouTube’s official Twitter account, the … Continue reading
NPR: In the last days of the Trump administration, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham has pressured employees at the agency to speed up the production of a data report about noncitizens, including unauthorized immigrants, the bureau’s internal watchdog group says.Dillingham, … Continue reading
NYT: Social media has played a crucial role in the support of Mr. Trump since he announced his intention to run for president five years ago. And the rioters who attacked the Capitol last week did much of their planning in the … Continue reading
Zuckerberg statement. … Continue reading
Tom Edsall NYT column: In the closing days of his presidency, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he can make innumerable false claims and assertions that millions of Republican voters will believe and more than 150 Republican members of the House … Continue reading
NYT: Two weeks ago, the conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk falsely claimed on their Facebook page that people who were not eligible to vote were receiving ballots in Georgia’s special elections next month. Their post was shared more than … Continue reading
NYT: Sidney Powell, a lawyer who was part of President Trump’s legal team, spread a conspiracy theory last month about election fraud. For days, she claimed that she would “release the Kraken” by showing voluminous evidence that Mr. Trump had … Continue reading
CNN: Around the election, social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter were praised for how quickly and widely they applied warning labels to misinformation.But President Donald Trump’s 46-minute video last week, which was riddled with election misinformation and conspiracy theories discredited by … Continue reading