michaelmalak writes: The Colorado Senate President Pro Tempore, Kerry Donovan, is the prime sponsor of SB21-132,
Digital Communications Regulation, which if passed, would fine websites $5,000 per day as a class 2 misdemeanor if they “allow” user comments that: “…promote hate speech; undermine election integrity; disseminate intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news; or authorize, encourage, or carry out violations of users’…
Tag: First Amendment
Cops Are Playing Music While Citizens Are Filming To Trigger Copyright Filters
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last Friday, a man entered the Beverly Hills police department, only to be treated to a mini DJ set that could potentially get his Instagram account banned. Sennett Devermont was at the department to file a form to obtain body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt…
Obama Says Social Media Companies ‘Are Making Editorial Choices, Whether They’ve Buried Them in Algorithms or Not’
Former U.S. President Barack Obama said that the extent to which social media companies claim they “are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic” is not “tenable,” he told the publication in an interview published Monday. From a report “They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not,” the former president said in…
FCC Will Move To Regulate Social Media After Censorship Outcry
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: On Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that the agency will seek to regulate social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter at the behest of the Trump administration’s executive order signed earlier this year. “Members of all three branches of the federal government have expressed serious concerns about the prevailing…
Former Mentor Says Mark Zuckerberg Intoxicated by Power, Calls Disinformation ‘A National Security Issue’
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi interviewed Mark Zuckerberg mentor (and early investor) Roger McNamee for a special report on “the disinformation epidemic.” McNamee — also the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe — says Zuckerberg is too focused on “imposing his vision” to acknowledge the website’s threat to national security, adding “It’s about power.” Ali Velshi: The fact that rumor,…
Trump Asks Supreme Court To Let Him Block Critics on Twitter
The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court ruling that found President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his critics on Twitter. From a report: The lawsuit arose in 2017 after Trump’s social media account blocked seven people who had tweeted criticism of the president in comment threads linked to his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle….
Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: The U.S. government charges too much for access to an electronic database of federal court records, the Federal Circuit ruled in a decision curbing a revenue stream the court system uses to help fund other programs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision that the…
Judge Urged To Release Documents About Google’s Cellphone Tracking
Eight weeks ago Arizona’s attorney general sued Google for allegedly deceiving users about when location data would be collected from their phones, tracking them without their clear consent. . Now an Arizona congressman and more than two dozen researchers from institutions including Yale, MIT, and Cornell are urging a judge to publicly release the documents collected during that investigation: The documents…
Supreme Court Upholds Cellphone Robocall Ban
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a 1991 law that bars robocalls to cellphones. The case, argued by telephone in May because of the coronavirus pandemic, only arose after Congress in 2015 created an exception in the law that allowed the automated calls for collection of government debt. Political consultants and…
Appeals Court Says California’s IMDb-Targeting ‘Ageism’ Law Is Unconstitutional
The state of California has lost again in its attempt to punish IMDb for ageism perpetrated by movie studios who seem to refuse to cast actresses above a certain age in choice roles. Techdirt reports: The law passed by the California legislature does one thing: prevents IMDb (and other sites, theoretically) from publishing facts about actors: namely, their ages. This stupid…