Oct 28, 2021
Read Chapter 3 on free speech
They were in the news a few weeks ago for turning over, under Swiss court order, the IP address of a French climate activist. They have now won an appeal limiting the information they can be required to collect: www.swissinfo.ch/eng/proton-wins-appeal-in-swiss-court-over-surveillance-laws/47052196. It is not clear if this is directly tied to the earlier incident.
British MP David Amess was murdered at a public event with constituents. British Home Secretary Priti Patel has called for a ban on anonymous social media accounts, on the theory that the killer was radicalized by content posted to such accounts. This seems a stretch.
The stated reason was that it contained "medical misinformation". The song does contain the following lyrics:
Pandemic
ain't real, thеy just planned it
Biden said the
jab stop the spread, it was lies
Maybe that is medical misinformation? See www.foxnews.com/politics/youtube-deletes-rappers-lets-go-brandon-song-medical-misinformation.
Texas has filed a significant antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing it of creating what amounts to a fraudulent ad-bidding system. Facebook collaborated in this. You can read the complaint here: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0_1.pdf. The discussion of "header bidding" starts at paragraph 9 (a reasonable introduction to header bidding is at adprofs.co/beginners-guide-to-header-bidding). See especially paragraph 11.
What are the consequences of Google's near-monopoly on online advertising (except for Facebook)?
This in and of itself is a meaningless concept. Facebook is a business. It makes profits.
Haugen's more specific claim is that Facebook allows harmful content to remain, even though they now have the tools to remove it, or at least the basic tool infrastructure. Also, Haugen states that Facebook used those tools to de-emphasize political content before the 2020 election, but then reverted right after. But how on earth do you decide things like this? Isn't reducing political misinformation during an election a good thing? But Facebook did let its guard down after the election, and so failed to do more to limit the "stop the steal" movement: www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048543513/facebook-groups-jan-6-insurrection.
(I still think Facebook's internal data suggesting that Instagram is harmful to young women is at best preliminary, and is in serious need of additional supporting evidence one way or another)
Goldman has been cataloging Section 230 cases for a long time now. Here's his post: blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2021/10/there-is-no-bottom-when-it-comes-to-section-230-reform-proposals-comments-on-the-justice-against-malicious-algorithms-act.htm.
Section 230 reform goes in two directions:
The fact that these two goals are somewhat contradictory is frequently ignored.
Fosta-Sesta
Required content carriage and Section 230
First-person libel
Threat speech