Carl Szabo

All across the country, lawsuits are piling up challenging state laws that attempt to regulate Big Tech platforms in one way or another. Some of the suits take aim at laws requiring new safeguards for kids online. Others are targeting attempts to govern how social media platforms can moderate political speech. All of the litigation has at least one thing in common: the Big Tech lobbying firm behind it. Over the past few years, NetChoice, which was founded in 2001, has emerged as the tech industry’s first line of defense…

Photo: Samuel Corum (AP)Republican lawmakers have yelped about banning TikTok nationally over supposed national security threats for years now but the increasingly prescient policy issue finally gained bipartisan political support this year with the introduction of the RESTRICT Act by Sens. Mark Warner, a Democrat, and John Thune. The proposed legislation would give the Secretary of Commerce the ability to ban digital products or services from China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela that involved…

A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump held firm this week by declining a request to delay a controversial order barring government agencies from making content moderation requests to social media companies. The Justice Department is already appealing the decision, according to court filings, and said in a statement it would seek an emergency action from the Supreme Court if its appeal is rejected.Twitter Verification is a Hot MessJudge Terry A. Doughty defended his ruling Mondayagainst critiques who claimed its…

A US federal judge handed the censorship-obsessed wing of the Republican party a major win on Tuesday by blocking Biden officials from contacting social media firms to suggest content moderation takedown requests. The preliminary injunction, delivered by way of a 155 page-ruling on Independence Day, marks the most significant policy outcome to date stemming largely from the right-wing backlash to the so-called Twitter Files and other half-baked theories accusing deep state boogeymen of illegally colluding with Big Tech to…

TikTokers in Montana are going to war against a new law banning the app across the state. They’re banding together and joining lawsuits against the state, accusing their elected officials of suppressing their speech and upending their livelihoods.Nobody’s Really Watching ReelsThis week, less than 24 hours after Republican Governor ​​Greg Gianforte signed the first of-its-kind bill into law, a group of TikTokers filed a lawsuit against the state’s attorney general seeking to reverse the ban. The video creators are the…

Photo: Thom Bridge/Matt Slocum (AP)Montana’s governor signed a bill into law banning TikTok from his state Wednesday.Will Banning TikTok Solve Privacy Issues? | Future TechThe legislation, the first in the nation to forbid downloading the app at the state level, is slated to go into effect in January 2024. It prohibits app stores like Apple’s and Google’s from offering downloads of the app, which is used by more than 150 million Americans. If Apple or Google were to allow downloads, they would face a $10,000-per-day fine,…

When Spencre McGowan, an herbalist and a cookbook writer in Butte, Montana, started posting on TikTok to help pull herself out of a “depressive funk” in 2021, she could have never imagined her quick, rustic videos of comforting food recipes and outdoor wanderings would net her an audience of 110,000 committed followers in less than two years. TikTok, seemingly overnight, became her primary platform for promoting her books and connecting with people that came to her for a sense of friendly familiarity—short, stress-free…

California lawmakers introduced new legislation this week aimed at pressuring tech companies like Google and Facebook into paying news publishers for content posted on their platforms. The measure comes amid a brewing battle between tech firms and lawmakers over similar legislation in Canada and on the heels of a messy fight over news last year between the Australian government and Facebook. Now, the fight over who pays for the news is coming to the Golden State.The proposed bill, dubbed the California Journalism…

Photo: Pool (Getty Images)House Republicans this week rammed through an ill-constructed, self-aggrandizing “anti-censorship” bill supposedly aimed at preventing federal agents from pressuring tech companies to stifle conservatives. The bill, inspired in part by Republican outrage over Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story and other so-called Twitter Files revelations, passed 219-206 in a straight party-line vote. The bill’s almost guaranteed to die in the Democratically controlled Senate.As written, the…

Photo: Win McNamee (Getty Images)This week, the Supreme Court is hearing two cases that could upend the way we’ve come to understand freedom of speech on the internet. Both Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh ask the court to reconsider how the law interprets Section 230, a regulation that protects companies from legal liability for user-generated content. Gizmodo will be running a series of pieces about the past, present, and future of online speech.The future of expression on social media may depend on how the…