content moderation

Google says in its terms of service that the company reserves the right to remove any content that violates the law or could harm other users, third parties, or Google itself. Those terms of service cover a wide range of products, including email, stored media, travel itineraries on Google Maps, and Google documents.  This policy has major privacy and safety implications for those educating others online about abortion, advocating for abortion access, or seeking an abortion in states that have made the procedure…

On June 6, Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence projects, saw traffic to an AI image-generation tool called DALL-E Mini skyrocket.The outwardly simple app, which generates nine images in response to any typed text prompt, was launched nearly a year ago by an independent developer. But after some recent improvements and a few viral tweets, its ability to crudely sketch all manner of surreal, hilarious, and even nightmarish visions suddenly became meme magic. Behold its renditions of…

The government is considering whether to set up an appeals panel with the power to reverse the content moderation decisions of social media firms, the information technology ministry said, in what would be the first such move of its kind worldwide.The revelation came in a document seeking comments on plans for changes to IT rules that took effect last year, and aim to regulate social media content, making firms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter more accountable.The document, made public on Thursday, proposed one or…

In March 2021, a Turkish court ordered the news site Diken to remove a critical story about an ally of the country’s president, Recep Tayip Erdogan. Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish lawyer and digital rights activist, posted a tweet urging his followers to read the story before the decision went into effect. Then the court ruled that his tweet also needed to be removed. But for more than a year Twitter has defied the order, allowing the tweet to remain up.If Elon Musk had owned Twitter then, Adkeniz might have been out of luck.…

Florida's law remains blocked, and the state is keenly interested in the outcome of the Texas battle. Florida on Wednesday filed a Supreme Court brief supporting Texas, and the Florida brief was cosigned by 11 other states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Carolina."Amici states have a strong interest in defending the regulatory authority of sovereign states in this area," the Florida brief said. "Indeed, many states have enacted, or are considering,…

A federal appeals court has reinstated a Texas state law that bans “censorship” on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, allowing Texas to enforce the law while litigation continues.A US District Court judge had granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law in December, ruling that it violates the social networks' First Amendment right to moderate user-submitted content. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton appealed the injunction to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and a panel of three…