free speech

My advice to Mr. Sweeney: The First Amendment is a valuable ally, but its protections might not be available to you in this situation.The arguments, explainedSince December 2023, Swift’s attorneys have sent Sweeney multiple cease-and-desist letters demanding that he stop sharing the real-time and precise information about Swift’s plane’s location. The most recent letter that has been made public accuses Sweeney of “intentional, offensive, and outrageous conduct” that threatens her safety and well-being.Swift’s attorneys…

On Monday, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in two cases that have the potential to remake online speech in America by weighing how the First Amendment applies to social media platforms.In Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, the justices will decide the constitutionality of a pair of laws that effectively strip tech companies’ agency to determine whose content they can restrict. Legal experts on both sides are calling them the two most important free-speech cases of this generation.Both involve a duo…

Headlines about the threats of artificial intelligence (AI) tend to be full of killer robots, or fears that when they're not on killing sprees, these same robots will be hoovering up human jobs. But a serious danger which gets surprisingly little media attention is the impact these new technologies are likely to have on freedom of expression.And, in particular, how they're able to undermine some of the most foundational legal tenets that protect free speech. Every time a new communications technology sweeps through…

A federal judge in California has shot down Elon Musk’s attempt to invalidate a state social media law, first reported by The Verge. The state’s AB 587 requires social companies to publish their content moderation policies, something Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) claimed violated the First Amendment. US District Judge William Shubb wrote on Thursday, “It does not appear that the requirement is unjustified or unduly burdensome within the context of First Amendment law.”X’s lawyers had argued the law was unconstitutional and…

Artificial intelligence chatbots have lied about notable figures, pushed partisan messages, spewed misinformation or even advised users on how to commit suicide.To mitigate the tools' most obvious dangers, companies such as Google and OpenAI have carefully added controls that limit what the tools can say. Now, a new wave of chatbots, developed far from the epicentre of the AI boom, are coming online without many of those guardrails - setting off a polarising free-speech debate over whether chatbots should be moderated,…

The US Supreme Court sided with free speech advocates Tuesday in ruling that a man's online harassment of a country singer could only be deemed illegally threatening if he knew it could be understood as such.The high court overruled the Colorado conviction of Billy Counterman for making what the western US state deemed threats among the thousands of unwelcome Facebook messages he sent to country singer Coles Whalen from 2014 to 2016. True threats are not protected by the US Constitution's guarantee of free speech rights.…

Gideon: I find it so much work to get started on a new platform, you know, to follow people and figure out what I want to prioritize and post things there. Uh, so I can't really say that I've used them. I've tinkered, but that's about it. Lauren: Yeah. My workflow now is I, I publish a story or a podcast on WIRED. I open Twitter, I share it, and then I'm like, where's my Bluesky login again? And then I do that. And I'm like, oh, right, T2, where I think I have, you know, four followers and I do that and then I craft…

The debate about who can say what online is heating up once more globally. Twitter, the favoured network of politicians and the press, is under the mercurial new management of Mr Musk, a self-declared free-speech absolutist who has restored the accounts of previously banned users like Mr Trump. Meta, a larger rival, is reportedly readying a text-based network of its own, to launch this summer. Social-media platforms face a test over the next 18 months as America’s presidential election approaches, one of the…

The social media platform is getting ready to launch a new feature, after which Twitter users will soon be able to request the suspension of accounts that threaten violence and harass specific people. According to Reuters, the social media company announced on Tuesday that starting on February 1 users will be able to appeal account suspensions and be assessed in accordance with its new guidelines for renewal. Severe policy violations, such as participating in unlawful activity, publishing inappropriate…

Twitter Inc.’s new owner Elon Musk‘s onslaught Monday against Apple Inc. and a cornerstone of the iPhone business empire has set the stage for a potentially bruising battle between the world’s richest man and the world’s most valuable company. Twitter Inc.’s…