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Section 230 deliberately seeks to induce private parties to take action that would violate constitutional rights if governmental actors did it directly.
This Week in Mistrusting Google: Klon Kitchen points to a Wall Street Journal story about all the ways Google tweaks its search engine to yield results that look machine-made but ar
If Congress had done in almost any other setting what it’s done to online speech, the unconstitutionality would have been immediately apparent.
Last week, a controversy in the National Basketball Association (NBA) ignited widespread public conversation about the perils of doing business in China. In a now-deleted post, Daryl Morey, who is the general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted a picture of an image that said “fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” The Rockets’s owner pushed back, tweeting that Morey “does not speak for” Houston’s team.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing titled "Russia Investigative Task Force Hearing with Social Media Companies." Witnesses include:
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing of its Russia Investigative Task Force on "Social Media Influence in the 2016 Elections" at 9:30 a.m. EST on Nov. 1. The following social media executives testified:
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on "Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find Solutions" at 2:30 p.m. EST on Oct. 31. The hearing consisted of two panels.
The first panel included:
Should the leading online tech companies be regulated as public utilities? Maybe so, according to White House advisor Steve Bannon. His basic argument, according to The Intercept, “is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity in contemporary life.” Thus far, the tech sector and Washington think-tank crowd have not grappled with that possibility in much depth, if at all.
Google filed a complaint this week in the Northern District of California to challenge a Canadian Supreme Court ruling that requires Google to delist—that is, remove from its search results—links to certain offending pages. (I wrote about the Canadian case here.) In short, Google’s attempt to fight a global takedown order in Canada was stymied by the fact that the order did not pose a conflict of laws.
Last week, the Canadian Supreme Court upheld a ruling by the Court of Appeal for British Columbia that required Google to delist—remove from its search results—links to a website that appears to violate Canadian law (the result of an intellectual property dispute between Equustek and Datalink that otherwise does not involve Google; for more background on the case, see coverage