It may be hip these day to talk about platform responsibility, but just a couple years ago, there were no mainstream conversations about how the operations and policies of online service providers might be enabling misinformation, hate speech, propaganda, etc. And while mea culpas from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey make headlines, and Google tries to pitch the ...

For years, producers of creative content—from individual artists to mass-media corporations—have tried to engage with internet companies (mainly Google) in an effort to stop the facilitation of rampant, unlicensed access to their material. Whether the complaint is millions of unlicensed works on YouTube, or search results leading users to pirate sites, copyright owners are all-too familiar with the dual response ...

Just in time for Christmas, it seems Google is up to its Grinchy tricks in the House of Representatives, allegedly the big gun behind an effort to undermine the anti-child-sex-trafficking bill FOSTA, which is the House version of the Senate’s SESTA.  Because these bills propose to amend the liability shield in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996), the ...

Yesterday afternoon the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled:  “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online:  Working with Tech to Find Solutions.” Representing the social media companies were Colin Stretch, General Counsel at Facebook; Sean Edgett, Acting General Counsel at Twitter; and Richard Salgado, Director of Law Enforcement And Information Security at Google. The news to come out of this ...

This refrain keeps playing over in my head lately:  The EFF and its sister organizations are to cyberlaw as the NRA is to rational gun policy in America.  That seems like a pretty harsh thing to say about a bunch of progressives (and one must even include the ACLU in this discussion), but in the context of policy debate, the ...

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