Recently, California legislators introduced the B.O.T. Act of 2018, which, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation summarizes, “would make it unlawful for any person to use a social bot to communicate or interact with natural persons online without disclosing that the bot is not a natural person.” The EFF describes the proposed bill as an understandable but over-broad response to Russia’s ...
On Wednesday, a federal court for the Southern District of New York held that President Trump violated the First Amendment when he and his Social Media Director Daniel Scavino blocked users on Twitter because they were critical of the President and/or his policies via the @RealDonaldTrump account. The story caught my attention—not only as a citizen who wants a president ...
In several posts on the subject of Facebook and fake news, I have opined that if we users are going to believe and disseminate bogus information, that’s mostly an us problem, one which Facebook likely cannot solve. In that spirit, there is an extent to which I agree with Mike Masnick’s Techdirt post on May 2 calling Facebook’s plans to ...
During Tuesday’s Joint Senate Committee hearing, as Mark Zuckerberg kept promising to take better control over content on Facebook, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked the CEO point blank if the site is a neutral platform or a publisher. Cruz acknowledged the company’s right to act as a publisher but also alluded to the fact that its liability protection under Section ...
With Mark Zuckerberg set to testify today on Capitol Hill, and revelations last week that the Cambridge Analytica data breach is now estimated to have affected nearly 90-million users (up from around 50 million), there seems to be no shortage of theories as to how to solve the “Facebook problem.” Congress will ask Zuckerberg what Facebook’s leadership knew about the ...
