Social Media

Texas sued TikTok for allegedly violating the state’s new social media parental-consent law. The social media platform shared minors’ personal data in violation of the state’s social media age-restriction law (HB-18), Texas said in a complaint at the Texas District Court in Galveston County (case 24-CV-1763). “Texas law requires social media companies to take steps to protect kids online and requires them to provide parents with tools to do the same,” said Ken Paxton (R), the Texas attorney general. The complaint claims that TikTok failed to provide those tools and develop a commercially reasonable parental-consent mechanism. In addition, Texas alleged that TikTok shared and disclosed minors’ personal identifying information without parental consent. Paxton sought injunctive relief and civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation. A TikTok spokesperson said, “We strongly disagree with these allegations and, in fact, we offer robust safeguards for teens and parents, including Family Pairing, all of which are publicly available. We stand by the protections we provide families.” The lawsuit comes roughly one month after the U.S. District Court of Western Texas granted a preliminary injunction (see 2409030039) against the 2024 law in a case that tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) brought. However, TikTok is not a member of NetChoice or CCIA. “The injunction granted by Judge [Robert] Pitman of the Western District of Texas bars the state from enforcing particular provisions of [HB-18] only as to CCIA, NetChoice, and their members,” said Stephanie Joyce, CCIA chief of staff.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should affirm a lower court’s decision that blocks Mississippi’s social media age-verification law because it violates the First Amendment, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chamber of Progress and other groups argued in filings Thursday (docket 24-60341). The amici filed in support of NetChoice, which won a preliminary injunction against the law from the U.S. District Court for Southern Mississippi on July 1 (see 2407160038). The ACLU and EFF filed a joint brief, arguing that online age verification blocks access to protected speech for millions of adults who lack proof of identification. Users have a right to be anonymous online, and age-verification requirements force people to put sensitive data at risk of inadvertent disclosure in data breaches, they said. Chamber of Progress filed with LGBT Tech, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation and the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. Minors don’t “shed their First Amendment rights at the gateway to the internet,” they said: Their participation in the “marketplace of ideas,” which includes unpopular ideas, is “essential to a functioning democracy.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression argued that legal precedent requires government to show there isn’t a “less restrictive alternative” to achieving its objective, and Mississippi hasn’t shown the new law is the “least restrictive means of addressing concerns about young peoples’ use of social media.”

Conservatives were more likely than liberals to be suspended on Twitter during the 2020 election, but they were also more likely to share lower-quality news articles on the platform, researchers said in a study released Wednesday. Scholars from Oxford University, MIT, Yale and Cornell examined accounts sharing hashtags supporting then-Republican nominee Donald Trump and then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Accounts sharing #Trump2020 during the election were 4.4 times “more likely to have been subsequently suspended” than those that shared #VoteBidenHarris2020, the study said. About 4.5% of users who shared Biden hashtags “had been suspended as of July 2021” compared to 19.6% of users who shared Trump hashtags, researchers said. Journalists and fact-checkers rated the quality of news websites for the study, ranging from mainstream and hyper-partisan to “fake news.” Conservative social media shares included content from sites like Breitbart, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, InfoWars, NewsMax and Red State. Statistics for users using a Trump hashtag showed 50,973 shares from Fox News, 47,841 shares from Breitbart, 38,692 shares from New York Post, 10,719 shares from Daily Mail and 9,968 shares from Daily Caller. Breitbart and Daily Caller were identified as hyper-partisan outlets in the study. Statistics for Biden supporters showed 33,604 shares from The New York Times, 28,488 shares from CNN, 20,759 shares from Raw Story, 6,639 shares from CBS News and 5,715 shares from USA Today. Raw Story was labeled as hyper-partisan in the study.

Tennessee’s social media age-verification law should be blocked because it violates the First Amendment, NetChoice said Thursday, filing a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Tennessee’s HB-1891 violates the Constitution in the same way as laws in California, Arkansas, Ohio, Mississippi, Texas and Utah, the association said. “HB 1891 would prevent Tennesseans -- minors and adults alike -- from discussing politics, catching up with friends, or reading the news online unless they surrender their sensitive personal data first,” said Litigation Center Associate Director Paul Taske. “Not only does this violate the First Amendment, but it also endangers the security of all Tennesseans, particularly children by creating a data target for hackers and criminals.” The Computer & Communications Industry Association wrote Gov. Bill Lee (R) in April, seeking a veto of the measure. HB-1891 holds social media platforms liable for failing to verify age, but it also tells companies to delete the information, which leaves them without a “means to document their compliance,” said CCIA.

TikTok's expansion of its creator subscription program illustrates a broader social media platform strategy of expanding revenue streams with a more entertainment-centric focus, MIDiA analyst Hanna Kahlert blogged Tuesday. TikTok's subscription program now lets creators develop paid subscriptions for their followers that include exclusive content and communities. As social media platforms expand their prominence in the entertainment marketplace, they will try to claim more of their audiences' entertainment spending, such as by offering subscriber-only communities or exclusive content access, she said.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should affirm a district court’s decision that blocks Mississippi’s social media age-verification law, TechFreedom said Tuesday in a brief supporting the tech industry (see 2409260053). Requiring that platforms verify age will chill online speech and violates the First Amendment, TechFreedom said. “Age verification requires identifying information, such as a user’s government-issued ID or a biometric scan of a user’s face,” Appellate Litigation Director Corbin Barthold said Wednesday. “Simply put, Mississippi is pressuring users to submit to invasive data collection.”

GOP running mate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, railed against major tech companies’ content regulation during the Tuesday night vice presidential debate as he attempted to deflect questions about whether he would challenge the Nov. 5 presidential election results if he and former President Donald Trump lose to Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Vance said “big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens” and Harris “saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she'd like to censor people who engage in misinformation” are bigger issues. Harris “is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale,” he said: “She did it during Covid, she's done it over a number of other issues. And that, to me, is a much bigger threat to democracy than what [Trump] said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest” during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Vance alluded to Murthy v. Missouri, in which the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a preliminary injunction that barred dozens of White House officials and four federal agencies from coercing social media platforms to moderate their content. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision in June (see 2406260034). Walz said Jan. 6 “was not [about] Facebook ads” and Vance’s description of the 2021 attack is “revisionist history.” Social media platforms remove content when a user is “threatening to kill someone, threatening to do something, that's not censorship," Walz said. "Censorship is book banning. We've seen that.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) is considering regulating telecommunications companies with age-verification rules that normally are reserved for social media platforms.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) issued judgments on a variety of telecom, privacy and social media bills before the legislative session ended Monday. The governor signed AB-2765, which requires that the California Public Utilities Commission report on inspections that ensure companies comply with resiliency plans. But Newsom vetoed AB-1826 to update the state’s 2006 video franchise law, the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act. It would have increased DIVCA fines for service-quality problems and sought increased participation from the public and its advocates in the franchise renewal process. Newsom had also vetoed a 2023 version of the bill (see 2310120008). “Unfortunately, this bill, like its predecessor, falls short of addressing the broader challenges we face in closing the Digital Divide,” said Newsom in his veto message. On privacy, Newsom approved AB-1008, which clarifies that personal information under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) can exist in different formats. Also, he signed SB-1223, which amends the CCPA to include “neural data” as a type of sensitive personal information. The governor signed AB-1282, which orders a study on mental health risks of social media for children. And he approved SB-1283, which will require that schools adopt limits or bans on student use of smartphones to keep kids off social platforms when on campus. Also, Newsom signed AB-2481, which will create a mechanism for people who report threatening content on social networks. And he approved SB-1504, which tightens a cyberbullying law that requires social platforms to have reporting mechanisms. But Newsom vetoed AB-1949, which sets stricter limits on sharing children’s personal data under the CCPA. “This bill would fundamentally alter the structure of the CCPA to require businesses, at the point of collection, to distinguish between consumers who are adults and minors,” he said in a veto statement. “I am concerned that making such a significant change to the CCPA would have unanticipated and potentially adverse effects on how businesses and consumers interact with each other, with unclear effects on children's privacy.”

Mississippi’s social media age-verification law is unconstitutional because it places a “government-mandated” barrier blocking access to protected speech, NetChoice argued Thursday before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (see 2408010054). HB-1126 disfavors social speech in relation to professional speech and media-driven speech, the trade association said. NetChoice won a preliminary injunction against the law from the U.S. District Court for Southern Mississippi on July 1 (see 2407160038), and Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R) appealed.