Social Media

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.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should lift a district court injunction against Texas’ social media law and remand the case to assess the tech industry’s First Amendment challenge at a more granular level, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) argued Wednesday (docket 21-51178).

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., on Tuesday sent letters to Cox, Meta and Google seeking information about how Cox allegedly used “active listening” tools to monitor users’ smartphone conversations. Blackburn cited reports claiming Cox Media Group “admitted to investors that it listens to users’ smartphone microphones.” The report said that Cox in a presentation with investors, including Google and Meta, acknowledged using phone conversations to deliver targeted ads. “If this reporting is true, it confirms longstanding suspicions by many consumers that technology and media companies are violating their privacy for profit by marketing products that closely reflect key words or phrases from private conversations,” she said. Cox in a statement Wednesday said its businesses “have never listened to any conversations nor had access to anything beyond third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement.” The reports are based on “outdated materials" for a product that CMG Local Solutions "no longer sells (although the product never listened to customers, it has long been discontinued to avoid misperception),” the company said. CMG Local Solutions, like other ad companies, offers tools that “include third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications and then packaged and resold to data servicers,” said Cox. “Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users.” The data can be sold to “third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.” Meta said in a statement it doesn't use "your phone's microphone for ads and we've been public about this for years. We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data."

Industry experts expect the FCC will petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiori following the split rulings between the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the 6th and 11th circuits on the Universal Service Fund contribution mechanism, they said during a Schools, Health, Libraries & Broadband Coalition webinar Wednesday. The 5th Circuit sided with Consumers' Research in its challenge of the contribution mechanism and agreed to stay its ruling pending the commission's petition (see 2408270030).

An order approving Audacy’s request for a temporary exemption from the foreign-ownership rules was adopted but isn’t expected to be released before next week, FCC officials told us. The waiver would allow Audacy to complete foreign-ownership review after it finishes a bankruptcy restructuring that involves control of the broadcaster passing to a fund affiliated with George Soros' family. FCC Republicans hadn’t submitted dissenting statements Wednesday afternoon but indicated they plan to do so, the agency officials said. Broadcast industry officials, attorneys and others told us the Audacy transaction wouldn’t attract as much attention without Soros’ name attached, and that radio broadcasters have long sought increased private equity investment in their industry. “They’re making it a political ax,” said Christopher Terry, University of Minnesota media law professor. “The radio industry has been cash-strapped for 20 years.”

House leaders will likely take up kids’ privacy legislation, but not before more legislative work is done on the House Commerce Committee-passed bills, a high-ranking Senate Commerce Committee staffer said Wednesday.