Hillicon Valley — California sued over kids’ online safety law
California is facing a lawsuit from tech industry group NetChoice over the Golden State’s landmark children’s digital safety law.
Meanwhile, left-leaning Twitter users are scrambling to find a backup platform after changes implemented by new CEO Elon Musk.
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Tech group sues California over kids’ privacy law
Tech industry group NetChoice on Wednesday sued California over a kids’ online safety law, arguing the measure that aims to ramp up privacy protections for minors online would “hobble” free speech.
NetChoice, which names tech giants Google and Meta among its members, said in a complaint the California Age Appropriate Design Code would “harm” rather than protect minors and pressure online businesses to “over-moderate content” in attempts to avoid penalties for the law in a way that will restrict information for users of all ages.
The complaint also alleges the law’s requirement to verify the ages of users will “frustrate anonymous and casual browsing” and “magnify privacy concerns.”
The lawsuit is the latest effort from the tech group against state laws, passed in lieu of Congress taking action to create federal regulation in the tech space. NetChoice is also part of lawsuits against Republican-backed laws in Texas and Florida that seek to keep companies from removing users or content over political ideology, which they say impedes companies’ ability to moderate content in line with their policies.
Liberals scramble to replace Twitter
Elon Musk’s conquest of the Twitter-verse has sent hordes of mostly left-leaning tweeters scrambling — if not for the exits, then at least for a social-media backup plan.
Twitter’s defectors and discontents set out in waves, searching for viable alternatives. The first broke in April, when Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion bid for the social media company. The second rolled out in October, when he completed the purchase.
- Further wavelets and ripples have followed the Tesla billionaire’s more incendiary moves as tweeter-in-chief: firing half Twitter’s staff, reinstating the suspended account of former President Trump and, more recently, mocking both the queer and public health communities with a five-word post, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
- Some of Twitter’s disaffected have closed their accounts. Many more have kept their Twitter handles while adopting new ones on other sites, thronging the virtual gates of previously unheralded platforms Mastodon, Hive and Post.
Now, social media colonists are laboring to rebuild their networks on new sites while keeping an eye on the old one, to see how the Twitter’s wars play out.
DEMOCRATS PUSH META TO KEEP TRUMP BAN
A group of Democrats urged Meta to extend the ban on former President Trump’s Facebook account, arguing that he would still pose risks of inciting violence and undermining democracy if allowed back on the platform.
The push comes just weeks ahead of Meta’s self-imposed January deadline to decide whether to keep Trump’s account banned, marking two years since the suspension was put in place following posts the former president made about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
- Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), André Carson (D-Ind.) and Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), along with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), cited Trump’s posts on his own social media platform, Truth Social, as examples of the “harmful election content” he could post on Facebook if given access to his account in a letter sent to Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg Wednesday.
- The Democrats said they “have every reason to believe he would bring similar conspiratorial rhetoric back to Facebook, if given the chance.”
- “His rhetoric can only serve as a motivation to incite violence, and it is Meta’s responsibility to keep such rhetoric off its platforms,” they wrote.
In response to the letter, a Meta spokesperson sent the blog post Clegg wrote in June 2021 about the decision to reevaluate Trump’s suspension in January 2023. At the time, Clegg said that Meta will “look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded,” considering factors such as “instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest.”
SEC CHARGES INFLUENCERS WITH FRAUD
The U.S. government has charged eight social media influencers with securities fraud, alleging they used Twitter and messaging app Discord to manipulate exchange-traded stocks as part of a $100 million fraud scheme.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a release that seven of those charged promoted themselves as successful traders and gained hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and in stock trading chatrooms on Discord since January 2020.
They allegedly bought certain stocks and encouraged their followers to do the same by indicating that they were buying, holding or adding to their stock positions.
But an SEC complaint states that when share prices or trading volumes rose in the promoted stocks, they regularly sold their shares without disclosing their plans to drop their securities.
More GOP TikTok bans for state workers
The Republican governors of three more states have joined the growing number of GOP governors who are banning TikTok among state government employees amid security concerns about the Chinese-owned social media platform.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds each signed executive orders in the past two days to ban the app from state-owned devices. Republican governors in Maryland, South Dakota, Texas and Utah have already taken action to ban TikTok for state employees’ devices.
Ivey said in a memorandum sent to state employees on Tuesday that the data that TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese parent company, collects could be subject to Chinese laws allowing it to be shared with the Chinese Communist Party.
GOP-LED STATES TELL APP STORES TO RAISE TIKTOK AGE RATING
Fifteen Republican state attorneys general sent letters to the CEOs of Apple and Google on Wednesday demanding they increase their age ratings for the TikTok app.
State governments have increasingly taken aim at the video-hosting platform for its ties to Beijing and the mature content on it. The letters argue that the app’s “Teen” rating in the Google Play Store and “12+” rating in the Apple App Store are deceptively low.
“We’ve known for a long time how TikTok acts as a Chinese Trojan horse, feeding harmful and adult content to children,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R) said in a statement. “It exposes kids to harmful content that promotes drugs and alcohol use, glorifies eating disorders and encourages illegal and dangerous ‘challenges,’ whether they are searching for it or not. Drug cartels have even used it to recruit teenagers to join them.”
BITS & PIECES
An op-ed to chew on: How can a company defend against data breaches? It starts with employees
Notable links from around the web:
The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tilt (Vox / Zack Beauchamp)
Why Tech Layoffs Don’t Reflect the Job Market (The Wall Street Journal)
📚 Lighter click: “a lot” of White Lotus memes
One last thing: Goodbye, ElonJet
Twitter suspended an account that tracked the movements of new CEO Elon Musk’s private jet, weeks after Musk vowed not to ban the account.
The @elonjet account, run by Jack Sweeney, used publicly available flight data to automate tweets about the jet’s movements, but the account page shows it was suspended for violating the company’s rules.
Musk, who has pledged to return “free speech” to Twitter, said days after closing his takeover deal in October that he would not ban the account.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk wrote on Nov. 6.
Following the suspension, Musk’s tweet now appears alongside a Community Note, a relatively new feature that allows users to offer context about tweets. If participants who sometimes disagreed in the past agree on a note for a particular tweet, it appears for other users.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hill’s Technology and Cybersecurity pages for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you tomorrow.
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