Tag: ftc

Child Safety Groups Urge FTC To Investigate Roblox

Two child safety groups filed a complaint against online interactive gaming platform Roblox with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on May 20, alleging that children face sexual and financial harm on the platform.

Filed by nonprofits National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and Fairplay, the complaint claims that certain Roblox features are “developmentally inappropriate for the platform’s massive young user base and pose a substantial risk of harm.” Such features include engagement-maximizing design features, a complex virtual currency system that can result in more user spending, and chat and communication features that expose children to sexual exploitation.

These components “capitalize on young users’ developmental vulnerabilities, exploit their desire for authentic self-expression, monetize their lack of impulse control, and turn in-game purchasing power into a form of social status,” the complaint states.

“As a result, young users say they feel a constant pressure to keep up with their peers on the platform, and are thereby driven to buy and spend Robux in order to enjoy Roblox’s experiences.

“At the same time, the voice and text chat features that make the platform social repeatedly expose children to sexual content and harmful adults, resulting in sexual exploitation and abuse.”

According to the complaint, Roblox requires users to be at least 5 years old to open an account.

Last month, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said at a press conference that Roblox, which has roughly 151.5 million daily active users, is used by almost half of all American children under 16. Around 42 percent of the platform’s users are children under the age of 13.

The nonprofits asked the FTC to investigate Roblox for violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and check whether the company is in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

Meanwhile, Roblox’s share price has crashed. On July 31, 2025, the company’s share price hit its year-high of $150.59. On May 21, 2026, prices closed at $46.14, a decline of nearly 70 percent. Since Sept. 29, Roblox’s market capitalization has tumbled from $98.7 billion to $32.8 billion as of May 21, a loss of almost $66 billion.

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Days Away: The TAKE IT DOWN Act Creates a Censorship Mechanism With No Safeguards

The Federal Trade Commission sent letters to 17 major tech companies this week, warning them to comply with the Take It Down Act by May 19 or face fines of $53,088 per violation.

Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, X, Reddit, Discord, Snapchat, Pinterest, Bumble, Match Group, Automattic, and SmugMug all got the same message from Chairman Andrew Ferguson.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

“We stand ready to monitor compliance, investigate violations, and enforce the Take It Down Act,” Ferguson wrote.

“Protecting the vulnerable, especially children, from this harmful abuse is a top priority for this agency and this administration.”

The law, signed by President Trump in May 2025 with strong backing from First Lady Melania Trump, requires platforms to delete non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfakes, within 48 hours of receiving a removal request.

Platforms must also find and remove identical copies, provide clear notice about the removal process and let people track their requests. The FTC published a business guidance page alongside the letter spelling all of this out. The definition of “covered platform” is broad enough to capture social media, messaging apps, video sharing, gaming platforms, and essentially any site hosting user-generated content.

Nobody wants revenge porn circulating online. But the law Congress passed is far broader than the problem it claims to solve.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act borrows its structure from the DMCA’s already-controversial notice-and-takedown system, then strips out the safeguards.

Under the DMCA, a takedown request must include a statement under penalty of perjury. False claims can result in liability. There’s a counter-notice process so the person whose content was deleted can push back. TIDA has none of this. There’s no penalty for false claims, no counter-notice, no requirement that the filer prove anything before content disappears. A platform gets a complaint, has 48 hours, and deletes. That’s the entire process and exactly why the Take it Down Act introduces a new censorship mechanism.

The law defines a violation as involving an “identifiable individual” engaged in “sexually explicit conduct,” without defining that conduct narrowly.

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FTC Settlement: Ad Agencies Agree to Stop “Brand Safety” Collusion to Defund Media Outlets

Three of the world’s biggest advertising conglomerates have agreed to stop colluding to defund media outlets whose politics they didn’t like.

The Federal Trade Commission and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by seven other states, filed a complaint and simultaneous settlement against Dentsu US, GroupM Worldwide (WPP’s media-buying arm), and Publicis on April 15, accusing them of running what amounts to a coordinated censorship operation through the advertising supply chain.

Starting in 2018, these agencies, which collectively control over $81 billion in ad-buying power, agreed to adopt identical “brand safety” standards that treated so-called “misinformation” as a category of content too dangerous for any advertiser to touch.

They did this through two industry groups: the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Advertiser Protection Bureau, and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media, better known as GARM. The result was a shared “Brand Safety Floor” that could starve publishers of revenue without any single company having to take public responsibility for the decision.

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Big Advertisers Settle Case with FTC over Leftist Censorship in Advertising and Suspected Collusion Against Breitbart, Other Conservatives

Three of the world’s largest advertising companies settled Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over claims that they colluded on policies to combat alleged misinformation that denied advertising revenue to conservative publishers such as Breitbart News.

The FTC said in a complaint filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas that WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis coordinated on policies that limited the number of ads that ran on sites with content that the industry had identified as misinformation. The policy resulted in fewer ads running on media outlets such as Breitbart News, punishing outlets that ran content that was “lawful but disfavored.” The filing explained that these advertisers sought to impose common “brand safety” standards across the digital advertising industry. The FTC stated that the ad agencies, with their primary competitors, Omnicom and IPG, operated through their trade associations to establish a “Brand Safety Floor” to combat “misinformation.”

“The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a written statement. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free from conduct, such as economic boycotts, that distort the fundamental competitive pressures that promote lower prices, higher quality products and increased innovation.”

“As we explain in our complaint, the brand-safety agreement limited competition in the market for ad-buying services and deprived advertisers of the benefits of differentiated brand-safety standards that could be tailored to their unique advertising inventory,” the FTC chairman said.

Ferguson continued:

This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor. The proposed order remedies the dangers inherent to collusive practices and restores competition to the digital news ecosystem.

A spokesman for WPP said in a statement that the agreement “reflects our existing and ongoing commitment to provide our clients with unbiased advice as they decide where to place their media.” A spokesman for Dentsu said the company was “fully committed to operating transparently, with integrity, and in strict compliance with all applicable laws.” Publicis had not responded to a request for comment from the New York Times.

The FTC said in its filing that the ad agencies “coordinated” through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an entity created by the World Federation of Advertisers, of which the three advertisers are members.

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FTC Warns PayPal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard Against Debanking

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent letters on Thursday to the CEOs of PayPal, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard, warning them against debanking practices — including denying access to services due to a customer’s lawful business activities.

“It is inconsistent with American values to deny law-abiding individuals the ability to run their legitimate businesses and feed their families because they attracted the ire of rogue American officials, overzealous activists, or, more worryingly, foreign governments seeking to control public discourse,” the letters read. “That is why President Trump’s August 7, 2025, Executive Order on debanking makes clear that it is unacceptable to debank law-abiding citizens due to ‘political affiliations, religious beliefs, or lawful business activities.’”

As XBIZ reported last year, that executive order prohibits banks, savings associations, credit unions or other financial service providers from restricting access to accounts, loans or other services on the basis of a customer’s lawful business activities “that the financial service provider disagrees with or disfavors for political reasons.”

Following Trump’s executive order, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued a report on debanking, in which it named adult entertainment as one of several sectors facing discrimination for engaging in activities contrary to banks’ “values.”

Ferguson’s letters inform the targeted companies that deplatforming such customers, or denying them access to financial products or services, could lead to an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action.

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Trump’s FTC Wages a War on Media Criticism

NewsGuard, a company that rates news outlets’ accuracy using what it calls “apolitical journalistic criteria…to identify reliable sources of information,” has filed a lawsuit to block the Federal Trade Commission’s demand for a list of all its customers.

The FTC in May 2025 launched a wide-ranging probe into NewsGuard and 16 other groups—including left-leaning watch group Media Matters for America, and the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit media ratings service. The agency alleged the groups were part of “a conspiracy to boycott conservative and independent media.”

Deadline (2/6/26) reported that FTC chair Andrew “Ferguson has targeted NewsGuard, suggesting that it violated antitrust laws and that it was biased, as NewsGuard had given a low score to Newsmax, the conservative news site.”

NewsGuard’s lawsuit accuses the FTC of “brazenly using its power not for any issue concerning trade or commerce, but rather to censor speech simply because it disagreed with NewsGuard’s judgments about the reliability of news sources” (AP, 3/23/26).

NewsGuard also accused the FTC of holding up a $13 billion merger of advertising heavyweights Omnicom Group and IPG unless the merged company agreed not to use NewsGuard’s services.

Media Matters filed a similar lawsuit last summer to block sweeping FTC demands for documents; a federal judge ruled in the group’s favor, calling that FTC probe “a straightforward First Amendment violation” (Bloomberg, 1/22/26). The FTC has appealed the ruling against it.

Ferguson is yet another representative of the Trump regime trying to silence any criticism of the government or its right-wing support network. For regime apologists, of course, the FTC chief is a sacred warrior against liberals, protecting conservatives from insults and disagreement.

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FTC Says Companies Can Collect Kids’ Personal Data, As Long As It’s Called “Age Verification”

The FTC just told companies they can collect children’s personal data without parental consent, as long as it’s for “age verification.”

That’s the practical effect of a policy statement the agency issued this week. Under COPPA, websites collecting data on kids under 13 generally need verifiable parental consent first. The FTC’s new statement carves out an exception: gather whatever personal information you need to verify someone’s age, and the Commission won’t come after you for it.

The agency calls this child protection. The infrastructure it’s enabling looks different.

Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said “Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades,” and framed the announcement as a tool for parents.

What the statement actually does is green-light personal data collection from minors, on the theory that knowing someone’s age requires knowing who they are first.

The exemption is conditional. To avoid enforcement, sites must delete age verification data “promptly” after use, restrict third-party sharing to vendors with adequate security assurances, post clear notices about what they’re collecting, and use methods likely to produce “reasonably accurate” results. These requirements are unverifiable by the people whose data gets collected, and enforced by an agency that just announced it won’t enforce.

COPPA supposedly exists precisely because children’s personal data is sensitive and companies can’t be trusted to protect it without legal pressure.

The FTC’s new exemption uses that same sensitive data as the price of admission for age verification, then steps back from enforcement. The agency is weakening the law’s protections in order to expand the infrastructure that the law was supposedly designed to regulate.

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This FTC Workshop Could Legitimize the Push for Online Digital ID Checks

In January 2026, the Federal Trade Commission plans to gather a small army of “experts” in Washington to discuss a topic that sounds technical but reads like a blueprint for a new kind of internet.

Officially, the event is about protecting children. Unofficially, it’s about identifying everyone.

The FTC says the January 28 workshop at the Constitution Center will bring together researchers, policy officials, tech companies, and “consumer representatives” to explore the role of age verification and its relationship to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.

It’s all about collecting and verifying age information, developing technical systems for estimation, and scaling those systems across digital environments.

In government language, that means building tools that could determine who you are before you click anything.

The FTC suggests this is about safeguarding minors. But once these systems exist, they rarely stop where they start. The design of a universal age-verification network could reach far beyond child safety, extending into how all users identify themselves across websites, platforms, and services.

The agency’s agenda suggests a framework for what could become a credential-based web. If a website has to verify your age, it must verify you. And once verified, your information doesn’t evaporate after you log out. It’s stored somewhere, connected to something, waiting for the next access request.

The federal effort comes after a wave of state-level enthusiasm for the same idea. Texas, Utah, Missouri, Virginia, and Ohio have each passed laws forcing websites to check the ages of users, often borrowing language directly from the European Union, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Those rules require identity documents, biometric scans, or certified third parties that act as digital hall monitors.

In these states, “click to enter” has turned into “show your papers.”

Many sites now require proof of age, while others test-drive digital ID programs linking personal credentials to online activity.

The result is a slow creep toward a system where logging into a website looks a lot like crossing a border.

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AI Giants Under Fire: Child Data EXPLOITATION?

On September 11, 2025, the FTC announced formal orders compelling seven tech giants to disclose detailed information about their consumer-facing AI chatbots. The companies under scrutiny include Alphabet (Google), Meta, OpenAI, Character.AI, Snap, and Elon Musk’s xAI. This action represents one of the most significant regulatory interventions into the AI industry since these platforms exploded in popularity following ChatGPT’s 2022 launch.

The timing raises questions about why previous administrations allowed these potentially dangerous technologies to proliferate unchecked for years. While American families watched their children become increasingly isolated and dependent on AI interactions, federal regulators stood by as Big Tech harvested unprecedented amounts of personal data from minors. The investigation should have begun the moment these companies started targeting children with addictive AI experiences designed to maximize engagement and profit.

Protecting Our Children From Digital Predators

The FTC’s inquiry specifically examines how these companies measure, test, and monitor potential negative impacts on children and teenagers. This focus comes after mounting evidence that AI chatbots can cause psychological harm, particularly among vulnerable young users who may develop unhealthy emotional dependencies on artificial relationships. The investigation also scrutinizes how companies monetize user engagement and process the sensitive personal information children share with these systems.

Parents across America have watched helplessly as their children retreat into conversations with AI entities that collect every intimate detail shared in confidence. These companies have essentially created digital environments where children reveal their deepest fears, desires, and personal struggles—all while sophisticated algorithms analyze this information for commercial purposes. The potential for manipulation and exploitation is staggering, yet these platforms operated with virtually no oversight until now.

Tragedy Sparks Overdue Investigation

The investigation gained urgency following a lawsuit against OpenAI after a teenager’s suicide was allegedly linked to ChatGPT interactions. This tragic case highlights the real-world consequences of allowing unregulated AI systems to interact with emotionally vulnerable young people. The lawsuit raises disturbing questions about whether these companies adequately warn users about potential psychological risks or implement sufficient safeguards to prevent harm.

Character.AI, specifically designed for extended conversations with AI personalities, presents particularly concerning risks for children seeking emotional connection. Young users often treat these AI characters as real friends or confidants, potentially replacing genuine human relationships with artificial substitutes. The long-term psychological impact of these interactions remains largely unknown, yet millions of children engage with these platforms daily without meaningful parental controls or safety measures.

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Supreme Court Throws Out 90-Year-Old Precedent, Allows Trump To Fire FTC Commissioner

Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay Monday that has effectively put a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent on the brink of being overturned. The ruling, made without explanation on the court’s emergency docket, allows President Donald Trump to proceed with his firing of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, despite a lower court and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals having blocked the action just last week.

The decision has significant ramifications for the independence of federal agencies and could pave the way for President Trump to fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.

A Battle Over Executive Power

The legal battle centers on the 1935 Supreme Court case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which held that a president can’t fire officials at independent agencies for mere policy disagreements. The precedent established that “cause” for removal must be based on “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Last week, both U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan and a majority of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had sided with Slaughter, finding that the circumstances of her firing by the Trump administration “almost identically mirror” the facts of the Humphrey’s Executor case. The D.C. Circuit majority, comprised of Judges Patricia Millett and Cornelia Pillard, stated that doing anything but reinstating Slaughter “would be to defy the Supreme Court’s decisions that bind our judgments.”

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