Tag: social media

Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Repeal Section 230, Endangering Online Free Speech

A proposal in the US Senate titled the Sunset Section 230 Act seeks to dismantle one of the core protections that has shaped the modern internet.

Put forward by Senator Lindsey Graham with bipartisan backing from Senators Dick Durbin, Josh Hawley, Amy Klobuchar, and Richard Blumenthal, the bill would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, a provision that has, for nearly thirty years, shielded online platforms from liability for the actions of their users.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Under the plan, Section 230 would be fully repealed two years after the bill’s passage.

This short transition period would force websites, social platforms, and hosting services to rethink how they handle public interaction.

The current statute stops courts from holding online platforms legally responsible as the publishers of material shared by their users.

Its protection has been instrumental in allowing everything from local discussion boards to global platforms such as YouTube and Wikipedia to operate without being sued over every user comment or upload.

The legislation’s text removes Section 230 entirely and makes “conforming amendments” across multiple federal laws.

“I am extremely pleased that there is such wide and deep bipartisan support for repealing Section 230, which protects social media companies from being sued by the people whose lives they destroy.

Giant social media platforms are unregulated, immune from lawsuits, and are making billions of dollars in advertising revenue off some of the most unsavory content and criminal activity imaginable,” said Senator Graham.

“It is past time to allow those who have been harmed by these behemoths to have their day in court.”

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In rare public comments, career DOJ officials offer chilling warnings about online network 764

In striking and chilling terms, several career Justice Department officials on Thursday offered dire warnings about the online extremist network “764,” whose young followers around the world use popular social media platforms to target, groom and push vulnerable teens into harming themselves and others.

“I don’t think Stephen King is dark enough to come up with some of the stuff that these kids are coming up with,” said Justin Sher, a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“It is as serious a threat as you can imagine,” Sher’s Justice Department colleague James Donnelly said. “[And] they’re trying to metastasize the evil.”

Their comments came during a panel about 764 hosted by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. It was a rare public appearance for two career prosecutors who the panel’s moderator described as “the point people” on 764 within the department’s National Security Division.

Sher and Donnelly both noted that 764 members are increasingly trying to push victims to take deadly actions, including suicide or school shootings and other mass-casualty attacks.

As ABC News has previously reported, 764 members find vulnerable victims on popular online platforms, elicit private information and intimate sexual images from them, and then use that sensitive material to threaten and blackmail victims into mutilating themselves, harming others, or taking other violent action — all while streaming it on social media so others can watch and then disseminate recordings of it.

“For them, content is currency,” Sher said. “So they are building their content inventory … and putting it out there to build their status within these groups.”

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US Suspends $41 Billion Tech Deal with UK over Online Censorship Laws

The great transatlantic tech romance has hit the skids. What was sold as a landmark agreement binding Silicon Valley brains to British ambition has been shoved into neutral, all because Britain decided it quite fancies telling American machines what they are allowed to say.

Washington has now suspended the much-trumpeted US-UK technology agreement, a decision driven by mounting alarm over Britain’s new censorship law, the Online Safety Act.

The idea that a British regulator might fine or muzzle American firms has landed in Washington like a dropped wrench.

One participant in the talks put it bluntly, telling The Telegraph, “Americans went into this deal thinking Britain were going to back off regulating American tech firms but realized it was going to restrict the speech of American chatbots.”

The Online Safety Act gives Britain the power to fine companies it believes are enabling “harmful” or “hateful” speech, concepts elastic enough to stretch around just about anything if you pull hard enough.

The communications regulator Ofcom has not been shy about using these powers.

Enforcement notices have already landed on the desks of major American firms, even when their servers, staff, and coffee machines are nowhere near Britain.

From Washington’s perspective, this looks less like safety and more like Britain peering over the Atlantic with a ruler, ready to rap American knuckles.

The White House had been keen on the £31 ($41) billion Tech Prosperity Deal, seeing it as a front door to closer ties on AI research and digital trade.

Instead, officials began to see the Online Safety Act as a mechanism for deciding what American platforms, and their algorithms, are allowed to say. Chatbots like ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok suddenly looked like potential defendants in a British courtroom, accused of wrongthink.

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YouTube Shuts Down Channels Using AI To Create Fake Movie Trailers Watched By Millions

 YouTube has terminated two prominent channels that used artificial intelligence to create fake movie trailers, Deadline can reveal.

The Google-owned video giant has switched off Screen Culture and KH Studio, which together boasted well over 2 million subscribers and more than a billion views.

The channels have been replaced with the message: “This page isn’t available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else.”

Screen Culture and KH Studio were approached for comment. They are based in India and Georgia, respectively.

Earlier this year, YouTube suspended ads on Screen Culture and KH Studio following a Deadline investigation into fake movie trailers plaguing the platform since the rise of generative AI.

The channels later returned to monetization when they started adding “fan trailer,” “parody” and “concept trailer” to their video titles. But those caveats disappeared In recent months, prompting concern in the fan-made trailer community.

YouTube’s position is that the channels’ decision to revert to their previous behavior violated its spam and misleading-metadata policies. This resulted in their termination.

“The monster was defeated,” one YouTuber told Deadline following the enforcement action.

Deadline’s investigation revealed that Screen Culture spliced together official footage with AI images to create franchise trailers that duped many YouTube viewers.

Screen Culture founder Nikhil P. Chaudhari said his team of a dozen editors exploited YouTube’s algorithm by being early with fake trailers and constantly iterating with videos.

For example, Screen Culture had created 23 versions of a trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps by March, some of which outranked the official trailer in YouTube search results. More recent examples include HBO’s new Harry Potter series and Netflix’s Wednesday.

Our deep dive into fake trailers revealed that instead of protecting copyright on these videos, a handful of Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros Discovery and Sony, secretly asked YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue from the AI-heavy videos flowed in their direction. The studios declined to comment.

Disney properties featured prominently on Screen Culture and KH Studio. The Mouse House sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google last week, claiming that its AI training models and services infringe on its copyrights on a “massive scale.”

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How new social media checks would change travel to US

The US is seeking to significantly expand its 

vetting of social media accounts for people who want to enter the country.

In 2019, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the US imposed a requirement that visa applicants disclose their social media accounts. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now aims to apply a similar requirement to another group: travellers from countries such as the UK, Japan and Australia whose citizens can enter the US without a visa.

The Trump administration argues that the rule change is necessary to ensure travellers entering the country “do not bear hostile attitudes” to the US and its citizens. Civil-liberties groups warn that the approach marks a sweeping expansion of federal surveillance over routine travel. Here’s what to know.

What exactly is the US proposing?

The US is proposing that foreign visitors from countries whose citizens can travel to the US without a visa, but must still apply online for advance authorisation, provide their social media history from the last five years. 

DHS did not respond to a query about what information applicants from visa-waiver countries would need to supply for the social media screening. (Visa applicants are required to list all social media identifiers they have used in the past five years.)

Applicants would also be required to supply, when “feasible,” a broad set of additional personal information: telephone numbers used in the last five years; e-mail addresses used in the last ten years; IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos; family members’ names, residences, places and dates of birth, and phone numbers used in the last five years; and personal biometrics – fingerprints, DNA samples, iris scans, and facial images. The proposal does not clarify how biometric information would be collected. 

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UK Parliament Rejects Petition to Repeal Online Censorship Law, Calls for Expanded Censorship

This week in the UK, Parliament held a debate in response to a public petition that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures calling for the repeal of the Online Safety Act (OSA).

It was a rare opportunity for elected officials to prove they still listen to their constituents.

Instead, the overwhelming message from MPs was clear: thanks for your concern, but we’d actually like even more control over what you can do online.

One by one, MPs stood up not to defend free expression, or question whether one of the most radical internet control laws in modern British history might have gone too far, but to argue that it hadn’t gone far enough.

“It’s Not Censorship, It’s Responsibility” (Apparently)

Lizzi Collinge, Labour MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, insisted the OSA “is not about controlling speech.” She claimed it was about giving the online world the same “safety features” as the offline one.

This was a recurring theme throughout the debate: reassure the public that speech isn’t being restricted while calling for more mechanisms to restrict it.

Ian Murray, Minister for Digital Government and Data, also insisted the OSA protects freedom of expression. According to him, there’s no contradiction in saying people can speak freely, as long as they’re age-verified, avoid VPNs, and don’t say anything that might be flagged by a government regulator.

It’s a neat trick. Say you support free speech, then build an entire law designed to monitor, filter, and police it.

VPNs in the Firing Line

There is a growing fixation inside government with VPNs. These are basic privacy tools used by millions of people every day, often to protect their data. But several MPs, including Jim McMahon, Julia Lopez, and Ian Murray, suggested VPNs should be subject to age verification or regulatory restrictions.

It’s unclear whether these MPs understand how VPNs work or if they simply dislike the idea of anyone browsing the internet without supervision.

Either way, the intent is clear. The government wants fewer ways for people to browse anonymously.

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Twitter user is jailed for 18 months for two anti-immigration tweets made after Christmas market car attack that were viewed just 33 times

A Twitter user who posted two anti-immigration tweets that were viewed just 33 times has been jailed for stirring up racial hatred.

Luke Yarwood, 36, received an 18-month sentence after tweeting in the wake of the Christmas market car attack in Magdeburg, Germany, in December 2024.

His posts were reported to the police by Yarwood’s own brother-in-law who he did not get on with.

The case has drawn comparisons with Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old wife of a Tory councillor from Northampton, who was jailed after she called for people to ‘set fire’ to asylum hotels in the wake of the Southport attack in July 2024.

Siobhan Linsley, prosecuting, said Yarwood’s ‘extremely unpleasant posts’ had the potential to trigger disorder at one of three high-profile migrant hotels in Bournemouth, Dorset, near to where he lives.

His barrister argued the posts had 33 views between them and were the ‘impotent rantings of a socially isolated man’ that had no ‘real-world’ consequences.

But Judge Jonathan Fuller said Yarwood’s ‘odious’ tweets were designed to stir up racial hatred and incite violence, and jailed him.

Bournemouth Crown Court heard Yarwood from Burton, near Christchurch, Dorset, made a series of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration posts from December 21, 2024 to January 29, 2025.

It started the day after the car attack in Germany in which six people were killed. At the time misinformation on social media suggested the person responsible was an Islamic extremist.

Yarwood responded to a post that stated thousands of Germans were taking to the streets and they wanted their country back.

Yarwood replied: ‘Head for the hotels housing them and burn them to the ground.’

While further posts by him displayed a ‘rabid dislike’ for foreigners, particularly Islam, these did not stir up racial hatred or incite violence.

For example, Yarwood wrote about the amount of foreign people in Bournemouth, stating: ‘Walking for ages and not hearing a word of English.’

He also wrote of his disgust at seeing ‘asylum seekers outside the hotel staring at young college girls’.

The second illegal tweet was made in response to a post by GB News.

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House Lawmakers Unite in Moral Panic, Advancing 18 “Kids’ Online Safety” Bills That Expand Surveillance and Weaken Privacy

The House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade spent its latest markup hearing on Thursday proving that if there’s one bipartisan passion left in Washington, it’s moral panic about the internet.

Eighteen separate bills on “kids’ online safety” were debated, amended, and then promptly advanced to the full committee. Not one was stopped.

Ranking Member Jan Schakowsky (D) set the tone early, describing the bills as “terribly inadequate” and announcing she was “furious.”

She complained that the package “leaves out the big issues that we are fighting for.” If it’s not clear, Schakowsky is complaining that the already-controversial bills don’t go far enough.

Eighteen bills now move forward, eight of which hinge on some form of age verification, which would likely require showing a government ID. Three: App Store Accountability (H.R. 3149), the SCREEN Act (H.R. 1623), and the Parents Over Platforms Act (H.R. 6333), would require it outright.

The other five rely on what lawmakers call the “actual knowledge” or “willful disregard” standards, which sound like legalese but function as a dare to platforms: either know everyone’s age, or risk a lawsuit.

The safest corporate response, of course, would be to treat everyone as a child until they’ve shown ID.

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Australia launches youth social media ban it says will be the world’s ‘first domino’

Can children and teenagers be forced off social media en masse? Australia is about to find out.

More than 1 million social media accounts held by users under 16 are set to be deactivated in Australia on Wednesday in a divisive world-first ban that has inflamed a culture war and is being closely watched in the United States and elsewhere.

Social media companies will have to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that under-16s in Australia cannot set up accounts on their platforms and that existing accounts are deactivated or removed.

Australian officials say the landmark ban, which lawmakers swiftly approved late last year, is meant to protect children from addictive social media platforms that experts say can be disastrous for their mental health.

“With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the man who created the feature as ‘behavioral cocaine,’” Communications Minister Anika Wells told the National Press Club in Canberra last week.

While many parents and even their children have welcomed the ban, others say it will hinder young people’s ability to express themselves and connect with others, as well as access online support that is crucial for those from marginalized groups or living in isolated parts of rural Australia. Two 15-year-olds have brought a legal challenge against it to the nation’s highest court.

Supporters say the rest of the world will soon follow the example set by the Australian ban, which faced fierce resistance from social media companies.

“I’ve always referred to this as the first domino, which is why they pushed back,” Julie Inman Grant, who regulates online safety as Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, said at an event in Sydney last week.

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Australian Leaders and Legacy Media Celebrates Launch of Online Digital ID Age Verification Law

It was sold as a “historic day,” the kind politicians like to frame with national pride and moral purpose.

Cameras flashed in Canberra as Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stood at the podium, declaring victory in the fight to “protect children.”

What Australians actually got was a nationwide digital ID system. Starting December 10, every citizen logging into select online platforms must now pass through digital ID verification, biometric scans, face matching, and document checks, all justified as a way to keep under-16s off social media.

Kids are now banned from certain platforms, but it’s the adults who must hand over their faces, IDs, and biometric data to prove they’re not kids.

“Protecting children” has been converted into a universal surveillance upgrade for everyone.

According to Albanese, who once said if he became a dictator the first thing he would do was ban social media, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 will “change lives.”

He described it as a “profound reform” that will “reverberate around the world,” giving parents “peace of mind” and inspiring “the global community” to copy Australia’s example.

The Prime Minister’s pride, he said, had “never been greater.” Listening to him, you’d think he’d cured cancer rather than making face scans mandatory to log in to Facebook.

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