Florida asked the Supreme Court to hear the state’s controversial law targeting social media companies, stepping up action as states seek to pass laws governing content moderation.
Meanwhile, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, is urging the Senate to pass the Cyber Diplomacy Act. Protecting America from Cyber Attacks.
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The content moderation war continues.
The state of Florida filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Wednesday to hear a lawsuit over how social media platforms regulate moderate content.
Florida asked the high court to weigh in after an appeals court struck down key provisions of the law in May, ruling in favor of tech industry groups that filed a lawsuit against it. The groups argued the law would violate First Amendment rights and lead to more dangerous content and hate speech online.
Florida law seeks to prohibit tech companies from blocking users or censoring content based on political views. Accusations from GOP members that tech platforms censor content based on anti-conservative bias are common accusations following Twitter and Facebook’s suspension of former President Trump’s accounts.
- The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals scored a major court victory last week for a Texas law similar to the one passed in Florida. The law restricts social media companies from removing users or offensive content. The court’s decision overturned an earlier order by the Supreme Court, allowing the move to take effect.
- A brief filed by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) cited the 5th Circuit’s decision last week to uphold the Texas law. She wrote that the 11th Circuit’s decision to block Florida’s law “conflicts squarely” with the Texas decision.
Read more here.
King urged the Senate to approve the cyber law
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, is urging the Senate to pass the Cyber Diplomacy Act, one of the key recommendations the commission has been pushing as part of a strategic approach to countering them. America Against Cyber Attacks.
He said the bill itself has not passed the Senate, although key elements of the act have been implemented, including the establishment of a cyber bureau in the State Department and the confirmation of an ambassador to lead it.
- “I think the biggest missing piece right now is nearly finished, and that’s cyber diplomacy law,” King said.
- The bill passed the House last year and is now sitting in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee awaiting a vote.
The legislation would establish the new Cyber Bureau within the State Department and help determine how to fund it as the bureau expands over time.
Read more here.
TikTok has updated its policies following misinformation
TikTok announced new policies for political accounts on Wednesday after a report last week found widespread misinformation on the social media platform.
TikTok’s president of global business solutions, Blake Chandlee, wrote in a blog post that the platform will begin testing mandatory verification systems for accounts linked to governments, politicians and political parties. Currently, authentication badges are optional.
TikTok prohibits campaign fundraising on the app and seeks to further limit the monetization of political accounts by blocking access to financial features such as gifting, tipping and e-commerce.
You’ll be eligible for Creators Fund, a political account that rewards popular TikTok creators with cash.
Read more here.
Short term income sharing
YouTube announced on Tuesday that it will soon give some of the advertising revenue from the company’s short-form video platform to creators.
YouTube runs ads between short videos posted to the platform, similar to Tik Tok and dubbed “YouTube Shorts”.
The company In early 2023, it said it would expand the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) — which allows qualified content creators who make long-form videos to earn ad revenue from their content — by pooling ad revenue into shorts and rewarding some of them. For creators based on the number of views.
YouTube allows creators to keep 45 percent of ad revenue, the company wrote in a blog post. The amount paid to each creator is based on their share of total views on the platform and does not vary if they use music in their videos, which often comes with a platform license fee.
Read more here.
Juul sues the FDA
Electronic cigarette maker Joule Labs is suing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for failing to release documents supporting the agency’s order to pull Joule products from the US market.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., the company said the FDA is violating the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to release “scientific disciplinary reviews” based on the FDA’s sales ban.
“The agency sought to withhold one of the most widely exercised freedoms—the deliberative process privilege—from most of the materials,” the lawsuit states. “However, the prohibited materials are central to understanding the basis of the FDA’s marketing refusal order” and to understanding whether the agency is balancing the public health benefits and risks of Joule products as required by law, as well as whether the agency’s reasoning is “scientifically sound.”
The FDA announced in late June that it was banning sales of Joule e-cigarettes nationwide, saying the company had not demonstrated that keeping the products on the market was “appropriate to protect public health.”
The next day, a federal appeals court temporarily upheld the administrative decision.
Read more here.
Bits and pieces
Op-ed to chew on: To Solve Big Tech’s New ‘Big Lie’: All Choices Are Broken.
Popular links from around the web:
QAnon videos get millions of views on TikTok as Trump embraces conspiracy theory (NBC News/Ben Goggin)
Regulators Sue Amazon for Disciplining Singling Out Union Organizers (The New York Times / Noam Scheiber).
Meta: We’re Not A Very Big Tech Now (Axios / Ashley Gold)
🥤 Easy Click: Cultural reset
One more thing: shield selection staff
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rejected a multimillion-dollar proposal by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CIA), a federally funded charity, to prevent harassment of election officials before the November midterms, CNN reported Tuesday.
The proposal would increase resources to monitor outside influence and report misinformation and disinformation around midterm elections, citing multiple people familiar with the matter, but officials raised concerns that the initiative could be seen as partisan.
DHS shut down the Counterintelligence Management Board in May after receiving condemnation from Republicans, some of whom compared the effort to the dystopian novel “1984.”
“Despite the message, DHS is frustrated after the Disinformation Management Board’s release failed. [from administration officials] “It was clear that we could not go back, that we could not afford to abuse our rights,” a senior US official told CNN.
Read more here.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out the Hill’s Technology and Cyber Security pages for the latest news and coverage. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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