Australia Plans to Set 16-Year-Old Age Limit for Social Media Use

Report from Reuters

In Brief – Australia plans to enact a strict age limit of 16 for the use of social media platforms in the country. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (Labor) said, “Social media is doing harm to our kids and I'm calling time on it" and specifically claimed that girls suffered from harmful depictions of body image, and boys from misogynist content. The Opposition Liberal Party expressed support for the effort. As currently planned, the legislation will not exempt teens who have parental consent or who already have accounts, the companies will be required to implement the systems to keep underage users from accessing their services, and there will not be penalties for underage users who circumvent those systems. The government is currently trialing systems that would use biometrics or government IDs. A representative of the Digital Industry Group, an Australian trade group that includes Meta, TikTok, X and Google, said, “Keeping young people safe online is a top priority” but that cutting off access to leading social media platforms could encourage young people to explore darker, unregulated parts of the internet.

Context – Albanese’s plan for a “world leading” social media age limit follows the September release of legislation to combat online misinformation by giving the Australian communications regulator the authority to police content moderation practices. That proposal is facing strong criticism as an attack on free speech. The country’s previous Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was often an aggressive critic of tech platforms, spearheading enactment of the 2021 Online Safety Bill that began regulating objectionable content on social media, forcing Google and Facebook to pay Australian media companies when their media content appeared on the platforms, and floating an earlier misinformation bill that fell to complaints of online censorship. On misinformation policing, Australia is now following the EU’s Digital Services Act regime and the UK’s Online Safety Act. But a strict ban on teens under 16 using social media would be a first for western countries.

Canada Orders TikTok to Shut Down Its Canadian Offices But Not The App

Report from the Wall Street Journal

In Brief – Canada has ordered TikTok to shut down its business operations in the country due to national security concerns. The decision followed a government review of the Chinese-owned app. The Canadian Government, like the US and many other Western countries, had already blocked the app's use on government-issued devices. Despite the order to shut down TikTok's in-country business operations, the government is not banning the app or blocking Canadians from accessing it. Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said, “the decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice.” A TikTok spokesperson said that the company would challenge the order in court. Michael Geist, a professor at Ottawa University and a long-recognized expert on internet law and policy, responded to the announcement by noting that shutting down TikTok's in-country business operations but not the app itself could have the effect of weakening the ability of the government to address risks associated with the app without reducing those risks themselves.

Context – Governments that want to pressure digital platforms to address problems generally start by requiring the platforms to have an in-country presence. They want people employed by the company in the country. Why? Because those are people that the government, including law enforcement, can make in-person demands, and yes, in a pinch, pressure. When police arrest an in-country business executive it gets the attention of executives back at the home office. To see how the dance plays out in real life, when X had its most recent showdown with the Brazilian Supreme Court over demands that the platform block some users, X preemptively shut down its offices in Brazil and got rid of all its in-country employees claiming that they could effectively become hostages. The Brazilian Government then blocked the app from operating in Brazil, demanded that the company restore its in-country presence and comply with all court orders, and only then could the app be turned back on. In short, kicking a foreign company physically out but allowing its online services to still operate is opposite of the norm.

European Commission Opens Formal DSA Investigation of Temu

Report from EuroNews

In Brief – The European Commission has announced a formal investigation of the fast-growing Chinese ecommerce platform Temu under the Digital Services Act (DSA), legislation enacted in 2022 to regulate how digital platforms address illegal and objectional content. Platforms with over 45 million active users in the EU are designated Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and face enforcement by the Commission itself. There are currently 25 VLOPs, including five online commerce marketplaces -- AliExpress, Amazon, Shein, Temu and Zalando. Commission regulators are focused on the sale of dangerous and illegal products on Temu, the potentially addictive design of the service, the systems it uses to recommend purchases, and whether researchers have appropriate access to platform data. Consumer groups have long complained about the sale of unsafe products on digital platforms, most recently on Temu and Shein.

Context – Placing the Commission in charge of regulating the VLOPs was a key DSA provision. No more deferring to regulators from small member states under the GDPR’s “one stop shop”. VLOPs also face stricter criteria for dealing with objectionable material. DSA regulators had already opened full investigations of five VLOPs -- X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and AliExpress and are questioning Snapchat and YouTube. When the Commission announced its investigation of AliExpress, the first marketplace platform to face added scrutiny, then-Commissioner Thierry Breton reminded everyone that the DSA does not just regulate how platforms deal with “hate speech, disinformation & cyberbullying” but also ecommerce. The DSA, and the EU’s Digital Markets Act, impose ongoing regulation on the digital sector in a manner like financial services or telecoms. With more than one-in-five of the VLOPs now facing formal probes, the next thing to watch for is the level of fines the Commission metes out. The lack of big fines imposed on Big Tech in the early years of the GDPR was a major criticism of that law and a motivation for the Commission-centric DSA and DMA models.

Google Employee Policy on Litigation Comms Challenged by Worker Group

Report from The Verge

In Brief – The Alphabet Workers Union, a non-traditional “minority union” that counts around 1,000 of Google’s 180,000 employees as members and speaks on company policies rather than engage in collective bargaining, has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claiming that Google management’s request of employees to “refrain” from talking about the company’s search antitrust case violated worker rights. Following the decision of Federal Judge Amit Mehta siding with the US Department of Justice and finding that Google had violated federal antitrust law in protecting its monopoly in general internet search, Google’s General Counsel sent an email directing staff to “please refrain from commenting on this case, both internally and externally.” The worker group calls the request an “overly broad directive” that might chill protected concerted activity, such as employees discussing working conditions. Even though the company email did not include an outright prohibition on speaking about the antitrust case, the NLRB could still determine that it is a violation if it concludes it would likely chill protected employee speech. A Google spokesperson said that the company respects the rights of workers to speak about the terms and conditions of employment and that, “As is standard practice, we’re simply asking that employees not speak about ongoing litigation on behalf of Google without prior approval.”

Context – The topic of unions organizing in Big Tech companies increasingly requires filters to track different developments. A key one is to segregate out organizing by “non-tech” workers. Videogame “game testers”, Tesla “image analysts” who check how automobile camera software labels images, Apple retail store employees, and Amazon distribution center workers, all tend to be hourly employees, not programmers or developers. The biggest real union success with coders is still at the New York Times with the creation of the New York Times Tech Guild. They've been engaged in two years of talks over pay equity, work-from-home policies, and performance review processes, went on strike the day before the election.