Report from the Miami Times In Brief – Federal District Judge Robert Hinkle has rejected the State of Florida’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging its 2021 law that regulates how social media companies engage in content moderation. Hinkle has overseen First...
Indonesian Antitrust Regulator Rules on TikTok Shopping Acquisition
Report from Reuters In Brief – Indonesia’s antitrust authority has determined that TikTok’s acquisition of leading local ecommerce platform Tokopedia could lead to monopolistic practices and is imposing two years of behavioral remedies to protect competition....
European Commission Opens DSA Investigations of Porn VLOPs
Report from Euractiv In Brief – The European Commission has announced that it has launched a formal investigation of four major pornographic websites over concerns that they are violating the Digital Services Act (DSA) by failing to provide adequate protection for...
Washington Post Tech Workers Vote to Unionize
Report from the Hill Rag In Brief – More than two hundred of the over three hundred tech workers at the Washington Post, including engineers, product designers, and data analysts, have voted to establish the Washington Post Tech Guild (WPTG). The final vote was...
Italian Consumer Protection Authority Targets DeepSeek for Hallucinations
Report from Reuters In Brief – Italy’s joint antitrust and consumer rights regulator has opened a probe into Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek for allegedly failing to sufficiently warn users about the danger of false information arising from so-called “hallucinations” in...
Federal Judge Puts a Hold on Florida Law Regulating Teens on Social Media
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Federal District Judge Mark Walker has blocked enforcement of Florida law HB 3 that prohibits social media platforms that have so-called “addictive features”, such as showing “like” counts and automatically playing videos, from...
French President Macron Wants a Social Media Age Threshold of 15
Report from Politico In Brief – French President Emmanuel Macron has said that he supports setting an age limit of 15 for social media platforms in the European Union, and if the EU doesn’t follow through, his government will set that age standard in France. The...
X Sues to Block New York Content Moderation Transparency Law
Report from The Hill In Brief – X has sued the state of New York to block its law requiring social media companies to explain how they moderate some content. The platform successfully challenged a similar law in California on First Amendment grounds last year. New...
Trump Administration Walks Back Revenge Tax After Minimum Tax Deal
Report from the New York Times In Brief – The Trump Administration has called on Republicans in Congress to drop a controversial tax provision dubbed the “Revenge Tax” from the massive budget reconciliation bill. Referred to as Sec. 899, the measure would impose a new...
Second Circuit Panel Rejects Meta Pixel Tracking Tech as a VPPA Violation
Report from MediaPost In Brief – A panel of the Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals has ruled that web companies don’t violate the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), a 1980’s law designed to keep private the names of videos that customers rented, when a...
European Publishers Suing Google for Adtech Monopoly Damages
Report from the Press Gazette In Brief – More than 20 European news publishers from eight countries have launched a lawsuit against Google seeking over €640 million in damages, alleging the company’s dominance in advertising technology harmed their businesses by...
European Commission Orders Meta to Allow Chatbots on WhatsApp for Free
Report from the Wall Street Journal In Brief – The European Commission competition authority has issued an interim order to Meta requiring the digital giant to allow AI companies to use WhatsApp to interact with European users without charges. The dispute stems...
Colorado Governor Vetoes Bill Restricting Data Use for Prices and Wages
Report from Colorado Newsline In Brief – Colorado Governor Jared Polis vetoed House Bill 26-1210, legislation that would have barred companies from using personal data and algorithmic tools to set individualized wages or prices. The bill targeted so-called...
Cyber Concerns Results in Ban on Foreign Use of Top Anthropic Models
Report from the Wall Street Journal In Brief – The Trump administration's decision to halt foreign access to Anthropic's most advanced Fable and Mythos AI models followed warnings from Amazon’s CEO that his company’s researchers had been able to prompt the Fable 5...
Meta Adds Funding to the Content Moderation Oversight Board
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Meta has agreed to provide the Oversight Board, an independent organization it created in 2020 to review content moderation decisions across Meta’s platforms, an additional $13 million in “top up” funding to support its operations...
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