SUMMARY The Fifth Circuit will rehear challenges to Texas’s SCOPE Act, reopening a fight over state-mandated filtering of social media. The law orders covered platforms to prevent minors from seeing broad categories of content, raising threats to lawful political speech and mental-health discussion. A July panel ruling preserved a block on the filtering mandate under…
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SUMMARY Britain’s High Court upheld Ofcom’s demands for three years of moderation data from Meta, WhatsApp, TikTok, and X. Ofcom can cite broad purposes such as online safety research or keeping its codes under review without having a specific project, rule change, or investigation in mind. The companies asked the court to require Ofcom to…
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SUMMARY New Mexico’s $25 billion penalty against Meta includes findings over Facebook’s promises to suppress “misinformation” and “hate speech,” categories that encompass constitutionally protected expression. The First Amendment contains no general exception for hateful or false speech. New Mexico used consumer-protection law to penalize Facebook’s assurances about suppressing that content. Twenty-six statements became nearly 44…
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SUMMARY Canada’s Supreme Court will hear the federal government’s appeal against two rulings that rejected its use of emergency powers against the Freedom Convoy. The crackdown required banks to freeze accounts and share private financial information. Police supplied details on roughly 57 people and entities, resulting in about 257 frozen accounts. The crackdown bypassed prior…
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SUMMARY Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes told British lawmakers on Monday that the regulator may never collect fines against foreign websites if foreign courts stand in the way. Only two of the eleven fines Ofcom has issued under the Online Safety Act since March have actually been paid. The admission comes weeks after a…
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Summary Teach Us Consent received 89% of its 2024/25 revenue from government. Albanese then showcased the group while presenting his digital crackdown as change driven from below. FOI records show private lobbying with Reset Australia and Digital Rights Watch, a reply from a senior prime ministerial adviser the next morning, and a meeting scheduled for…
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SUMMARY The US-funded Atlantic Council is pushing the EU to finance organizations that help enforce its digital censorship laws against American technology companies. The Council received at least $10.8 million in disclosed US government support during 2019–2024, including millions from the State and Defense departments. DFRLab’s report, developed through workshops with the Global Disinformation Index,…
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SUMMARY EU law allows the Commission to compel employee-level access to AI models for specified evaluations, backed by fines and powers to restrict models’ availability. The EU’s voluntary code sets expectations for privileged outside scrutiny, while Brussels pays evaluators to develop tests and assessment methods. The campaign for permanent embedding extends into the EU’s advisory…
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Australia’s Federal Court has ruled that eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant cannot impose a messaging-service standard on X simply because the social media platform lets users send direct messages. The 12 August decision blocks the regulator’s attempt to layer a more intrusive set of detection rules on top of the code already governing X. In…
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SUMMARY The RAND corporation receives hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding anually via the federal government. RAND has partnered with METR, the well-funded AI safety org that Anthropic wants to embed as government-mandated AI safety evaluators in every company, despite concerns over the organization’s ideological biases. The joint RAND-METR initiative is backed…
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