In a filing submitted to an Austin, Texas district court, Judge Robert Pitman ruled that the bill — called HB 20 — would violate social media companies’ First Amendment right to exercise editorial control over the content that appears on their platforms.
“HB 20 prohibits virtually all content moderation, the very tool that social medial platforms employ to make their platforms safe, useful, and enjoyable for users,” the filing states.
HB 20 was due to come into force on Thursday.
Pitman’s ruling came in response to a legal challenge by NetChoice and the CCIA, two industry groups whose members include Google, Amazon, Meta (formerly known as Facebook), and Twitter.
The CCIA said in a press release: “Today’s outcome is not surprising. The First Amendment ensures that the Government can’t force a citizen or company to be associated with a viewpoint they disapprove of, and that applies with particular force when a State law would prevent companies from enforcing policies against Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and disinformation from foreign agents.”
Russian state media agencies omitted any mention of damaging information about Vladimir Putin in its coverage of the Pandora Papers leak.
Among the revelations in the trove of leaked financial records is that a woman who reportedly had years-long a clandestine relationship with Putin, Svetlana Krivonogikh, is the owner of a luxury property in Monaco.
The claim was reported by outlets including The Guardian which had access to the Pandora Papers, a vast array of documents leaked from financial-service providers around the world.
It was one of a number of assets valued at around $100 million that the papers indicate Krivonogikh owned, according to the reports. The papers indicate that Monaco was where several members of Putin’s circle had assets.
The papers were investigated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and shared with outlets including The Washington Post and BBC.
It instead focussed on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a foe of the Kremlin. According to the papers, he used offshore companies to buy luxury properties abroad
It is also paid attention to financier George Soros, a favored target of right-wing and Kremlin conspiracy theories, in an apparent bid to portray the leaks as a politically-motivated plot. (His Open Society Foundations is among 22 organisations that provides funding to the ICIJ.)
In its two English-language reports on the leaks TASS, Russia’s other pre-eminent state news agency, also made no mention of Putin. Instead, it covered a statement from Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, on the papers exposing the US as a tax haven.
Russian-language reports by TASS and RIA reviewed by Insider also covered the allegations in detail, but without mentioning Putin or his associates.
The outlet noted that “The Guardian had to admit in its reporting that the Russian president ‘does not appear in the files by name.’“
“Instead, the paper focused on Putin’s ‘friends,’ including billionaire businessman Gennady Timchenko, and Putin’s rumored past ‘girlfriend,’ it said.
The Kremlin has long exerted tight control over the news media in Russia, and in recent months has engaged in a crackdown on independent media outlets in the country it has labelled “foreign agents.”
The leaks of the so-called Panama Papers in 2016 also implicated members of Putin’s inner circle with schemes to use networks of offshore companies to launder money obtained through corruption.
LinkedIn is censoring profiles on its Chinese website of prominent journalists over “prohibited content” that is considered offensive to the country’s ruling communist party.
The Microsoft-owned company sent emails to users – some of whom posted screenshots online – informing them that their profiles “will not be made viewable in China.”
“While we strongly support freedom of expression, we recognized when we launched that we would need to adhere to the requirements of the Chinese government in order to operate in China,” LinkedIn told affected users, who confirmed the authenticity of the email to Insider.
The bans represent the significant “soft power” China’s government yields as corporations chase a financial necessity to expand into the lucrative market. That often means complying with local laws and customs by blocking specific content or editing out bits of media the party may find unfavorable.
A LinkedIn spokesperson told Insider that the company “respects the laws that apply to us, including adhering to Chinese government regulations for our localized version of LinkedIn in China. For members whose profile visibility is limited within China, their profiles are still visible across the rest of the globe where LinkedIn is available.”
Reporter Melissa Chan posted her email on Twitter, which said the offensive content was located in the Publications section of her profile.
Another journalist, Greg Bruno, posted his email on LinkedIn and was also not given any specifics. He told Insider that his book, “Blessings from Beijing: Inside China’s Soft-Power war on Tibet,” is listed on his profile and that “it seems clear that LinkedIn made the decision to choose profits over truth.”
And Axios reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who reports on China, said LinkedIn told her her Summary section is where the offending content was housed.
China has subjected hundreds of thousands in the Uyghur minority to brutal forced labor in concentration camps, where they are forced to abandon their culture for Chinese customs. Human Rights Watch said the nation is committing “crimes against humanity.” Beijing has said they’re merely “reeducation centers.”
Ethnic Uyghur demonstrators take part in a protest against China, in Istanbul, Turkey October 1, 2020.
Murad Sezer/Reuters
And China has long contended that Tibet is part of the nation and has subjected rural Tibetans to similar treatment since 2016. As of late 2020, 15% of the Tibetan population was sent to harsh “military-style” training centers. The Party has characterized the practice as a way to fight poverty.
Bruno told Insider that he is “dismayed that an American tech company is caving to the demands of a government intent on controlling access to information.” Bruno and Allen-Ebrahimian also speculated if the removals came from a LinkedIn algorithm or a direct order from China.
Allen-Ebrahimian said LinkedIn offered to review her profile after she updates it, but doing so would delete that content from her profile in every market, not just China’s.
“LinkedIn appears to offer a free self-censorship consulting service,” she wrote, later adding that she hasn’t changed that section.
But she also pointed out that the company was merely doing what is standard in the business world by expanding into a new market and following the rules. LinkedIn acknowledged as much, according to the email Bruno posted.
“While we strongly support freedom of expression, we recognized when we launched that we would need to adhere to the requirements of the Chinese government in order to operate in China,” the email reads.
Two major trade groups representing social media platforms Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are suing the Attorney General of Texas over a new state law that supporters say would limit the “censorship” of conservative users.
HB20, which passed in Texas earlier this month, bans social-media companies with more than 50 million monthly active users from censoring people because of “the viewpoint of the user or another person,” the law states. It also allows users “banned from social media for their political beliefs” to sue the platform that banned them.
Tech companies say the law “would unconstitutionally require platforms like YouTube and Facebook to disseminate, for example, pro-Nazi speech, terrorist propaganda, foreign government disinformation, and medical misinformation,” according to the suit.
The plaintiffs cite multiple court decisions defending a private company’s right to editorial discretion under the first amendment. This includes a Florida law similarly targeting social media companies that was blocked by a federal judge in June.
“Forcing those companies to give equal treatment to all viewpoints puts Nazi party political speech and extremist messages from Taliban sympathizers on equal footing with God bless America,” Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, told USA Today.
On the other side of the lawsuit is Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fervent Trump loyalist who spoke at the rally preceding the Jan 6. attack on the US capitol.
Texas GOP leaders initially raised Big Tech censorship concerns following the US capitol insurrection that killed five people and injured more than 100 officers.
In response, several major social-media networks banned former president Donald Trump from their platforms citing a violation of their terms and services, in addition to blocking accounts linked to election misinformation.
“The seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President of the United States and several leading voices not only chills free speech, it wholly silences those whose speech and political beliefs do not align with leaders of Big Tech companies,” Paxton said in a news release one week after the riot.
“I will defend the First Amendment and ensure that conservative voices have the right to be heard,” Paxton said in a statement. “Big Tech does not have the authority to police the expressions of people whose political viewpoint they simply disagree with.”
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
The Lithuanian government has told people to throw away their Chinese phones and avoid new ones, claiming some of them had the ability to find and censor certain terms like “democracy movement” in people’s texts.
“Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible,” Lithuania’s deputy defense minister, Margiris Abukevicius, told reporters on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
In a Tuesday report, the Lithuanian defense ministry’s National Cyber Security Centre said that Mi 10T 5G phones sold in Europe by China’s Xiaomi Corp, for example, were able to detect and censor terms including “free Tibet, “long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement.”
Discussions about the pro-independence movement in Tibet, sovereignty of Taiwan, and pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong are highly sensitive subjects in China. Those terms are heavily censored on Chinese social media, and people who discuss these topics are punished.
The Lithuanian report said that the censorship function was generally turned off in the phones in the European Union, but that the feature can be turned back on remotely, per Reuters. The report did not say where the feature could be turned on, or by whom.
Xiaomi did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
A new, anti-censorship social media platform set up by Donald Trump’s former aides has already been overrun with porn, reports say.
GETTR, which is led by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, advertises itself as holding freedom of speech as a “core value.” But users have already taken advantage of the website’s lax approach to moderation, according to reports.
According to Politico, the app went live in app stores in mid-June but is set to launch officially on July 4.
Comments under the platform’s welcome message currently include pornographic images and GIFs, Mother Jones reported. Users have also spammed the platform’s first post with graphic hentai videos and images of Hillary Clinton’s face photoshopped onto a woman’s naked body, the outlet said.
There are also comments including images of old men wearing diapers, Gizmodo reported.
A description for GETTR on Apple’s App Store shows that it has a 17+ “mature” rating.
And while the platform cites a commitment to not censoring content, GETTR’s terms of service show that it reserves the right to “address content” that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, pornographic, violent.”
As Insider’s Grace Panetta reported, GETTR’s format resembles that of Twitter, with trending topics, verified users, and the ability to reshare and like posts.
The former president is yet to join GETTR and, according to Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs, has no plans to participate and still intends to launch his own social media website.
He was barred from platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram following the Capitol riot, and recently shut down his blog due to low readership rates and widespread mockery.
According to Politico, Miller recently left his post as Trump’s spokesman to launch GETTR, and Tim Murtaugh, who was once Trump’s communications director, also works as a consultant for the app.
Mike Pompeo in an interview said college censorship is scarier to him than the Taliban.
“I met with the Taliban, I met with Chairman Kim. None of that scares me as much as what’s happening in our universities and on our campuses today,” he said.
Pompeo said thinking about censorship on college campuses keeps him up at night.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he finds censorship on college campuses more disturbing than the Taliban.
“I get asked all the time, what keeps you up at night,” Pompeo said in an interview that aired Friday. “What’s the thing that worries you the most?”
Speaking to businessman John Catsimatidis on his radio show, “Cats at Night,” Pompeo said he’s “met with a lot of bad people” during his time as an official working under the Trump administration.
“I met with the Taliban, I met with Chairman Kim,” he said. “None of that scares me as much as what’s happening in our universities and on our campuses today.”
“Wow,” Catsimatidis said in response.
Pompeo continued, elaborating but not citing specific examples:
“I watch what’s taking place there and the inability for us to speak our mind, the fact that people want to put pressure on people who have a conservative mindset, and just deny them the space to go speak,” he said. “The fact that we now are accusing people who are just saying things that are common sense about how to treat everyone equally, fairly, are being accused of being racist – those are dangerous things in our democracy, in our republic.”
Pompeo went on to say the country’s founders “created a nation that depended on people with virtue and character and faith.”
“If we lose those things,” he said, “if we lose the bubble on those, you can send diplomats to 180 countries in the world and none of it will matter because if America is weak at home, our capacity to influence the world is diminished.”
Colleges and universities all over the country have previously uninvited speakers like far-right commentator Ben Shapiro and trans activist Janet Mock.
Microsoft-owned search engine Bing was not displaying any image results to US users who searched for the term “tank man” on Friday, and appeared to be down-ranking some image searches for other terms related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Vice earlier reported that users in France, Switzerland, and the UK also saw no results when searching Bing for images of “tank man.”
Insider was able to confirm the lack of image results for US users, and also found significant discrepancies between the image results for “Tiananmen Square tank man” shown by Bing versus Google.
“This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Insider.
Microsoft Bing showed users pictures of Tiananmen Square’s “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” while Google showed the infamous image of a protestor in front of Chinese tanks.
Screenshot/Microsoft/Google
Microsoft’s apparent censorship came on the anniversary of the student-led protests, in which the Chinese military killed at least hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators. The phrase “tank man” refers to an infamous photo of a single protestor obstructing the path of Chinese tanks.
For countless Indians, Twitter has been a way to track down medical supplies for friends and family sick with COVID-19, as a second wave overwhelmed hospitals.
But when one man appealed for oxygen for his sick grandfather in April, he was arrested and charged with spreading misinformation. Authorities in Uttar Pradesh, where the man lived, claimed there was no shortage, dismissing “rumors and propaganda on social media.”
One head of an NGO in New Delhi, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisal, told Insider he was called by police and told to shut down a Telegram channel he was running to procure medical supplies for those in need.
Authorities have been going after the platforms themselves too. Earlier this week, police went to Twitter’s offices in Delhi after the company labelled tweets by ministers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP party as “manipulated media.”
BJP member of parliament Dr. Vinay Sahasrabuddhe was among those whose tweets Twitter labelled “manipulated media.” He shared a document claiming it was an opposition party plan to use the COVID situation to embarrass the Government. The opposition claimed it was fake.
Twitter
They are also clamping down on more trivial matters. Last week, the government ordered Facebook and Twitter to remove references to the “Indian variant” of coronavirus – despite the fact the government itself was happy to call another variant “South African.”
Indian authorities’ attempts to censor criticism have become more pronounced in recent months.
At that time, COVID-19 cases were low and ministers encouraged people to resume normal life. But a more severe second wave struck. Earlier in May, the country set a global record for cases recorded in one day – 414,188 – and its seven-day average of daily cases is still more than 200,000, more than double the peak of the first wave in September.
The seven-day average of India’s daily COVID case rate shows the scale of the second wave.
Our World In Data
Ministers have been condemned for not only failing to prepare for second wave, but allowing and even staging mass gatherings. In late April, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook were asked to censor dozens of tweets and posts that criticized such failures.
This week, the standoff is coming to a head. A new law came into force Wednesday that threatens tech companies and their employees with prosecution and potentially imprisonment if they don’t comply with takedown orders within 36 hours.
Twitter issued a statement Thursday condemning “intimidation tactics” against their employees and the new rules’ “potential threat to freedom of expression.”
The statement vowed to continue a “constructive dialogue with the Indian Government” but added: “We plan to advocate for changes to elements of these regulations that inhibit free, open public conversation.”
Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been refuges for dissent in India. A US State Department report noted in March that Indian government officials were “involved in silencing or intimidating critical media outlets” through physical attacks, pressuring owners, as well as targeting sponsors and “encouraging frivolous lawsuits.”
Raman Jit Singh Chima, the Asia Policy Director at Access Now, a non-profit promoting digital civil rights, said the government’s actions were creating a “chilling impact on free speech.”
He added the repressive action tended to happen “when they think they are under pressure or come under more online criticism.”
Pratik Sinha, who founded one of India’s leading fact-checking platforms, AltNews, said the government had been content to leave social media alone before the farmers’ protests, when it was enjoying praise and India appeared to have avoided a COVID-19 disaster.
An elderly farmers shouts slogans as protesters block a major highway during a protest at the Delhi-Haryana state border in India on December 1, 2020.
Altaf Qadri/AP Photos
But Sinha said: “As soon as the narrative changed, people started using the very medium that has benefitted the ruling party for such a long time to voice their discontent … they don’t want these critical voices to come out.”
“These are clearly diversion tactics that the government is adopting in the middle of a pandemic.”
Samir Jain, policy director at digital rights think-tank the Center for Democracy and Technology, said threats of imprisonment were akin to “hostage provisions.”
He added the new rules would “only empower the government to escalate its attempts to stifle legitimate speech and further imperil the future of online free expression in India.”
Facebook and Google have both issued carefully-worded statements in response to the new rules, in contrast to Twitter’s strongly-worded response.
Google said it would “ensure that we’re combating illegal content in an effective and fair way, and in order to comply with local laws in the jurisdictions that we operate in.”
A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the company would “comply with the provisions of the IT rules and continue to discuss a few of the issues which need more engagement with the government.”
Senior BJP member of parliament and former party vice-president Dr. Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, whose tweet was among those labelled “manipulated media” by Twitter, told Insider in a statement: “The refusal and reluctance of social media platforms to abide by the rules and regulations made applicable by the government is inexplicable.”
“Law of the land is supreme and nobody can disregard India’s constitution,” he added.
“Besides, the opaqueness of their algorithms and lack of transparency in their decision making makes their case of taking a unilateral decision of flagging some Tweets totally undemocratic.
“India is a robust and institutionalized democracy and the Government cannot allow any company to take us for granted.”
AltNews’s Sinha said the government could not continue to suppress its failures over the pandemic.
“People are grieving. There’s anger,” he added. “You can’t just suppress anger, it’s bound to come out.”
A specific exemption included in a new law signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to draw fire from critics including the Internet Association, an industry group representing 40 of the world’s leading internet companies.
The legislation, SB 7072, was signed by DeSantis on Monday and bills itself as a way to hold tech companies accountable and protect individuals’ ability to post, share, and access content on social media.
The law forces social-media companies to host all candidates for political office in the state, regardless of what they say, or face fines of up to $250,000 per day. In addition, private Florida citizens who feel they have been unfairly treated by the big tech companies will be able to sue the platforms for up to $100,000.
“Many in our state have experienced censorship and other tyrannical behavior firsthand in Cuba and Venezuela,” DeSantis said in a statement. “If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable.”
But there’s a massive loophole written into the law that exempts companies that own theme parks in the state.
“Social media,” as defined by the bill, “does not include any information service, system, Internet search engine, or access software provider operated by a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex.”
In other words, the new law won’t apply to Disney, which operates Disney World in Florida, and Comcast, which operates Universal Studios. And other companies like Facebook and Twitter could avoid liability simply by opening – or simply buying – an amusement park in Florida.
Indeed, one Democratic lawmaker asked that very question in the debate over the bill back in April.
“If Facebook buys a theme park, does that prevent us from being able to regulate what happens on Facebook?” asked Rep. Andrew Learned, according to NBC Miami.
“If they bought a theme park and named it Zuckerland and he met the definition of a theme park under Florida statute, then yes,” Republican Rep. Blaise Ingoglia replied.
According to the statute, Zuckerland would need to have at least “25 contiguous acres” and serve at least 1 million visitors per year to be legally allowed to ignore the content rules on Facebook.
The bill also requires social-media companies to inform users of what types of content are allowed on their platforms – like the terms of service and acceptable use policies that users already must agree to in order to access their accounts.
Companies would be further required to give notice when changing their policies, like those emails users already get that say “We’re updating our policies.”
If a news story is clearly untrue, but just so happens to come from a news outlet, social platforms would be prohibited from taking steps to make sure the fake news doesn’t go viral, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“We the people are standing up to tech totalitarianism with the signing of Florida’s Big Tech Bill,” DeSantis said on Twitter.
Another law in Texas, Senate Bill 12, echoes much of the language from the Florida legislation, calling for “protection from censorship or discriminatory enforcement of content regulations.”
Florida’s SB 7072 is “more about politics than prevention, as the bill arbitrarily exempts major mass media corporations as long as they are also in the theme park business,” said the Internet Association’s senior vice president of state government affairs, Robert Callahan, in a statement on Monday.
In addition, both the Florida and Texas rules apply only to platforms with more than 100 million users. Parler, a favorite app of conservatives, has just a fraction of that, and a Texas lawmaker’s proposal to have the law apply to platforms with 25 million users was defeated.
“This type of legislation would make children and other vulnerable communities less safe by making it harder for us to remove content like pornography, hate speech, bullying, self-harm images and sexualized photos of minors,” said Facebook’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis, in a statement to the Austin Business Journal.
Florida’s measure goes into effect on July 1, 2021.
