A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the dismissal of a case that sought to hold Facebook parent company Meta liable for the 2015 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal...more
Character Technologies has been hit with two lawsuits, including a wrongful death suit (among other claims), in less than two months over its popular Character.ai chatbot. The first was filed in the U.S. District Court for...more
12/13/2024
/ Algorithms ,
Arbitration ,
Arbitration Agreements ,
Artificial Intelligence ,
Bots ,
Breach of Contract ,
Defamation ,
Facebook ,
Fraud ,
Immunity ,
Intellectual Property Protection ,
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) ,
Mental Health ,
Metaverse ,
Minors ,
Music Industry ,
Piracy ,
Popular ,
Preemptive Challenges ,
Safe Harbors ,
Terms of Service ,
Terms of Use ,
Uber ,
Web Scraping ,
Willful Infringement
In a rare example of bipartisan agreement, the dramatically named DEFIANCE (Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits) Act unanimously passed the Senate. The bill allows victims of AI-generated deepfake...more
8/6/2024
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
Blackmail ,
Censorship ,
COPPA ,
Copyright Office ,
Deep Fake ,
Facebook ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Intellectual Property Protection ,
Intent to Defraud ,
Metaverse ,
Nigeria ,
Pornography ,
Section 230 ,
Social Media
In our fourth installment of our six-part series examining Section 230—the segment of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) that immunizes online service providers from liability stemming from content created by third...more
In a significant move toward enhancing transparency and trust in digital content, Meta has announced plans to introduce labeling for AI-generated images across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Nick Clegg, President of Global...more
In late October, Facebook announced that it would change its name to Meta, signaling a shift of the social media giant’s focus toward the metaverse, a virtual space where social media, gaming, augmented reality, virtual...more
12/21/2021
/ Communications Decency Act ,
Facebook ,
Facial Recognition Technology ,
JAMA ,
LinkedIn ,
Pinterest ,
Rebranding ,
Social Media ,
Technology ,
Video Recordings ,
Websites
Social Links is our ongoing series here at Socially Aware that rounds up current developments at the intersection of social media, policy, research, and the law.
Embedding social media posts can be considered copyright...more
A federal district court judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., dismissed the complaint in a case filed by Genius, a platform that lets users share and annotate lyrics, holding that the plaintiff’s claims were preempted by copyright law....more
In a move that might be part of a settlement that YouTube has entered into with the Federal Trade Commission, the video-sharing site said it will ban “targeted” advertisements on videos likely to be watched by children....more
Based on copyright infringement, emotional distress and other claims, a federal district court in California awarded $6.4 million to a victim of revenge porn, the posting of explicit material without the subject’s consent....more
In order to comply with a new German law requiring social media sites to take down hate speech, Twitter and Facebook removed anti-Islamic social media posts authored by a German far-right political party....more
After British police unsuccessfully tried to get the blogging platform WordPress.com to remove offensive and threatening posts, the deputy leader of the UK’s Labour Party vowed to urge changes that would make the country’s...more
As part of a new tracking system, the Department of Homeland Security will be keeping records of immigrants’ social media handles and search results.
Russia to Facebook: Turn over user-information or risk being blocked....more
A federal appeals court in Miami held that a judge needn’t necessarily recuse herself from a case being argued by a lawyer with whom the judge is merely Facebook “friends.”...more
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that a North Carolina law that the state has used to prosecute more than 1,000 sex offenders for posting on social media is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment....more
6/26/2017
/ Certiorari ,
Constitutional Challenges ,
Copyright ,
DMCA ,
EU ,
Facebook ,
Fair Use ,
First Amendment ,
Hate Speech ,
SCOTUS ,
Sex Offenders ,
Social Media ,
YouTube
Instagram is now allowing a limited number of users to identify branded content with a “paid partnership” subhead instead of using hashtags like #ad and #sponsored to identify sponsored posts. The platform says it plans to...more
One year since agreeing with the European Commission to remove hate speech within 24 hours of receiving a complaint about it, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are removing flagged content an average of 59% of the...more
A nice overview of the rules on researching jurors’ social media accounts in various jurisdictions from Law.com.
The importance of appearing at the top of Google search results, especially on mobile devices, is driving...more
Without Google’s permission, Burger King ended one of its television commercials with a statement designed to automatically cause Google Assistant devices to read a list of the Whopper’s ingredients out loud.
Having passed...more
Twitter is suing the Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to void a summons demanding records that would identify the creator of an anti-Trump Twitter account.
Facebook has joined the fight against the...more
A court ruled that a particular 98-character tweet wasn’t sufficiently creative to warrant protection under German copyright law.
Inspired by a recording posted to Snapchat of a physical attack on a 14-year-old boy, a...more
Facebook is implementing a feature that uses artificial intelligence to identify posts reflecting suicidal inclinations.
Google unveiled a new tool designed to combat toxic speech online by assessing the language...more
New York City’s Conflicts of Interest Board has issued guidelines prohibiting elected officials from using official social media accounts for political purposes or having their staff draft content for their personal social...more
Over 30 workers at a Japanese insurance company are losing their jobs following the company’s adoption of IBM’s Watson Explorer, an artificial intelligence system that will perform an important back office function at the...more
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has filed suit to overturn a law that requires the popular entertainment website to remove the ages or birth dates of people in the entertainment industry upon request.
Vine might not...more