President Donald Trump has signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a new federal law aimed at curbing the spread of non-consensual AI-generated pornography. The law makes it a criminal offense to create or share explicit deepfake images...more
5/23/2025
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
Consent ,
Criminal Prosecution ,
Deep Fake ,
First Amendment ,
New Legislation ,
Online Platforms ,
Pornography ,
Privacy Laws ,
Revenge Porn ,
Social Media
CONGRESS MOVES TO BLOCK ALL STATE AI LAWS -
In a late-night addition to a sweeping budget proposal, the House Energy and Commerce Committee inserted a provision in a large reconciliation package that would block state and...more
OHIO SOCIAL MEDIA LAW STRUCK DOWN -
On April 16, 2025, a federal judge in Ohio ended the state’s ambitious plan to severely limit social media access for minors. The court permanently blocked Ohio’s Attorney General from...more
California’s attempt to impose content moderation transparency requirements on social media platforms has suffered a significant setback. Last month, the state reached a settlement with X Corp. (formerly Twitter), effectively...more
If you want the perfect illustration of the high-stakes world of tech acquisition, look no further than the mad scramble for TikTok. Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s wunderkind co-founder, has joined Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty...more
3/24/2025
/ Acquisitions ,
Arbitration ,
California ,
Consumer Privacy Rights ,
COPPA ,
Data Privacy ,
First Amendment ,
Mergers ,
Online Safety for Children ,
Privacy Laws ,
Regulatory Requirements ,
Social Media ,
TikTok
Looks like WhatsApp just leveled up—whether it wanted to or not. Meta’s messaging giant has officially been crowned a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which basically...more
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
In a rare unanimous decision, on January 17, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that bans TikTok in the United States on national security grounds so long as it has its current ownership structure. TikTok chose to make the...more
1/23/2025
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
China ,
Data Collection ,
Executive Orders ,
First Amendment ,
Google ,
National Security ,
Privacy Concerns ,
Privacy Laws ,
SCOTUS ,
Social Media ,
TikTok ,
Trump Administration ,
User-Generated Content ,
YouTube
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
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has sent a challenge to Texas’s controversial online age verification law back to district court for additional clarification, while leaving the lower court’s injunction...more
11/14/2024
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
Blogging Platforms ,
Canada ,
Domain Names ,
Electronic Devices ,
Fake Reviews ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Fraud ,
Minors ,
Mobile Apps ,
Online Platforms ,
Online Reviews ,
TikTok ,
Verification Requirements
The Federal Trade Commission’s new rules banning phony online reviews are now in effect. These rules aim to curb false consumer testimonials, the buying of fake reviews from brokers, review suppression, falsifying social...more
10/31/2024
/ Bankruptcy Trustees ,
Chapter 11 ,
Defamation ,
En Banc Review ,
Fake Reviews ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Online Marketplace ,
Online Reviews ,
Social Media ,
TikTok ,
Unfair Competition ,
Web Tracking ,
Wiretapping
California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB-1047. The controversial bill was intended to establish safety guidelines for artificial intelligence models and would have been the first significant piece of state AI...more
10/8/2024
/ Arbitration ,
Artificial Intelligence ,
California ,
Deep Fake ,
Governor Newsom ,
Governor Vetoes ,
Mental Health ,
Online Safety for Children ,
Severance Agreements ,
Social Media ,
Twitter
Sick of the “very demure, very mindful” social media trend yet? The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office probably is too. Our national nightmare began on August 5 when TikToker Jools LeBron uploaded a video of herself...more
9/25/2024
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
Conspiracies ,
Data Collection ,
EU ,
First Amendment ,
Minors ,
Money Laundering ,
Music Industry ,
Social Media ,
State Attorneys General ,
TikTok ,
Trademark Registration ,
USPTO ,
Warning Labels ,
Wire Fraud
On August 8, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Lovinfosse v. Lowe’s Home Centers, LLP addressed the enforceability of an arbitration clause in Lowe’s terms of service, serving as a reminder...more
Lingo Telecom, a Georgia-based VoIP service operator, has agreed to pay a $1 million fine for using AI-generated deepfake technology to spoof President Joe Biden’s voice in a series of robocalls. A Louisiana political...more
9/5/2024
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
California ,
Copyright Infringement ,
Deep Fake ,
Google ,
Machine Learning ,
Music Industry ,
Online Advertisements ,
Reddit ,
Robocalling ,
Telecommunications ,
VoIP
The Federal Trade Commission has finalized a new rule aimed at curtailing false, misleading, and otherwise fraudulent reviews on online retail sites. Fake reviews are a significant problem for the big e-commerce platforms,...more
8/28/2024
/ Cybersquatting ,
Defamation ,
Domain Names ,
E-Commerce ,
Endorsements ,
Fake Reviews ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Google ,
Instagram ,
Microsoft ,
Online Reviews ,
Reddit ,
Sexual Harassment ,
Social Media
Social media giant TikTok has been sued by the United States for allegedly collecting data on children under thirteen illegally. The suit claims the app, which is owned by China-based parent company ByteDance, allowed...more
8/19/2024
/ Big Tech ,
Boycotts ,
Data Collection ,
Deep Fake ,
DMCA ,
Electronic Frontier Foundation ,
Minors ,
Parental Consent ,
Section 230 ,
Securities Fraud ,
Social Media ,
TikTok ,
Twitter
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
A few months ago, we highlighted the many pending and enacted state-level social media laws targeting minors’ use of social media. Since then, political and industry groups have begun to push back, calling into question...more
On May 9, 2024, in X Corp. v. Bright Data Ltd., the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed X’s claims alleging that Bright Data’s access to X’s systems, and scraping and selling of publicly...more
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
As we reported in 2023, Utah was the first state in the nation to enact laws limiting minors’ use of social media. In early March 2024, Republican Governor Spencer Cox effectively repealed and replaced the previously enacted...more
4/4/2024
/ Algorithms ,
Artificial Intelligence ,
Big Tech ,
Data Collection ,
Governor DeSantis ,
Immunity ,
Liability ,
Minors ,
OMB ,
Parental Consent ,
Section 230 ,
Social Media ,
Targeted Digital Advertising
Conversations around AI continue to dominate the headlines in early 2024 and show no signs of abating anytime soon. Here are few of the stories and trends we’ve been tracking at Socially Aware. A deepfake technology scam...more
In the prior two installments of our six-part series examining Section 230, the section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) that immunizes online service providers from liability stemming from the publication and...more
A court in the Southern District of Ohio has issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the Social Media Parental Notification Act, an Ohio law that would require social media platforms to obtain parental consent...more