In recent times, headlines have been dominated by instances where students, professors, and professionals engaged in inflammatory, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and offensive language. The fallout has led institutions to...more
As Head of the Center for Technology & Society, Yaël Eisenstat leads ADL's efforts to hold tech companies accountable for hate and extremism on their platforms. Project W’s Program Director, Emily Baum, spoke with Yaël about...more
A recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision held that school officials did not violate students’ First Amendment rights when disciplining them for off-campus social media posts that amounted to severe harassment...more
On Sept. 13, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 587, which requires social media companies to publicly post their content moderation policies and semiannually report data on their enforcement of the policies to...more
Meta has been hit with two related lawsuits totaling over $150 billion in its first major legal challenge since rebranding. The suits (one filed in California Superior Court and the other in the UK) come from a class...more
On Wednesday, October 28, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held a much-anticipated hearing titled, “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” The witness line-up featured...more
Hogan Lovells partner Winston Maxwell spoke at the executive roundtable on artificial intelligence and online hate speech, organised on January 31, 2019 by CERRE, the Centre on Regulation in Europe....more
The phenomenon of so-called “Hate Speech” has been in the public eye for a while now, but particularly in German news. Hate speech denotes verbal attacks and accusations based on personal attributes such as race, religion,...more
The recent tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia and other news regarding the activities of white supremacists and similar groups, have served as a rude awakening for many that our national reality has shifted. These...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
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
For the third year in a row, Socially Aware co-editor Aaron Rubin and I attended SXSW Interactive, which arguably has become the premier annual gathering for the global tech community. But this year, SXSW Interactive had a...more
Google is cracking down on mobile pop-up ads by knocking down the search-result position of websites that use them. The National Labor Relations Board decided a social media policy that Chipotle had in place for its...more
In a fascinating, must-read article, a Google design ethicist explains the techniques that engineers and entrepreneurs employ to keep us hooked on the web. A majority of U.S. adults—62%—now get their news on social...more
Recent District of Hawaii decision suggests social media policies are more important than ever, despite NLRB’s dramatic limits on employers’ ability to police employee speech on the Internet - Howard v. Hertz - ...more
..Unfree speech? In the United States, the First Amendment would likely prevent the prosecution of someone who posted racist or anti-Semitic messages on a social media platform. But social media platforms operate worldwide,...more