The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in a case that involves the Biden administration’s efforts to communicate with social media sites about posts officials believed made false or misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines and the pandemic. While the case primarily focuses on a debate around free speech, it also spotlights the potential harms…
Shafiqah Hudson was looking for a job in early June of 2014, toggling between Twitter and email, when she noticed an odd hashtag that was surging on the social media platform: #EndFathersDay. The posters claimed to be Black feminists, but they had laughable handles like @NayNayCan’tStop and @CisHate and @LatrineWatts; they declared they wanted to…
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday vetoed a sweeping social media bill that would have effectively barred Florida residents under the age of 16 from opening accounts on services like TikTok and Instagram, even if their parents permitted them to do so. In a post on X, Mr. DeSantis said he had vetoed the teen social…
If the career of Roger Fidler has any meaning, it is this: Sometimes, you can see the future coming but get trampled by it anyway. Thirty years ago, Mr. Fidler was a media executive pushing a reassuring vision of the future of newspapers. The digital revolution would liberate news from printing presses, giving people portable…
The most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, may turn on a single question: Do platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and X most closely resemble newspapers or shopping centers or phone companies? The two cases arrive at the court garbed in politics, as they…
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in a pair of cases that could fundamentally change discourse on the internet by defining, for the first time, what rights social media companies have to limit what their users can post. The court’s decision, expected by June, will almost certainly be its most important statement on…
Social media companies are bracing for Supreme Court arguments on Monday that could fundamentally alter the way they police their sites. After Facebook, Twitter and YouTube barred President Donald J. Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol, Florida made it illegal for technology companies to ban from their sites…
Florida’s Legislature has passed a sweeping social media bill that would make the state the first to effectively bar young people under 16 from holding accounts on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The measure — which Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would “be wrestling with” over the weekend and has not yet signed — could…
Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images. One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter,…
