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The high-end skincare brand Sunday Riley has settled lawsuits filed by the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the brand’s founder encouraged employees of her eponymous company to set up accounts “under different identities” on the cosmetics retail site Sephora.com and leave positive reviews for Sunday Riley’s products. The FTC filed the complaints after the agency…

A California Superior Court’s recent ruling in Murphy v. Twitter held that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded Twitter from liability for suspending and banning a user’s account for violating the platform’s policies. As we have previously noted, Section 230 has come under pressure in recent years from both courts and legislatures. But we have also examined other cases demonstrating Section 230’s staying power. The ruling in Murphy again shows that, despite the challenges facing Section 230, the statute continues to serve its broader purpose of protecting social media platforms from the actions of their users while allowing those platforms to monitor and moderate their services.

From January to mid-October 2018, Meghan Murphy posted a number of tweets that misgendered and criticized transgender Twitter users. After first temporarily suspending her account, Twitter ultimately banned her from the platform for violating its Hateful Conduct Policy. Twitter had amended this policy in late October 2018 to specifically include targeted abuse and misgendering of transgender people.…
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New York is now one of the 43 states where “revenge porn,” the posting of explicit photographs or videos to the Internet without the subject’s consent, is punishable by law. See how far the states have come – find out how many had criminalized revenge porn as of 2014, when Socially Aware first covered the…

An advertising executive who lost his job after being named on an anonymous Instagram account is suing the now-defunct account for defamation. The suit names as defendants not only the account—Diet Madison Avenue, which was intended to root out harassment and discrimination at ad agencies—but also (as “Jane Doe 1,” “Jane Doe 2,” et cetera)…

In an effort to deter hate groups from tweeting sanitized versions of their messages, Twitter has began considering account holders’ off platform behavior when the platform evaluates whether potentially harmful tweets should be removed and account holders should be suspended or permanently banned.

In connection with Congressional efforts to deter online sex trafficking by narrowing…

The government in Indonesia has warned the world’s biggest social media providers that they risk being banned in that country if they don’t block pornography and other content deemed obscene.

A member of the House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the U.K.’s data protection bill that would subject technology companies to “minimum standards…

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 laws less tolerant of online abuse.

As bipartisan U.S. legislation to prevent the appearance of foreign-entity-funded political ads on social media…

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.”

Bills in both houses of Congress propose amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to clarify that it doesn’t insulate website operators from liability…

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 time, the EC reports.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a catering company…

GettyImages-484516083_SMALLFor 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 very different vibe to it than in the prior two years.

In the past, a spirit of boundless optimism infused the event. A sense existed that there is no problem that could not be solved through technological innovation.

Indeed, at SXSW Interactive last year, President Obama—who was rapturously received by the audience—touched on this “can do” spirit in his keynote address:

“So the reason I’m here really is to recruit all of you. It’s to say to you as I’m about to leave office, how can we start coming up with new platforms, new ideas, new approaches across disciplines and across skill sets to solve some of the big problems that we’re facing today.”

What a difference a year can make. Perhaps it was due in part to the weather—overcast, wet and cold—but a pessimistic mood seemed to hang over this year’s edition of SXSW Interactive.…
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