Minnesota state lawmakers are trying to prohibit social media platforms from using algorithms to recommend content to anyone under age 18. The bill was approved Tuesday by the House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee in a 15-1 vote. The potential state law goes next to the House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee, which has put it on the docket for a hearing on March 22.

The algorithm ban applies to platforms with at least 1 million account holders and says those companies would be “prohibited from using a social media algorithm to target user-created content at an account holder under the age of 18.” There are exemptions for content created by federal, state, or local governments and by public or private schools.

“This bill prohibits a social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, TikTok, and others, from using algorithms to target children with specific types of content,” the bill summary says. “The bill would require anyone operating a social media platform with more than one million users to require that algorithm functions be turned off for accounts owned by anyone under the age of 18.” Social media companies would be “liable for damages and a civil penalty of $1,000 for each violation.”

Tech-industry lobbyists say the bill would violate the First Amendment, prevent companies from recommending useful content, and require them to collect more data on the ages and locations of users.

“Too many kids are struggling”

Rep. Kristin Robbins (R-Maple Grove) sponsored the bill, saying that “too many kids are struggling, or worse, dying,” according to an article about the committee vote on the Minnesota House website. Robbins said she was moved to act by Wall Street Journal articles about TikTok pointing minors to sex and drug videos and eating-disorder videos. Robbins “believes [the bill] could be a model for the rest of the country,” the article said. Online platforms’ use of algorithms has also come under fire in Congress.

Tech industry lobbying group NetChoice told Minnesota lawmakers that the bill is “well-intentioned” but “undermines parental choice, removes the access to beneficial technologies from young people, and is a clear violation of the First Amendment.” NetChoice members include Facebook, Google, TikTok, Twitter, and other tech companies.

“Clear violation of the First Amendment”

Florida and Texas laws that regulate social media in other ways have been blocked by federal judges who found that the laws violate the companies’ First Amendment rights to moderate user-submitted content. Florida’s law would have made it illegal for large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban politicians, while the Texas law tries to ban “censorship.” Tech-industry groups won preliminary injunctions blocking both of them.

Democrats have a majority in the Minnesota House while Republicans have a majority in the state Senate. Commerce Finance and Policy Committee Chair Rep. Zack Stephenson (D-Coon Rapids) “was unimpressed by the argument that algorithms shouldn’t be barred because they are a vehicle companies use to send healthy, age-appropriate content. He compared it to saying you can’t ban cigarettes because it would prevent young people from the benefits of cigarette filters,” the article on the House website said.

“These companies are doing immense damage to our communities, to our children,” he said. “I am very determined to take some action before it is too late.”

NetChoice argued that the First Amendment case against the bill is strong, writing:

In Sorrell v. IMS, the Supreme Court ruled that information is speech and that a Vermont law could not prohibit the creation and dissemination of information including the selling of data to a database. Even more relevant here, multiple court cases have held that the distribution of speech, including by algorithms such as those used by search engines, are protected by the First Amendment. This proposal would result in the government restraining the distribution of speech by platforms and Minnesotans access to information. Thus, HF 3724 will be deemed by courts as a violation of the First Amendment.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1842161

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, Meta is temporarily changing its policies to allow users on Facebook and Instagram to post calls for violence against—and even the deaths of—Russian soldiers and political figures, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to Russian invaders,’” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said on Twitter. “We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.”

The temporary policy exception was recently sent to Facebook and Instagram moderators, and emails detailing the change were revealed by Reuters. The exceptions mark the social media company’s latest attempt to adapt to the shifting geopolitical situation.

“We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the Hate Speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, EXCEPT prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it’s clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.),” the email said. “We are doing this because we have observed that in this specific context, ‘Russian soldiers’ is being used as a proxy for the Russian military. The Hate Speech policy continues to prohibit attacks on Russians.”

The change apparently only applies to users in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

Meta also is allowing for some praise of the Azov Battalion, a right-wing extremist militia that is fighting Russian soldiers in the eastern Donbas region, The Intercept reported. The exception is “strictly in the context of defending Ukraine or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

In response, the Russian government has opened an investigation into Meta and is looking to designate the company as an “extremist organization.”

“Meta’s aggressive and criminal policy leading to incitement of hatred and hostility toward Russians is outrageous,” the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, said. “We demand that the US authorities stop the extremist activities of Meta and take measures to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Ars has contacted Meta for further comment and clarification. We will update this article if we receive a reply.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1840384

Update 2:40pm EST: Russia’s Internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, confirmed that it would be blocking access to Facebook, accusing the company of violating the law by blocking state media outlets from the platform.

When reached for comment by Ars, a Facebook spokesperson cited a statement from Nick Clegg, president of global affairs, who said, “We will continue to do everything we can to restore our services so they remain available to people to safely and securely express themselves and organize for action.”

Original article: Russia is reportedly blocking Twitter, Facebook, various news sites, and major app stores, according to a German journalist.

The move comes after the Russian government announced last week that it was partially restricting access to Facebook in retaliation for the company applying fact-checking labels to posts from state-controlled media outlets. Earlier this week, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and YouTube blocked access to Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik in the European Union.

The news of Russia’s blockade came from Mathieu von Rohr, head of the foreign desk at German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. He tweeted that “Twitter, Facebook, BBC, Deutsche Welle, App Stores” were all being blocked. (Deutsche Welle is the German public broadcaster.)

Putin has long sought to control the Internet inside Russia’s borders in much the same way that the Communist Party does within China. Yet, Russia’s attempts to censor the Internet aren’t as sophisticated and haven’t been as sweeping or effective as China’s Great Firewall, instead relying on regulatory harassment, occasional throttling, and government takeovers. For example, VK, the parent company of Russian social media network VKontakte, was recently taken over by Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas company.

Whether Russia’s attempts to censor the Internet will succeed remains to be seen. Compared with China, the country is late to the game, and it doesn’t have the market size to recreate the range of products and services offered by companies like Meta, Apple, or Google. Any efforts to start beefing up capabilities now will face stiff headwinds as Western sanctions begin to bite, with Russian companies unable to obtain advanced chips for computers, telecommunications, and more.

Ars has contacted Meta, Twitter, Apple, and Google to confirm whether their services are still available inside Russia. We will update this article if we hear back.

Update 12:43 EST: After publication, Ars commenter Artem S. Tashkinov said that connections to Facebook and Twitter were timing out in Russia, even when using a VPN, but that Instagram and Google Play remained accessible via the same route.

Previously, Ukraine had asked Apple to remove the App Store from the Russian market. Apple didn’t accede, but it did remove RT News and Sputnik News from the App Store outside Russia. The company also stopped selling products within the country. An Apple spokesperson said the move was in response to the invasion, though Western companies face myriad hurdles to selling in Russia, including problems processing credit card payments, uncertainties around importing products, and rising inflation in the country. Previously, Apple has temporarily suspended product sales in countries like Turkey where inflation has significantly devalued the currency.

Since President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government has been pushing an avalanche of pro-Kremlin propaganda, spreading disinformation about the course of the invasion, casualty figures, and more. Not that this is any different from before—RT and Sputnik have long offered audiences a skewed, if not outright false, view of world events, one that hews to Putin’s party line.

Social media companies have been slow to respond to the war in Ukraine, appearing to fall back on their default “neutral” status and leaving their platforms open to state media companies. Even today, Sputnik and RT and its affiliated channels remain on YouTube outside of the EU, though Google has removed their ability to make money so as to comply with sanctions. Perhaps as a result, RT America ceased production yesterday, though its videos are still available on YouTube.

But, as the war drags on, civilian casualties mount, and Russia places even greater pressure on Western companies, social media platforms will likely be forced to decide whether their markets-first ideology will serve them in the long run. Since their advent, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been able to thread the needle, doing just enough to stay in hostile markets without risking government probes or catastrophic consumer backlashes in Western markets. 

That era may be swiftly coming to a close, though, as a Cyber Curtain begins to take shape amid Putin’s efforts to relitigate the end of the Cold War.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1838252

The Reddit mobile app doesn’t often get big updates, but this week was an exception, with the company adding a new “Discover Tab” and menus for managing subscriptions.

In a blog post announcing the feature, Reddit says that one in five users joined at least one new community after using the Discover Tab. Jason Costa, Reddit’s director of product for content and communities, offered the following statement in the blog post:

We’re ushering in a new era of discovery on Reddit, with images and video top of mind. We’re making discovering relevant content and communities more intuitive with the Discover Tab. It’s a great new way for people to explore and engage with hundreds of thousands of communities around the world.

The Discover Tab is now in the top-level app navigation, replacing the communities and subscriptions tab. Tapping it brings you to a scrollable grid list of Reddit content from a variety of subreddits you may not already be following.

Reddit says the Discover Tab populates content based on both the subreddits you already follow and how much time you spend in them. So if you spend a lot of time in r/OLED, the tab will likely show content from other home theater or display tech subreddits. On the other hand, if you are subscribed to r/Xbox but don’t visit it much, you might occasionally see content from, say, a Halo subreddit, but not as much as you’d see from a topic you engage with frequently.

Reddit says it won’t use demographic data like age, gender, or location to make decisions about what content to show you in the Discover Tab—it’s purely based on your past Reddit browsing and engagement.

You can also drill down on categories like “technology” or “sports.” And you can give feedback on individual pieces of content with options like “show me more of this content,” “show me less of that content,” or “hide that content,” which will affect what appears in the tab in the future.

There are a number of other changes, too. For example, many of the features from the communities and subscriptions tab can now be found by swiping from the left. From there, you’ll have the option to access functionality on subreddits you moderate, sort and customize your communities, assess the list of Redditors you follow, and of course, go to the r/all entry point.

This is all in the official Reddit app for iOS and Android, of course. There are several third-party Reddit clients, but Costa told The Verge that there are “no plans to expose an API at this time.” The Discover Tab also won’t be available on the web version of Reddit in the immediate future.

The new tab is in the process of rolling out to Reddit’s Android and iOS users now, though not everyone will see the update pop up at the same time.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1836695

Wish 2021 had been a better year? Facebook probably does, too. The company has long been maligned by politicians, media observers, and consumer advocates, but it wasn’t until 2021 that it felt like the tide truly began to turn.

Though Facebook had faced scandals in the past, from Cambridge Analytica to the Myanmar genocide, this year’s string of missteps and revelations may have tipped the company and its reputation past the point of no return.

For Facebook, trouble started shortly after the new year. On January 6, the company found itself enmeshed in the insurrection at the US Capitol. Both Facebook and Instagram played a key role in radicalizing users who later attended the deadly rally. While the company had acted swiftly in November 2020 to shutter the “Stop the Steal” group formed to undermine the results of the presidential election, it let splinter groups and individuals spawn a “harmful movement” that spread across its platforms. For two months, those groups operated more or less unfettered.

Then, during the insurrection, Facebook and Instagram served as a loudspeaker for the rioters, with violent content posted that afternoon up “more than 10-fold from the morning,” according to internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Whatever corporate introspection the insurrection had inspired didn’t have a lasting impact. By March, Facebook was caught autogenerating pages for white supremacist groups, creating pages for groups like “Universal Aryan Brotherhood Movement” when someone would add the group’s name as an employer. Its moderation AI were being easily fooled by simple misspellings, like swapping S for $, which allowed many groups to operate unnoticed.

By the summer, the company began to feel the effects of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature that was introduced in iOS 14.5. While the company weathered the initial storm, it has likely lost billions of dollars as a result of users asking the company not to track them.

In September, Facebook was hit with a shareholder lawsuit that alleged the company had intentionally overpaid a $5 billion Federal Trade Commission fine. The agency had been considering holding CEO Mark Zuckerberg responsible for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but the record fine put an end to that. Shareholders claimed that Facebook should have only paid about $105 million and that the additional $4.9 billion payment was a breach of fiduciary duty.

Whistleblower leaks

That lawsuit was just a blip compared with what was to come. The Wall Street Journal had been publishing a string of exposés based on particularly damning and detailed internal documentation it had obtained. Those documents revealed that the company used a different set of moderation rules for 5.8 million VIPs, that it was aware of how Instagram harmed teens’ mental health, especially that of girls. They detailed how Facebook failed to stop human traffickers and ethnic violence. The leaks kept coming.

Then, on October 3, Frances Haugen revealed herself as the whistleblower who had sent the WSJ the documents. She had also sent them to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission, where she sought whistleblower protection. After Haugen’s debut on 60 Minutes, she began a speaking tour of sorts, with stops at Congress, the European Parliament, and more. With each appearance, politicians’ calls for regulations grew louder. Two days after Haugen went public, Facebook and many of its services suffered an embarrassing outage.

Facebook had lost control of the narrative and was clearly in need of a distraction. CEO Mark Zuckerberg had spent the previous few months talking at length about the metaverse. To him, the metaverse would be a virtual environment in which people could chat, play games, hold meetings, and buy things (of course)—the sort of shiny new thing that leaders trot out when things are going bad. Here was something new the company could sell to consumers who had grown tired of the company’s old platforms. It was also something dispirited employees could work toward that wasn’t tainted with scandal.

But the metaverse would take years to realize, and Facebook’s problems were pressing. After enduring a month of unflattering revelations, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was renaming itself as Meta.

While the decision wasn’t a surprise, its timing was. The company seemed ill prepared for the change, and investors have speculated that the company rushed the name change because of Haugen’s testimony. Indeed, to this day, Facebook press requests receive replies from “@fb.com” accounts. Perhaps the Meta rebranding is another distraction for an already distracted company.

Will “Meta” be enough to save the company’s reputation? That remains to be seen. Once companies reach the size that Meta has, they tend to have very long lives. What shape that life takes, well, that’ll be up to Zuckerberg to decide.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1822143

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/398908

Thea-Mai Baumann had posted to Instagram using the @metaverse handle for nearly a decade when her account was disabled on November 2.

“Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else,” the app told her. 

Baumann wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, but the timing was curious. The account block came just days after Facebook had announced its new name, Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the name reflected the company’s new focus on its vision of the metaverse, a virtual world meant to facilitate commerce, communication, and more. Baumann’s @metaverse handle was suddenly a hot commodity.

This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn’t want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet,” Baumann told The New York Times. “That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time.”

In 2012, when Baumann started Metaverse Makeovers, she grabbed the Instagram handle @metaverse to showcase her art and technology. The Australian had created an app that would display virtual holograms over her company’s fingernail designs. She envisioned making an entire line of clothing and accessories that would be virtually augmented. After five years, funding ran dry and she began to use her Instagram account to promote her other work.

Baumann’s @metaverse account went relatively unnoticed over the years, attracting fewer than 1,000 followers. Then Facebook changed its name. 

On October 28, Zuckerberg announced the change in his Connect 2021 keynote, saying that the Facebook name “just doesn’t encompass everything we do.” Zuckerberg had been selling his idea of the metaverse for months, telling The Verge in an interview last summer that “the metaverse is a vision that spans many companies—the whole industry,” he said. “It’s certainly not something that any one company is going to build.” 

Baumann, with her years of experience running a company based around and named after the concept, would seemingly be an ideal partner in that venture.

After Zuckerberg’s keynote, Baumann started receiving unsolicited messages on Instagram, including some that offered to buy @metaverse from her. One person delivered a warning, though: “fb isn’t gonna buy it, they’re gonna take it.”

It’s unclear whether Meta/Facebook had anything to do with Baumann losing access to her account. Baumann attempted to verify her identity with Instagram, but she didn’t receive a reply for weeks. She tried working with an intellectual property attorney to see what rights she had to get her account back, but she couldn’t afford their services.

Once a journalist got wind of the story, though, things changed. On December 4, two days after a New York Times reporter contacted Meta about the account, Baumann suddenly regained access to @metaverse.

“This account was incorrectly removed for impersonation, and we’ve now restored it,” Stephanie Otway, a Meta company spokesperson, told Ars. “We’re sorry that this happened.”

Baumann’s experience could have a chilling effect on companies’ and individuals’ willingness to participate on social media for fear of having their online identity arbitrarily seized. “Facebook has essentially unfettered discretion to appropriate people’s Instagram user names,” Rebecca Giblin, director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at the University of Melbourne, told The New York Times. “There can be good reasons for that—for example, if they’re offensive or impersonating someone in a way that causes confusion.”

“But the @metaverse example highlights the breadth of this power,” Giblin said. Users “essentially have no rights.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1820222

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You’re reading Entrepreneur United States, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/398635

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You’re reading Entrepreneur United States, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/395539

A federal judge yesterday blocked a Texas state law that bans “censorship” on social media platforms, ruling that the law violates the social networks’ First Amendment right to moderate user-submitted content.

“Social media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content disseminated on their platforms,” Judge Robert Pitman wrote. He found that the Texas law “compels social media platforms to disseminate objectionable content and impermissibly restricts their editorial discretion” and that the law’s “prohibitions on ‘censorship’ and constraints on how social media platforms disseminate content violate the First Amendment.”

Pitman’s ruling granted a preliminary injunction requested by tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications & Industry Association (CCIA), which sued Texas in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and various other tech companies belong to the groups.

The injunction prohibits the Texas attorney general from enforcing the law. The judge found that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their case, a prerequisite for granting a preliminary injunction.

“Replete with constitutional defects”

Pitman rejected a severability clause that aimed to save parts of the law if the rest was invalidated. He found that nothing can be severed from the law and survive because the unconstitutional portions are “replete with constitutional defects, including unconstitutional content and speaker-based infringement on editorial discretion and onerously burdensome disclosure and operational requirements.”

“This ruling upholds the First Amendment and protects Internet users,” CCIA President Matt Schruers said yesterday. “Without this temporary injunction, Texas’s social media law would make the Internet a more dangerous place by tying the hands of companies protecting users from abuse, scams, or extremist propaganda… The First Amendment ensures that the government can’t force a citizen or company to be associated with a viewpoint they disapprove of, and that applies with particular force when a state law would prevent companies from enforcing policies against Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and disinformation from foreign agents.”

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill in September, he claimed the law is needed to protect Texans’ First Amendment rights against “a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas.” Florida tried to impose a similar social media law but it was also blocked by a federal judge for violating the First Amendment.

Parler and Gab excluded from law

Under the Texas law, a platform that labels a post as misinformation “may be discriminating against that user’s viewpoint by adding its own disclaimer,” Pitman wrote. The law thus “restricts social media platforms’ First Amendment right to engage in expression when they disagree with or object to content.”

The threat of lawsuits for violating the state law “chills the social media platforms’ speech rights.” Pitman also found that the law’s disclosure and operational requirements impose burdens on social media platforms’ editorial discretion, and that the law “discriminates based on content and speaker.”

Pitman noted that Texas lawmakers excluded conservative social networks Parler and Gab by applying the law only to platforms with 50 million or more monthly active users in the US. One state senator “unsuccessfully proposed lowering the threshold to 25 million monthly users in an effort to include” sites like Parler and Gab, Pitman wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1817628