Two state laws from Texas and Florida, that could upend the way social media companies handle content moderation are still up in the air. The Supreme Court sent the challenges back to lower courts, which vacates previous rulings. In a 9 – 0 decision in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, the Supreme Court said that earlier rulings in lower courts had not properly evaluated the laws’ impact on the First Amendment. Never heard of NetChoice? It’s an industry group representing Meta, Google, X and other large tech companies. So it’s incredibly well-funded. NetChoice argued that the laws were unconstitutional.
The Texas law, passed in 2021, allows users to sue large social media companies over alleged “censorship” of their political views. The Supreme Court suspended the law in 2022 following a legal challenge. The Florida measure, also passed in 2021, attempted to impose fines on social media companies for banning politicians – that’s also on hold.
Justice Elena Kagan said that lower court rulings in both cases “concentrated” on the issue of “whether a state law can regulate the content-moderation practices used in Facebook’s News Feed (or near equivalents).” However, she writes, “they did not address the full range of activities the laws cover, and measure the constitutional against the unconstitutional applications.” It seems the lower courts need to do their homework.
— Mat Smith
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It banned the creation of Trump and Biden images around the election.
Midjourney, a popular AI-powered image generator, is creating images of Donald Trump and Joe Biden despite saying that it would block users from doing so ahead of the upcoming US presidential election. Engadget managed to get the tool to create images of Trump multiple times. The only time Midjourney refused to create an image of Trump or Biden was when it was asked to do so explicitly. “The Midjourney community voted to prevent using ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Joe Biden’ during election season,” the service said in that instance. Midjourney did not respond to a request for comment from Engadget.
The video owner will have 48 hours to respond.
Talking of AI-generated fakes, YouTube quietly added a new policy last month that lets you request the removal of AI-generated content that features your likeness. YouTube says several factors will determine whether it considers a removal, including whether the content is altered or synthetic (and whether it’s disclosed as such), easily identifiable as the person in question or realistic.
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