Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
While the majority of the bill was allowed to proceed, two elements were blocked over concerns that they may infringe tech companies’ First Amendment rights.
A US district judge has blocked the state of California from enforcing parts of a bill aimed at safeguarding children and teenagers from social media, following a lawsuit filed by tech lobbying group NetChoice.
Senate Bill 976, also known as the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, was initially passed in September of last year and prevents social media companies from purposely providing an addictive content feed to minors without the consent of their parents.
While judge Edward J Davila denied NetChoice’s motion for an injunction to stop the law in its entirety – thus allowing most elements of the bill to come into effect – he did block some elements of the bill from proceeding after finding they may infringe tech companies’ First Amendment rights.
Specifically, he blocked two elements of the bill: one that proposed restrictions on night-time notifications for minors and another that compelled social media companies to disclose the number of minors using their platforms.
The lawsuit was filed in November by NetChoice, which argued that the law in its entirety violated the First Amendment. NetChoice is an organisation that advocates for internet safety and freedom of expression. Its members include tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Lyft, Meta, PayPal, Snap, Waymo and X.
On Tuesday (31 December), Davila submitted his decision via a 34-page order, in which he concluded that because NetChoice showed that parts of the bill are likely to infringe upon the First Amendment, the court would grant “in part and denies in part NetChoice’s preliminary injunction motion”.
Commenting on the partial granting of the injunction, Davila said: “As NetChoice observed at hearing, a sports website such as ESPN can send notifications about, for instance, a minor’s favourite team winning a national championship during prohibited hours, but Facebook could not send the same notification.”
In addition, he questioned the requirement for companies to disclose the number of minor accounts present on their platforms, adding: “The court sees no reason why revealing to the public the number of minors using social media platforms would reduce minors’ overall use of social media and associated harms.”
Speaking on the rejected aspect of the injunction, the judge explained that while he agreed that limits on notifications and reporting how many minors are on their platforms should be blocked, he rejected NetChoice’s request for an injunction of provisions for parental controls and restrictions on personalised feeds.
As a result, from January 2027, social media companies will be required to use “age assurance” techniques to determine whether a user is a minor and adjust their feed accordingly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday January 06, @12:43AM (2 children)
in a country that affords first amendment rights to companies.
(Score: 1, Troll) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 07, @04:01AM (1 child)
What are companies? Are they not groups of people, and should groups of people not have first amendment rights?
Or have we been summoning demons without the knowledge of the occult-disbelieving majority this whole time? I thought demon summoning required blood sacrifices, not filing paperwork at the local government office.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ox0000 on Tuesday January 07, @05:16PM
> and should groups of people not have first amendment rights?
No. Plain and simple no. You're confusing "people" with "groups of people", either deliberately or out of ignorance. It's not because those two concepts contain the same word ("people") that they are the same.
Those "groups of people" consist of individuals who already have that right, and that right is not taken away from them. The individuals are the entities to whom that right was granted. Why does their association (a third actor) require that right? Why should individuals who band together get an additional right of speech-through-proxy purely for grouping together?
(Score: 4, Informative) by ShovelOperator1 on Monday January 06, @01:12PM
I started with the Internet when I was young, and when it is known today as a "wild west". I also used social media accessible these times - personal sites, mailing lists, mail groups, IRC channels and early forums. While it is currently shown as dangerous for minors, I had a totally different impression. Well, there were weirdos, there was an opinion that the tech list without a trinity of Manga fan, Linux evangelist and a Furry is not a competent technical discussion group, but it was considered more than a sick joke than a threat for national security. Because of the general atmosphere of a non-formal talk it was also less prudish than now, but to get to real obscenities it was needed to go a bit deeper than usual. Because of the general publishing freedom, it was quite natural to look for various sources and confirmations of the information, and every published information was passed thru the filter of knowing the author. If an author had a site, reader knew it and it was known what to expect. Plus, there was also the identification of the objective why someone wrote the post. Discussing, popularizing knowledge or trolling? Currently this won't take you far as most content is just something to stuff ads into. The basics of pseudonymous acting was a normal thing, so the attack surface was accordingly lower.
This, when the people known each other by interacting with their share of the media, was a community. You read not only the message, but also a header, or, in forums, the left-hand pane with the user's nickname and avatar. Generally inserting a fake news there is possible, but problematic, as many paid articles stood out extremely from the typical "style" of known author.
When netiquette applied to users, it was also possible to avoid much spam. The influx of "children of broadband", as we regionally call our version of the Eternal September which happened around 2001-2003, was difficult, but manageable comparing to the influx of spam when many forums decided to lift netiquette for paid promotion.
The things started to go really bad when the Internet communities became "Social media" - in such situation you not only don't know the author well, so the author's opinion and by some sick reason have to think it's always verified, it is also difficult to verify information. It's harder and harder to put, use or visit an external link to the source. And the netiquette applies to all but the advertisers. More - there are rules which explicitly protect the advertisers on the loss of users. To go even shorter, with commercialization of the Internet, advertisers became new users.
I don't see the greedy plundering of sensitive data as solution to any of these problems. This acquisition of personal identifying information will be used only to do more harm than good, and the funny "penalties" for corporations when they leak information or gather too much are a clear sign that it's more favorable for lawmakers to get hands on more data. And centralization is then a good thing for lawmakers, that's why these laws in the UK practically destroying Internet forums.
So, what to do? Unfortunately, not much can be done. The thing has been broken, the genie is out of the bottle and won't go back. The education won't happen, the only way is to avoid leaving much data. And stay away from "social media" in favor of communities. Except that artificial scarcity of Internet resources, and then slowly the law, successfully eliminated them.