Happy Thursday! I’m Will Oremus, technology news analysis writer, filling in for Cristiano. You can reach me at: will.oremus@washpost.com. Below: A Utah age verification lawsuit is tossed, and a key White House adviser on microchips departs. First:
As my Washington Post colleagues have reported, that pressure could have a chilling effect on misinformation research and puncture efforts to guard against interference in the 2024 presidential election.
Now some of those academics and advocacy groups are asserting their own First Amendment rights.
In a legal brief filed last week, Stanford University and two of its internet researchers blasted a Louisiana federal judge’s order that limited the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with them about online misinformation.
Stanford and the researchers, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, claim that U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 ruling repeatedly quoted them as saying things they never said. Those “invented quotations,” they say, helped Doughty paint an inaccurate picture of their role in what Doughty deemed “censorship” of posts about the 2020 election and the covid-19 pandemic. The injunction he imposed “has cast a chill across academia” and violates Stamos and DiResta’s First Amendment rights, they argue.
Doughty told The Technology 202 he can’t comment on active cases in his court.
Stanford joins the fray as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is set to consider the Justice Department’s appeal of Doughty’s ruling, which the appeals court put on hold until it reaches a final ruling.
Stamos and DiResta aren’t named as defendants in the case. But they feature prominently in the judge’s ruling, which barred government agencies from contact with them. And their filing is the first that takes direct aim at the collateral damage of Doughty’s ruling to the First Amendment rights of academics who study social media.
In other words, they say Doughty is doing just what he accuses the Biden administration of doing: suppressing protected political speech.
The Stanford brief notes that Doughty quoted DiResta four times in his ruling as saying that Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership was designed to “get around” unclear legal authorities and First Amendment issues. In fact, the documents cited for that quote show DiResta simply said there were unclear legal authorities and First Amendment issues; she never said the goal was to “get around” them.
In another instance, Doughty’s ruling quotes an Election Integrity Partnership report as saying it targeted “domestic speakers,” a phrase that does not appear in the report the ruling cites. Stanford says the report was not targeting any speakers, but rather analyzing whether the instances of online election misinformation the project had collected were domestic or foreign in origin. (The report concluded that the most influential false narratives in the 2020 election came from authentic, domestic accounts, rather than from foreign influence campaigns.)
The issue of the First Amendment rights of people who criticize social media firms’ content moderation was also raised this week in a separate case in which Elon Musk’s renamed Twitter (now called X) sued the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The lawsuit accused the organization of unlawfully scraping X’s data as part of a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers.”
The lawsuit shows Musk “will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions,” the center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said in a statement. He added, “CCDH has no intention of stopping our independent research — Musk will not bully us into silence.”
On Wednesday, three Democratic lawmakers backed the center. Reps. Lori Trahan (Mass.), Sean Casten (Ill.), and Adam B. Schiff (Calif.) sent a letter to X accusing the company of trying to “harass, silence, and suppress research and accountability” for harmful content on its platform.
Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech consulting firm Anchor Change and a former public policy director at Facebook, told The Technology 202 she believes the various efforts to deter academic research into social media firms’ speech policies are misguided, regardless of one’s politics.
“There are some very valid questions here of the roles the government should have, the roles of academia, civil society” in addressing online speech, Harbath said. But she added, “If we're pushing for more transparency from these companies — if we don’t want them to continue to be black boxes — we need to be having folks from academia and civil society doing this research.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of the newsletter incorrectly rendered the name of the Election Integrity Partnership. This version has been corrected.
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Judge tosses lawsuit challenging Utah age verification law for porn sites
A Utah law that requires adult entertainment sites to verify the age of their users will remain in effect after a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality was tossed by a federal judge, Sam Metz reports for the Associated Press.
“The dismissal poses a setback for digital privacy advocates and the Free Speech Coalition, which sued on behalf of adult entertainers, erotica authors, sex educators and casual porn viewers over the Utah law — and another in Louisiana — designed to limit access to materials considered vulgar or explicit,” Metz writes.
U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart dismissed the suit, saying that the coalition “couldn’t sue Utah officials because of how the law calls for age verification to be enforced,” according to the report. The law notably does not specify how platforms should verify user ages.
The group alleged the law “unfairly discriminates against certain kinds of speech, violates the First Amendment rights of porn providers and intrudes on the privacy of individuals who want to view sexually explicit materials,” the report adds.
Key White House adviser on microchips steps down
Ronnie Chatterji, a key National Economic Council coordinator that helped set the Biden administration’s semiconductor agenda, will depart from his role on Friday, Steven Overly reports for Politico.
Chatterji, who has worked to implement key semiconductor legislation aimed at bolstering the U.S. chip manufacturing and research landscape, will return to Duke University to serve as a business professor.
The CHIPS and Science Act seeks to “dole out $52 billion to expand domestic research and manufacturing of chips while simultaneously authorizing major increases to the budgets of federal science agencies,” Overly writes. “Those semiconductors are used for almost everything electronic, from powering artificial intelligence and laptops to guiding military munitions and drones.”
“Chatterji’s departure this Friday comes as the Biden administration’s semiconductor strategy has evolved from a frenzied search for a short-term fix to the global chips shortage to placing long-term bets on U.S.-based manufacturing facilities in an effort to depend less on suppliers in Taiwan, which has become a political liability amid rising tensions with China,” the report adds.
Australian Senate panel recommends government TikTok ban be extended to WeChat
The Australian Senate’s Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media recommended a government device ban of the China-linked TikTok app be extended to WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform, Rod McGuirk reports for the Associated Press.
The committee formed last year to examine how social media platforms could undermine Australian democracy or values. Australia became the last nation within the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner nations to ban TikTok from government devices on grounds that it poses a national security risk. “The committee recommended the government consider extending that ban because WeChat posed similar data security and foreign interference risks,” McGuirk writes.
“Committee chair James Paterson said on Wednesday the report’s recommendations would make Australia a more difficult target for the serious foreign interference risks that the nation faced,” according to the AP. The committee also recommends social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter “should become more transparent or be fined,” McGuirk adds.
“It tackles both the problems posed by authoritarian-headquartered social media platforms like TikTok and WeChat and Western-headquartered social media platforms being weaponized by the actions of authoritarian governments including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” Paterson told reporters.
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- The FCC convenes its August open meeting at 10:30 a.m.
