Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Today, an unsealed court document revealed that, earlier this year, a federal judge held Twitter (now called X) in contempt of court. The judge imposed $350,000 in sanctions.

Sanctions were applied after the social media platform delayed compliance with a federal search warrant that required Twitter to hand over Donald Trump's Twitter data without telling the former president about the warrant for 180 days.

At first, Twitter resisted producing Trump's data and argued that the government's nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. However, US circuit judge Florence Pan wrote that the court was largely unpersuaded by Twitter's arguments, mostly because the government's interest in Trump's data as part of its ongoing January 6 investigation was "unquestionably compelling."

Enlarge / A view of a broken window after the supporters of Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro participated in an anti-democratic riot at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil on January 9, 2023. (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu )

Claiming “election interference” in Brazil, thousands of rioters on Sunday broke into government buildings in the nation’s capital, Brasília. The rioters relied on social media and messaging apps to coordinate their attacks and evade government detection, The New York Times reported , following a similar “digital playbook” as those involved in the United States Capitol attacks on January 6, 2021. Now, social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube have begun removing content praising the most recent attacks, Reuters reported , earmarking this latest anti-democratic uprising as another sensitive event requiring widespread content removal.

Disinformation researchers told the Times that Twitter and Telegram played a central role for those involved with organizing the attacks, but Meta apps Facebook and WhatsApp were also used. Twitter has not responded to reports, but a Meta spokesperson told Ars and a Telegram spokesperson told Reuters that the companies have been cooperating with Brazilian authorities to stop content from spreading that could incite further violence. Both digital platforms confirmed an uptick in content moderation efforts starting before the election took place—with many popular social media platforms seemingly bracing for the riots after failing to quickly remove calls to violence during the US Capitol attacks.

“In advance of the election, we designated Brazil as a temporary high-risk location and have been removing content calling for people to take up arms or forcibly invade Congress, the Presidential palace, and other federal buildings,” a Meta spokesperson told Ars. “We're also designating this as a violating event, which means we will remove content that supports or praises these actions.“

Enlarge (credit: Jon Cherry / Stringer | Getty Images News )

Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom enacted a law that has been described by its author, California Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, as “ the most stringent transparency measures for Big Tech” in the world.

AB-587 was drafted in direct response to the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol and was designed to hold Big Tech companies like Meta accountable for “grossly inadequate” self-policing of hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on social media platforms. Now passed, the California law requires social media companies to post their policies and then submit enforcement reports publicly, every quarter, to California's attorney general.

If companies fail to abide by the law, they risk “penalties of up to $15,000 per violation per day,” enforced by the attorney general or specified city attorneys.

Enlarge (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Contributor | AFP )

Since 2009, the anti-government extremist group Oath Keepers has grown more extreme, preparing for civil war by recruiting law enforcement and military into local chapters nationwide.

As reports tracked a string of violent events leading up to Oath Keepers' involvement in the Capitol riots, it remained difficult for outsiders to discern just how effective the nonprofit group's recruitment really was at targeting people with real power. Then in fall 2021, the Distributed Denial of Secrets published a massive data leak , revealing names and addresses of 38,000 Oath Keepers and donors. Sorting through the data, the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism (COE) saw an opportunity to cross-reference public data on listed members and map out approximately how far Oath Keepers has come in furthering its mission to establish a secure "foothold in mainstream seats of power" throughout the US.

In a report published this week , COE identified 373 people in the Oath Keepers database believed to be active law enforcement officers, 117 people who seem to be currently serving in the military, and 81 public officials who either currently hold or are running for public office in 2022.

Enlarge / Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. (credit: Pool / Pool | Getty Images North America )

“Protestors are literally storming the Capitol. Breaking windows on doors. Rushing in. Is Trump going to say something?”

This text from White House correspondent Michael D. Shear to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is one of thousands preserved from the January 6 attack on the Capitol showing that when the trouble started, people with power immediately turned to their phones to do what they could to stop it.

There are many more deleted texts, though, that would have shown how former President Donald Trump acted before the attack and how he responded to urgent requests to de-escalate the violence in the middle of it. First, the Secret Service confirmed in December 2021 that thousands of their texts were deleted in an agency-wide phone reset. Now, The Washington Post reports that senior Department of Homeland Security officials—acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli—also lost text messages from that day, blaming a government phone reset that happened during the transition to the Biden administration in January 2021.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Earlier this month, Google sent a request to the Federal Election Commission seeking an advisory opinion on the potential launch of a pilot program that would allow political committees to bypass spam filters and instead deliver political emails to the primary inboxes of Gmail users. During a public commenting period that's still ongoing, most people commenting have expressed staunch opposition for various reasons that they're hoping the FEC will consider.

"Hard pass," wrote a commenter called Katie H. "Please do not allow Google to open up Pandora's Box on the people by allowing campaign/political emails to bypass spam filters."

Out of 48 comments submitted as of July 11, only two commenters voiced support so far for Google's pilot program, which seeks to deliver more unsolicited political emails to Gmail users instead of marking them as spam. The rest of the commenters opposed the program, raising a range of concerns, including the potential for the policy to degrade user experience, introduce security risks, and even possibly unfairly influence future elections.