Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

Over the past few days, dozens of tech companies have filed briefs in support of Google in a Supreme Court case that tests online platforms’ liability for recommending content . Obvious stakeholders like Meta and Twitter, alongside popular platforms like Craigslist, Etsy, Wikipedia, Roblox, and Tripadvisor, urged the court to uphold Section 230 immunity in the case or risk muddying the paths users rely on to connect with each other and discover information online.

Out of all these briefs, however, Reddit’s was perhaps the most persuasive . The platform argued on behalf of everyday Internet users, whom it claims could be buried in “frivolous” lawsuits for frequenting Reddit, if Section 230 is weakened by the court. Unlike other companies that hire content moderators, the content that Reddit displays is “primarily driven by humans—not by centralized algorithms.” Because of this, Reddit’s brief paints a picture of trolls suing not major social media companies, but individuals who get no compensation for their work recommending content in communities. That legal threat extends to both volunteer content moderators, Reddit argued, as well as more casual users who collect Reddit “karma” by upvoting and downvoting posts to help surface the most engaging content in their communities.

“Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act famously protects Internet platforms from liability, yet what’s missing from the discussion is that it crucially protects Internet users—everyday people—when they participate in moderation like removing unwanted content from their communities, or users upvoting and downvoting posts,” a Reddit spokesperson told Ars.

Enlarge (credit: ilkercelik | E+ )

The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online. Many UK lawmakers have argued that the only way to guarantee that future is to criminalize tech leaders whose platforms knowingly fail to protect children. Today, the UK House of Commons reached a deal to appease those lawmakers, Reuters reports, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government agreeing to modify the Online Safety Bill to ensure its passage. It now appears that tech company executives found to be "deliberately" exposing children to harmful content could soon risk steep fines and jail time of up to two years.

The agreement was reached during the safety bill's remaining stages before a vote in the House of Commons. Next, it will move on to review by the House of Lords, where the BBC reports it will “face a lengthy journey.” Sunak says he will revise the bill to include new terms before it reaches the House of Lords, where lawmakers will have additional opportunities to revise the wording.

Reports say that tech executives responsible for platforms hosting user-generated content would only be liable if they fail to take “proportionate measures” to prevent exposing children to harmful content, such as materials featuring child sexual abuse, child abuse, eating disorders, and self-harm. Some measures that tech companies can take to avoid jail time and fines of up to 10 percent of a company's global revenue include adding age verification, providing parental controls, and policing content.

Enlarge (credit: Carolco Pictures)

YouTube has announced a plan to crack down on spam and abusive content in comments and livestream chats. Of course, YouTube will be doing this with bots, which will now have the power to issue timeouts to users and instantly remove comments that are deemed abusive.

YouTube's post says, "We’ve been working on improving our automated detection systems and machine learning models to identify and remove spam. In fact, we’ve removed over 1.1 billion spammy comments in the first six months of 2022." It later adds, "We’ve improved our spambot detection to keep bots out of live chats."

When YouTube removes a message, the company says it will warn the poster that the message has been removed. The company adds, "If a user continues to leave multiple abusive comments, they may receive a timeout and be temporarily unable to comment for up to 24 hours."

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Today is apparently the day when Twitter Blue is coming back. Reuters reported that subscriptions would be available sometime Friday for purchase in the Apple App Store for $11 and on the web for $7.

This was confirmed in an email sent to advertisers Thursday, which Reuters reviewed, announcing some new Twitter Blue security features and advertiser controls. The email informed advertisers that individuals would be able to purchase blue checkmarks, while verified businesses would be distinguished by gold checks and government accounts by gray checks.

The purpose of the email was partly to reassure advertisers that the Twitter Blue impersonation scandal is actually over and partly to announce new controls allowing advertisers to prevent branded ads from appearing “above or below tweets containing certain keywords,” Reuters reported.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

This weekend, widespread protests erupted in China in what amounted to “the biggest show of opposition to the ruling Communist Party in decades,” AP News reported . Many protesters attempted to document events live to spread awareness and inspire solidarity across Twitter. Demonstrations were so powerful that Chinese authorities actually seemed to cave, appeasing some of the protesters’ demands by easing the severe lockdown restrictions that sparked the protests.

This could have been a moment that showed how Twitter under Elon Musk is still a relevant breaking-news source, still a place where free speech demonstrations reach the masses, and thus, still the only place to track escalating protests like these. Instead, The Washington Post reported that a flood of “useless tweets” effectively buried live footage from protests. This blocked users from easily following protest news, while Twitter seemingly did nothing to stop what researchers described as an apparent Chinese influence operation.

For hours, these tweets dropped Chinese city names where protests occurred into posts that were mostly advertising pornography and adult escort services. And it worked, preventing users attempting to search city names in Chinese from easily seeing updates on the protests. Researchers told The Post that the tweets were posted from a range of Chinese-language accounts that hadn’t been used for months or even years. The tweets began appearing early Sunday, shortly after protesters started calling for Communist Party leaders to resign.

Enlarge (credit: Theo Wargo / Staff | WireImage )

When “Chief Twit” Elon Musk launched a poll to decide whether to reinstate Donald Trump’s Twitter account , many wondered what happened to Musk’s plan to form a "widely diverse" content moderation council to help him weigh any decisions to reverse permabans. He had announced that plan after meeting with civil rights groups earlier this month but had never mentioned it since. It took four days of Trump not tweeting before Musk finally provided an update on that oversight council that he never formed.

In a tweet seemingly blaming activists for Twitter’s advertising woes, Musk claimed that he had only promised to form the council on the condition that activists promised to stop pushing advertisers to boycott his platform.

“A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition,” Musk tweeted. “They broke the deal.”

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Twitter already faces a class-action lawsuit from some staff that the company laid off without providing federally required notice. Now, rather than realize the error of its ways, Twitter decided this weekend that its next round of layoffs should come with no notice at all.

On Saturday, Platformer’s Casey Newton tweeted that a large number of Twitter contract workers based inside and outside the US had been laid off. This decision was seemingly made so abruptly that not even the contractors’ managers were told they’d be losing workers. Business Insider published the email sent out to contract workers, coldly informing them that Monday would be their last day and no work was required of them that day. The Verge estimated that 4,500 to 5,500 workers were affected from content moderation, marketing, engineering, and other teams. By some estimates, this represents 80 percent of all Twitter contract workers.

"One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows," one manager wrote in Slack, according to Newton’s tweet thread .

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

At a time when Elon Musk has just begun fiddling with Twitter’s knobs in attempts to make it more money, the possibility that Tumblr could rise back up as a profitable social media giant simply by allowing some users to post nude pics again is a prospect that’s left many Twitter users nakedly giddy.

Tweets garnering tens of thousands of likes may be joking when they call Tumblr’s recent announcement —confirming that it would no longer restrict content featuring “nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes”—a “death blow” to Twitter, which many users are already threatening to abandon. However, it appears Tumblr’s decision could lure Twitter users away.

Earlier this year, The New Yorker reported that Tumblr was already attracting a younger demographic that other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter want to attract. And other tweets reacting to Tumblr’s announcement received just as many likes simply out of enthusiasm for the return of nudity on Tumblr, seemingly indicating that some of the users who fled Tumblr when it banned adult content in 2018 would be willing to come back.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu Agency )

This weekend, advertisers, regulators, and Twitter users were all attentively watching Elon Musk’s Twitter feed for any indication of whether the free speech absolutist could be trusted to do things like effectively combat disinformation spread after taking over the site. In what may be considered Musk’s first major misstep as Twitter’s new owner, Musk chose that moment to amplify a far-right conspiracy theory in a now-deleted tweet garnering scrutiny from all sides.

Musk’s tweet came amid a wave of online chatter discussing what happened when an accused intruder, David Wayne DePape, broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house, attacked her now-hospitalized husband Paul with a hammer, and screamed out, “Where’s Nancy?” Investigating possible motives, CBS News reviewed some of DePape’s social media posts and confirmed that DePape had shared several far-right conspiracy theories, including posts denying the Holocaust and tying Democratic officials to child sex rings. CBS also reported that DePape allegedly had a list of other targets.

Hillary Clinton joined others in tweeting critically of the Republican party, which she accused of inciting violence by spreading “deranged conspiracy theories.” Clinton’s tweet prompted Musk to link Clinton to an article from a weekly newspaper known to publish false news—the Santa Monica Observer—which, according to The New York Times , reported false allegations suggesting that Paul Pelosi knew his attacker. Overlooking the dubious news source, Musk repeated those false allegations, telling Clinton and his millions of followers that “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.”