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X, formerly known as Twitter, spent the summer hastily rebranding and vying to win advertisers back , but at least one advertiser was shocked when X swiftly rejected its ads after deciding to return to X.

A nonpartisan nonprofit, the Freedom Forum, told Ars that last week it discovered that its X ads were being arbitrarily blocked after attempting to advertise an educational, family-friendly festival that celebrates the First Amendment.

The group assumed the ads were blocked in error, so it reached out to X six different times, and at various times, X's rationale for blocking the ad changed.

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Debate continues to rage over the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which seeks to hold platforms liable for feeding harmful content to minors. KOSA is lawmakers' answer to whistleblower Frances Haugen's shocking revelations to Congress. In 2021, Haugen leaked documents and provided testimony alleging that Facebook knew that its platform was addictive and was harming teens—but blinded by its pursuit of profits, it chose to ignore the harms.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who sponsored KOSA, was among the lawmakers stunned by Haugen's testimony. He said in 2021 that Haugen had showed that "Facebook exploited teens using powerful algorithms that amplified their insecurities." Haugen's testimony, Blumenthal claimed, provided "powerful proof that Facebook knew its products were harming teenagers."

But when Blumenthal introduced KOSA last year, the bill faced immediate and massive blowback from more than 90 organizations—including tech groups, digital rights advocates, legal experts, child safety organizations, and civil rights groups. These critics warned lawmakers of KOSA's many flaws, but they were most concerned that the bill imposed a vague "duty of care" on platforms that was "effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content." The fear was that the duty of care provision would likely lead platforms to over-moderate and imprecisely filter content deemed controversial—things like information on LGBTQ+ issues, drug addiction, eating disorders, mental health issues, or escape from abusive situations.

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Starting today, Facebook users may feel a little less safe posting anonymously. The Court of the Hague in The Netherlands ruled that Meta Ireland must unmask an anonymous user accused of defaming the claimant, a male Facebook user who allegedly manipulated and made secret recordings of women he dated.

The anonymous Facebook user posted the allegedly defamatory statements in at least two private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing dating experiences. The claimant could not gain access but was shown screenshots from the groups, one with about 2,600 members and one with around 61,000 members. The claimant argued that his reputation had suffered from the repeated postings that included photos of the man and alleged screenshots of his texts.

The claimant tried to get Meta to remove the posts, but Meta responded with an email saying that it would not do so because "it is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation."

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Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decided that a lower court's logic was flawed when it convicted a Colorado man, Billy Raymond Counterman, for stalking. Counterman had sent hundreds of online messages—some of which the lower court ruled that a reasonable person would consider threatening—to a local musician, Coles Whalen, whom he'd never met.

The Supreme Court ruled that the objective standard that the Colorado lower court used to convict Counterman violated his First Amendment rights and, if upheld, could have a chilling effect on online speech.

"The State prosecuted Counterman in accordance with an objective standard and did not have to show any awareness on Counterman’s part of his statements’ threatening character," the SCOTUS opinion said. "That is a violation of the First Amendment."

Enlarge / Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (L) shakes hands with Elon Musk during a meeting in Ankara on November 8, 2017. (credit: AFP Contributor / Contributor | AFP )

This weekend, Twitter restricted access to some tweets in Turkey at the request of the Turkish government ahead of its next presidential election. Twitter's compliance silenced accounts that had been critical of the Turkish government, Business Insider reported . It also prompted a wave of criticism directed at Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who seemingly once again abandoned his free speech principles to comply with the Turkish government order.

Musk defended his decision, arguing that "the choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets." Some troubled Twitter users suggested that authoritarian governments could see this response as a signal that Twitter will help them silence opponents any time that they threaten to ban the platform regionally. Others felt that Twitter could have been more transparent about Turkey's request.

An official Twitter account confirmed that all account holders impacted by the takedown request were informed and that those users' tweets would be "available in the rest of the world." Musk also claimed that, for transparency reasons, he would post the takedown notice that Twitter received from Turkey, but that seemingly never happened.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk hoped that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would narrow or possibly even end the terms of a 2018 securities fraud settlement that require a lawyer to review his Tesla tweets before he posts them. Instead, a federal appeals court today rejected Musk's claims that the SEC's consent decree violated his First Amendment rights by placing a prior restraint on his speech.

This means Musk is stuck with what his lawyers called a "government-imposed muzzle" on his Tesla tweets.

The SEC's consent decree came after a controversial Musk tweet claiming that he was considering taking Tesla private after allegedly securing funding—a tweet that caused investors to lose billions .

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“Women, life, freedom” became the protest chant of a revolution still raging in Iran months after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in custody of morality police. Amini was arrested last September for “improperly” wearing a hijab and violating the Islamic Republic's mandatory dress code laws. Since then, her name has become a viral hashtag invoked by millions of online activists protesting authoritarian regimes around the globe.

In response to Iran's ongoing protests—mostly led by women and young people—Iranian authorities have increasingly restricted Internet access. First, they temporarily blocked popular app stores and indefinitely blocked social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. They then implemented sporadic mobile shutdowns wherever protests flared up. Perhaps most extreme, authorities responded to protests in southeast Iran in February by blocking the Internet outright, Al Arabiya reported . Digital and human rights experts say motivations include controlling information, keeping protestors offline, and forcing protestors to use state services where their online activities can be more easily tracked—and sometimes trigger arrests.

As getting online has become increasingly challenging for everyone in Iran—not just protestors—millions have learned to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide Internet activity, circumvent blocks, and access accurate information beyond state propaganda. Simply put, VPNs work by masking a user's IP address so that governments have a much more difficult time monitoring activity or detecting a user's location. They do this by routing the user's data to the VPN provider's remote servers, making it much harder for an ISP (or a government) to correlate the Internet activity of the VPN provider's servers with the individual users actually engaging in that activity.

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Twitter is reviewing its controversial policies around permanently banning users, potentially bringing its content moderation more in line with Elon Musk’s vision for the social media platform regardless of whether the Tesla chief becomes its owner.

The Silicon Valley company has been assessing whether there are other content moderation tools that could replace its harshest penalty for the violation of certain rules, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

But any change is unlikely to pave the way for a return to the platform for Donald Trump, two of the people said, as removing bans for breaching of its policy against inciting violence is not under consideration. The former US president was issued a lifetime ban soon after a mob of his supporters invaded the US Capitol on January 6 last year.

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While YouTube has started deleting videos promoting false information on abortion , the South Carolina Senate introduced a new bill that strives to block Internet users from talking about abortion truthfully online.

Known as the " Equal Protection at Conception—No Exceptions—Act ," the bill would ban any website from hosting or publishing any information about accessing or self-inducing abortion "knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used, for an abortion."

Specifically, the bill restricts "providing information to a pregnant woman, or someone seeking information on behalf of a pregnant woman, by telephone, Internet, or any other mode of communication." That includes restrictions against providing abortion referral services, including to doulas performing abortions, as well as hosting or maintaining a website that's "purposefully directed to a pregnant woman" living in South Carolina. Less specifically, the bill notes that further restrictions will apply once the law becomes enforced.