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It Always Gets Dumber: Elon Sues The Ad Coalition He Just Rejoined Because He Thinks It’s Illegal To Not Advertise On ExTwitter
from the the-hypocrisy-files dept
Remember when Elon told advertisers not to advertise on ExTwitter? Remember how he told them to “go fuck” themselves? Well, now he’s suing those companies for the serious crime (he claims it might be RICO) of not wanting to advertise on his site.
Oh, and it’s even dumber than that. Because, as we detailed, just a month earlier, ExTwitter “excitedly” announced how “proud” it was to rejoin the industry coalition that Elon is now suing. And apparently, they’re staying in as a part of that coalition.
But, wait, let’s back up a bit. There’s so much stupid here that it’s easy to get ahead of ourselves.
GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. It was set up by the World Federation of Advertisers in response to the horrifying mosque shooting in Christchurch, in which the killer livestreamed the attack. Around this time, the media started pointing out (sometimes fairly, though often not very fairly) that when bad stuff showed up online (terrorism, CSAM, hate) it often showed up next to big brand advertisements.
Advertisers recognized that it would do damage to their brands to keep having ads show up in that way, and they set up GARM as a way in which advertisers and social media companies might try to create some basic frameworks to minimize such a risk for advertisers. It basically creates some standards and best practices for both advertisers and social networks to do with it as they see fit (nothing is required at all).
Next up, Elon announced a plan to purchase Twitter for $44 billion claiming it was to support free speech. Then he immediately regretted it and tried to back out of the deal. When that was clearly going to fail (in spectacularly embarrassing ways), Elon switched gears and said he’d go through with the deal.
Since Elon’s conception of “free speech” from the beginning has basically been “obnoxious speech I like is protected, but speech I dislike is not,” many advertisers decided to hold back on their ad spend to protect their brands. This turned out to be wise for a variety of reasons.
The company would then swing back and forth with CEO-in-name-only Linda Yaccarino wooing advertisers to come back to the platform, only to have Elon do something stupid and push them away again.
Early on in Elon’s tenure, he got into a bit of a war of words with folks associated with GARM after they merely asked him for details of how he would deal with hate speech on the platform. At some point after taking the company over, Elon took Twitter out of GARM. However, whenever the company wanted to cozy up to advertisers, they would tout how they would comply with GARM standards.
Twitter did that in January of 2023 and again in June of 2023.
But, of course, Elon would continually fuck things up. In November of 2023, he did so by going on stage at the Dealbook conference and telling advertisers to “go fuck yourself.” He also told them “don’t advertise.”
It appears many advertisers took him up on the latter offer again (no idea if they took him up on the former offer), making life difficult for the business side in which the company has to try to attract advertisers.
Then, just last month, ExTwitter announced that it had “excitedly” rejoined GARM. Note the date on the tweet (which is still up):
A week later, Rep. Jim Jordan (as he is known to do) released a very stupid, misleading report, claiming that GARM was an antitrust violation and that it was pressuring advertisers not to advertise on conservative media. Elon, who seemed unaware that days earlier his own company had excitedly announced it was rejoining GARM, announced that he would sue GARM and its “collaborators” over their decisions not to advertise on ExTwitter.
So, basically a week after rejoining GARM “excitedly,” “free speech absolutist” Elon announced that he would be suing GARM for using their speech to tell advertisers how best to keep their brands safe, which meant that some of them chose not to advertise on ExTwitter.
And, this week, he went through with it. Even though X is a Nevada company headquartered (for the time being) in California (though with plans to move to Texas) and WFA is a Belgian non-profit with US offices in New York, Elon sued in Texas. And not just any Texas court, but the Northern District of Texas, Wichita Falls Division, where they were guaranteed to get judge Reed O’Connor, who is already hearing Elon’s SLAPP suit against Media Matters (and has already been siding with Elon despite the ridiculousness of the case).
The complaint argues that GARM and its advertising partners are engaging in antitrust behavior in convincing advertisers not to advertise on ExTwitter. But there’s quite strong precedent at the Supreme Court that says that economic boycotts related to lawful expression are protected under the First Amendment. The only cases when that’s not true is if they’re advocating for something illegal (which didn’t happen here) or the boycott is not for any legitimate purpose, but to kill a competitor.
The complaint is nonsense in so many ways, including the false claim that GARM “forces” social media companies to adhere to its standards. But that’s not true. Social media companies can choose to adopt those standards or not (and how). And, at the same time, the advertisers who are members of GARM get to choose whether or not they want to advertise on platforms that don’t adhere to those standards. No one is forced to do anything.
And, remember, Elon literally told advertisers who were concerned about these issues on ExTwitter not to advertise.
The exhibits in the complaint show a bunch of emails that repeatedly (though contrary to how they’re described in the complaint) show that GARM just acts as a facilitation organization, and advertisers all get to make up their own minds on how to deal with things.
I mean, literally in one of the exhibits, an advertiser is asking GARM’s lead, Rob Rakowitz, what to do about Twitter, and Rakowitz tells the advertiser “you may want to connect with Twitter directly to understand their progress on brand safety and make your own decisions.” That email starts out with him telling the advertiser pretty explicitly that GARM doesn’t make recommendations, and that such decisions are “completely within the sphere of each member and subject to their own discretion.”
So, the evidence that ExTwitter itself has submitted debunks the entire argument of the case. In the complaint, ExTwitter tries to play this off as GARM trying to cover its tracks after Jim Jordan had launched his investigation.
But none of this should matter. The entire crux of the case is the ridiculous belief that advertisers have no right to pull their advertisements from Twitter.
In announcing the lawsuit, Linda Yaccarino put out a laughably stupid video in which she (1) wore a necklace that said “free speech” and (2) argued that not advertising on ExTwitter was an attack on free speech (and, hilariously, on ExTwitter’s users). I mean, you can’t make this shit up:
These organizations targeted our company, and you, our users. The evidence and facts are on our side. They conspired to boycott X, which threatens our ability to thrive in the future. That puts your global town square — the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly — at long term risk. People are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is restricted.
I mean, what? Deciding not to give Elon money is somehow an attack on users of ExTwitter? Did anyone with half a brain read this through? The marketplace has rejected your terrible understanding of trust & safety, and advertisers (and users) have gone elsewhere. That’s free speech and the free market in action.
There’s no requirement that anyone advertise on your terrible platform.
And no, ExTwitter is not “the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly.” That’s the wider internet. There are many places that allow people to express themselves freely and openly, while ExTwitter has shown a frequent willingness to remove content that Elon dislikes.
Free speech rights include freedom to not associate with someone, and that’s all advertisers are doing. If the marketplace isn’t accepting of that, then, well, that’s the marketplace telling you your ideas suck.
Meanwhile, Elon continues to argue that this is not just a civil matter, but a criminal one, pretending that this might be a RICO Act violation.
Seems like as good a time as any to point to an archived version of Ken White’s (unfortunately no longer online) lawsplainer on why it’s not RICO, dammit. In this case, it is especially not RICO.
Again, it needs to be clear what’s going on here. Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck themselves and not advertise. Many of them did so. A few of them reached out to GARM to see what people there thought about advertising on Twitter, but no official recommendations were ever made.
And somehow, that’s RICO? Or an antitrust violation?
Meanwhile, at least one other wannabe company has joined Elon in this stupid, anti-free speech crusade. Rumble, the “what if YouTube, but for assholes,” video streaming company also sued. In the same court. With the same lawyer.
The Rumble lawsuit may be even dumber. The company admits that it doesn’t care about protecting the brand safety of advertisers:
Rumble has chosen not to implement monetization policies that are based on GARM’s preferred brand safety standards. Because of this, Rumble forgoes spending significant resources on brand safety efforts, which allows it to offer advertising space at a lower price than other platforms that do invest resources in complying with restrictive brand safety standards.
It presents no evidence that GARM did anything with regard to Rumble, but just whines that whenever it’s spoken to GARM members, none of them ever decide to advertise.
Rumble has made multiple attempts to form a commercial relationship with GroupM over the years but has never received a meaningful response. In 2023 and 2024 alone, multiple members of Rumble’s sales team sent emails to GroupM seeking to have GroupM purchase advertisements on Rumble’s platform, but GroupM refused to engage with Rumble’s outreach beyond a single meeting that GroupM ended without any follow-up.
On multiple occasions since GARM’s founding, Rumble has opened a dialogue with advertisers and ad tech providers that are GARM members with the intent of selling advertisement inventory to new customers. Despite many productive early conversations, the GARM members eventually declined to purchase advertisements on Rumble.
Must be a conspiracy, huh? And not the fact that Rumble likes to platform terrible people with embarrassingly stupid views, which most brand advertisers don’t want to be within 100 yards of supporting?
The sheer entitlement of these fuckers.
Look, there are a lot of companies that don’t want to advertise with Techdirt. For one, we say things like “these fuckers.” Also, we regularly criticize companies for doing stupid shit. So, I get it. We once had a conversation with a large advertising firm that thought they would get a big telecom company to advertise on Techdirt. They then sent us an example of us trashing that company and said “I’m afraid they won’t be interested.” Fair enough.
I get why companies don’t want to advertise here, and I’m not so entitled to think I’m owed their money or that there’s some conspiracy against us.
But somehow Elon, Linda, and whoever is behind Rumble seem to think the opposite. They think that they are magically owed advertising dollars.
And, really, at this point, any advertiser would have to be absolutely crazy to keep advertising on ExTwitter. Musk and Yaccarino are saying quite clearly that stopping advertising could lead to a lawsuit. Somehow you owe it to keep advertising forever or it’s a criminal attack on ExTwitter’s ability to thrive, which apparently is guaranteed by law.
But, of course, this case might actually succeed, given that it’s in Reed O’Connor’s court, and within the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit appeals court. I fear what such a world would look like. It’s certainly not one where free speech is supported, because any such forced association is an attack on free speech. Any such concept that says that certain platforms are magically owed support is not about freedom. It’s about blatant attacks on fundamental freedoms.
Oh, and just as a final kicker, despite Yaccarino claiming that GARM was somehow a threat to all that is good and holy, she told staff today that ExTwitter remains a member of GARM as per their agreement to rejoin last month.
Filed Under: advertising, antitrust, boycotts, brand safety, elon musk, garm, linda yaccarino, rico
Companies: garm, rumble, twitter, wfa, x
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Should Speech Cost A GARM And A Leg?
from the ctrl-alt-speech dept
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:
- Bluesky adds Techdirt founder Mike Masnick to its board (TechCrunch)
- X, Owned by Elon Musk, Brings Antitrust Suit Accusing Advertisers of a Boycott (New York Times)
- WFA Shutters GARM, X Antitrust Suit Cited (MediaPost)
- UK faces resistance from X over taking down disinformation during riots (Financial Times)
- Open letter to UK online service providers (Ofcom)
- Google and Meta struck secret ads deal to target teenagers (Financial Times)
- Turkey blocks access to Instagram for failure to comply with laws (Reuters)
- Harry and Meghan discuss ‘protecting’ their children (BBC)
- The Many Reasons Why NCMEC’s Board Is Failing Its Mission, From A NCMEC Insider (Techdirt)
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.
Filed Under: elon musk, garm, ncmec, turkey, uk
Companies: bluesky, google, instagram, meta, twitter, x
Detroit Man Secures $300,000 Payout For False Facial Recognition Arrest
from the improbable-cause dept
The Detroit PD — or at least a few of its investigators — managed to be the absolute worst at using facial recognition tech. Despite being told by their tech provider that a “match” was never to be considered probable cause for an arrest on its own, multiple PD investigators decided a match — no matter how iffy — was all they needed to start locking people up.
One of those people was Robert Williams, who was arrested in the driveway of his home because officers claimed grainy, dark footage from a jewelry store robbery showed he was the most likely suspect. The final part of this thoroughly incomplete “investigation” was performed by the PD’s facial recognition tech, which used a non-ideal image to serve up a match one detective (who has been sued twice so far) treated as actual probable cause.
Here’s the image they were working with:
Not great! Not even really acceptable! The face — the thing needed most for facial recognition — was in shadows, not clearly defined, and of low enough quality you would think the AI would have served up nothing more than a shrug.
Nonetheless, detectives Daniel Bussa and Steve Posey decided this was enough to go after Williams, who was arrested and, following his exoneration, sued the detectives for violating his rights.
That lawsuit has now netted Williams a $300,000 payout from Detroit residents who had nothing to do with this bogus arrest. But that’s how city funding works and that’s why when government agencies get things wrong, they rarely feel compelled to prevent the same thing from happening again. Here are a few more details on this part of the settlement, courtesy of Emma Camp at Reason:
Williams filed a lawsuit against Detroit police in 2020. Last month, the case was settled, with Williams receiving a $300,000 payout, according to the Associated Press. As part of the settlement, the Detroit Police Department also agreed to conduct an audit of all cases “in which facial recognition technology was utilized to generate an investigative lead that was followed by an arrest or the issuance of an arrest warrant.”
“We are extremely excited that going forward there will be more safeguards on the use of this technology with our hope being to live in a better world because of it,” Williams told journalists last month. “Even though what we would like for them to do is not use it at all.”
While I am pleased to see someone secure compensation for being wronged by the government (even if it will be paid by citizens, rather than the government employees involved), the bigger win is the other part of the settlement, which provides far more of a deterrent to future abuse of this tech than spending other people’s money to escape a lawsuit.
The other part of the settlement alters how the Detroit PD handles facial recognition tech matches, as well as how it conducts its virtual “lineups” when talking to eyewitnesses. That part of the settlement will force the PD to play by the rules set by the tech provider, which means investigators won’t be able to consider search matches probable cause on their own. In addition, any matches served up by the AI will no longer take prominence in photo arrays presented to eyewitnesses. Instead of a “six pack” of photos, investigators will have to present photos one at a time, including a separate photo of the suspect that hasn’t been derived from the facial recognition tech. Investigators will also have to disclose to eyewitnesses (and courts) that the match was derived from an automated search, rather than pretend these photos were just part of a random selection.
Finally, let’s not forget that a system capable of serving up false positives is just as capable of pitching false negatives to investigators. Relying solely on AI search results — as Detroit PD detectives did in multiple cases — compounds the problem. Not only are innocent people being arrested but guilty parties are going undetected. Facial recognition can work if it’s a small part of much larger and better vetted investigation process. What it should never be expected to do is act as a stand-alone probable cause for arrests.
Filed Under: daniel bussa, detroit, detroit pd, facial recognition, false arrest, false positive, michael oliver, robert williams, steve posey
Google Loses Big Antitrust Fight, Which Will Mean What, Exactly?
from the yeah,-but-now-what? dept
What if you found an antitrust violation… and almost all of the remedies wouldn’t actually do much to fix things? That might be the situation we’re in with Google’s antitrust loss this week. It’s not a good situation by any means, but it’s not clear what to do about it either. The DOJ’s historic antitrust win against Google raises a troubling question: what if the cure is almost as bad as the disease?
On Monday, the judge in Google’s big antitrust trial (the first of a few) found that the company had, in fact, violated antitrust laws. The ruling is massive (286 pages), so it took a few days for me to get through it. You can read straightforward coverage of it elsewhere, so I wanted to focus some of my thoughts on what this actually means.
And my general conclusion is… not very much? At best, it’s marginally helpful to Microsoft (one of just three companies that is larger than Google) and marginally harmful to Mozilla. But… not all that helpful at all to people who want there to be more competition and better search.
From the beginning, I thought this was a particularly weak antitrust case (apparently I was wrong!). I also thought that one of the other antitrust cases the company is facing (about advertising tech) was a hell of a lot stronger. So I’m a bit surprised by the conclusion here, but still left perplexed by what actual benefit this outcome has (should it stand).
And, of course, none of it really matters at all right now, because Google will appeal, and the case will go on for another five or so years before anything is decided. And, at that point, it’s possible that we’ll be living in an entirely different world, perhaps one where AI-driven search engines make Google’s position less dominant anyway.
However, let’s take a step back first, and start with a few key points before delving into this ruling in particular.
- Having more competition is good and having less competition is bad.
- Google is a tremendously powerful company, known (at times) to abuse that power in unfortunate ways. It’s entirely reasonable (and probably sensible) not to trust the company. There’s a reason why we removed all Google tracking and ads from Techdirt years ago.
- Things get complex when most people recognize that Google actually has the best search engine. That’s not to say it’s a good search engine. Many people believe it’s gotten a lot worse of late. But if users tend to think it’s the best and get upset at other companies if they present non-Google search results, what do you do? That was the question we asked last fall, and this ruling has not yet answered it.
All of that means that the situation here is uncomfortable. Judge Amit Mehta says that Google has a monopoly in search. He says the agreements it has made with Apple and Mozilla are a form of illegal tying. In these agreements, Google pays both of those companies lots of money to offer up Google search as a default in browsers and operating systems.
But, it’s a weird sort of monopoly in which the main evidence against the monopolist is that it pays billions of dollars to other companies. But, of course, the reasoning in the ruling is that Google pays that to effectively keep the market uncompetitive.
The judge finds that Google’s market share and the barrier to entry for new search engines is strong evidence that it has market power in search. The court found that Google did not have a monopoly in the search ads market, except in search text ads. It appears that Amazon’s product page ads somehow saved Google from also having a monopoly in regular search ads.
After establishing that Google has a monopoly in search and in text ads, it then explores whether or not its behavior is anti-competitive. Again, the Judge flat out says that everyone basically agrees that Google is the better product:
In a sense, Google is not wrong. It has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices… Nor has Google sat still; it has continued to innovate in search…. Google’s partners value its quality, and they continue to select Google as the default because its search engine provides the best bet for monetizing queries…. Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior. … And Google’s rivals have tried to oust it as the default GSE. Microsoft, most notably, has pitched Apple on making Bing the default multiple times, and DDG made a bid to be the default for private browsing mode searches on Safari. …These firms have not succeeded in part due to their inferior quality. …. It is also true that Google foresaw that the future of search was on mobile. Microsoft acknowledges that it was slow to recognize the importance of developing a search product for mobile, and it has been trying to catch up—unsuccessfully—ever since.
The judge even quotes Apple’s Eddy Cue admitting that it wouldn’t be worth it for the degraded user experience, even if Microsoft paid them much more money:
The market reality is that Google is the only real choice as the default GSE. Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue, put it succinctly when, in a moment of (perhaps inadvertent) candor, he said: “[T]here’s no price that Microsoft could ever offer [Apple] to” preload Bing. Tr. at 2519:10-11 (Cue) (emphasis added). “No price.” Mozilla stated something similar in a letter to the Department of Justice prior to the filing of this lawsuit. It wrote that switching the Firefox default to a rival search engine “would be a losing proposition” because no competitor could monetize search as effectively as Google.
This again highlights the issue described above. But to the court, it is an argument that there is no real competition.
If “no price” could entice a partner to switch, or if doing so is viewed as a “losing proposition,” Google does not face true market competition in search
But also, that raises the issue of the other oddity mentioned above. If there’s no one else who’s better, then why is Google paying so much to Apple and Mozilla? Microsoft can’t outbid them, so why not pay less?
And here, the judge speculates that the payments disincentivize others from entering the space at all, based in large part on the founder of the defunct search engine Neeva.
That was the key takeaway from the testimony of Neeva’s founder and former Google Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce, Dr. Ramaswamy. The court found him to be a particularly compelling witness. He put it best. When the court asked why Google pays billions in revenue share when it already has the best search engine, he answered that the payments “provide an incredibly strong incentive for the ecosystem to not do anything”; they “effectively make the ecosystem exceptionally resist[ant] to change”; and their “net effect . . . [is to] basically freeze the ecosystem in place[.]” Tr. at 3796:8–3798:22 (Ramaswamy). No one would ever describe a competitive marketplace in those terms. When the distribution agreements have created an ecosystem that has a “strong incentive” to do “nothing,” is “resist[ant] to change,” and is “basically [frozen] in place,” there is no genuine “competition for the contract” in search. It is illusory.
But all of that seems based on… pure hypotheticals. After all Neeva did enter the market. And failed. But others continue to try (like Kagi). Could Apple have made its own search engine? Maybe? Would it really have done so? Dunno. Would it have been any good? Also don’t know. Microsoft has spent billions on it and hasn’t done all that well. It seems more likely that the attempts by companies to use AI to reinvigorate search will have a better chance, and that’s unrelated to the issue of Google’s agreements.
And so, again, we get to remedies. The court can’t force someone else to create a good search engine that can compete with Google. Nor can it force Apple and Mozilla to default to other search engines when neither seem interested in doing so. About the only obvious move is to present a user choice screen of what search engine they want to use, which many users will see more as a nuisance than anything else. And… Europe already did this, and basically everyone still chose to use Google.
Some people point to reports about similar choice screens for browsers “working” in the EU, but that really depends on how you define “working.” Some reports highlighted how smaller browsers saw a large bump in users, but it still appears negligible relative to the market leaders.
So all of this leaves everyone in an uncomfortable and not very helpful position. Yes, it would be nice if there were other competitors in the market. But what about this ruling will actually make that happen? At best, this seems to give Google an excuse to pay less to Apple and Mozilla, which helps Google out and harms Mozilla, one of the few companies that is actually competing in the browser space.
That doesn’t seem like a good or healthy result.
Some are arguing that this calls for a “breakup” of Google, but it’s also difficult to see. What in breaking up Google enables more successful search engines to hit the market? Again, that kind of remedy seems more reasonable (and more likely to have an impact) in the other case about adtech.
And, again, by the time this case is actually over, years down the road, the entire market may have already shifted. This leaves things in an uncomfortable position. Yes, Google is dominant in the market. And, no, that’s not great. But how do you get someone else to build a really good search engine out of this remains unclear.
So, in the end, I still find this case frustrating. What do you do when the status quo seems way less than ideal, but the remedies presented don’t seem likely to help, and could actually do damage to a competitive player like Mozilla?
It’s also made more problematic by having different antitrust cases targeting different parts of Google’s business. If you could take a more holistic view of the company and its impact on various markets, it seems like the issues, the impact, and the potential remedies would take a more comprehensive view. But, instead, this is what we’re left with.
The DOJ won a historic antitrust case, which might not have any significant impact at all.
Filed Under: amit mehta, antitrust, competition, monopoly, search, tying agreements
Companies: google
Age-Gating Access To Online Porn Is Unconstitutional
from the we've-done-this-already dept
Texas is one of eight states that have enacted laws that force adults to prove their age before accessing porn sites. Soon it will try to persuade the Supreme Court that its law doesn’t violate the First Amendment.
Good luck with that.
These laws are unconstitutional: They deny adults the well-established right to access constitutionally protected speech.
Texas’ H.B. 1181 forces any website made up of one-third or more adult content to verify every visitor’s age. Some adult sites have responded to the law by shutting down their services in Texas. The Free Speech Coalition challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, arguing that mandatory age verification does more than keep minors away from porn — the law nannies adults as well, barring them from constitutionally protected speech.
The district court agreed with the challengers. Laws regulating speech because of its content (i.e., because it is sexually explicit) are presumed invalid. Under strict scrutiny, the state must show that its regulation is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. In other words, the government needs an exceptionally good reason to regulate, and it can’t regulate more speech than necessary.
The case will turn on what level of scrutiny applies. Protecting minors from obscene speech is a permissible state interest, as the Fifth Circuit court established when it applied the lowest form of scrutiny — rational basis review — to uphold the law. But not all speech that is obscene to minors is obscene to adults. Judge Higginbotham, dissenting from the Fifth Circuit’s decision, pointed out that kids might have no right to watch certain scenes from Game of Thrones — but adults do.
In previous cases regulating minors’ access to explicit content, the Supreme Court applied strict scrutiny specifically because the laws restricted adult access to protected speech. Texas hopes to get around decades of precedent by arguing that there is no way that age verification “could reasonably chill adults’ willingness” to visit porn sites. If adults don’t care about age verification, Texas reasons, nothing in the law stops them from viewing sexually explicit material: No protected speech is regulated.
There’s just one problem: Adults do care about age verification.
H.B. 1181 bars age verification providers from retaining “identifying” information. But nothing in the law stops providers from sharing that same info, and people are rightly concerned about whether their private sexual desires will stay private. That you visited an adult site is bad enough. Getting your personal Pornhub search history leaked along with your government ID is enough to make even the most shameless person consider changing their name and becoming a hermit.
Texas swears up and down that age verification tech is secure, but that doesn’t inspire confidence in anyone following cybersecurity news. Malware is out there. Data leaks happen.
A bored employee glancing at your driver’s license as you walk into the sex shop is not the same thing as submitting to a biometric face scan and algorithmic ID verification, by order of the government, before you can press play on a dirty video. Just thinking about it kills the mood, which may be part of the point.
Texas pretends there’s no difference between the bored bouncer and biometric scans, but if you knew the bouncer had an encyclopedic, inhuman ability to remember every name and face that came through the door and loose lips, well, you wouldn’t go there either.
Hand-waving away these differences is the kind of thing you only do if you’re highly ideologically motivated. But normal people are very reasonably concerned about whether their personal sexual preferences will be leaked to their boss, mother-in-law, or fellow citizens. Mandatory age verification turns people off of viewing porn entirely, and it chills their free expression.
Sexual preferences are private and sensitive; they’re exactly the type of thing you don’t want leaking. So, of course, sexual content is a particularly juicy target for would-be hackers and extortionists. People pay handsomely to keep “sextortion” quiet. If you’re worried about your privacy and you don’t trust the age verification software (you shouldn’t), you’re likely to avoid the risk up front. One adult site says only 6% of visitors go through age verification and that even fewer succeed. Thus the chilling effect: even though adult access to porn is technically legal, people are so afraid of having their ID and last watched video plastered across the internet that they stop watching in the first place.
If the Supreme Court recognizes this and applies strict scrutiny, it will ask whether less restrictive means could protect minors. Back in 2004, the Court tossed out COPA, a law requiring credit card verification to access sexually explicit materials, reasoning that blocking and filtering software would protect minors without burdening adult speech. Today’s filtering software is far more effective than what was available twenty years ago — as the district court found — and, notably, filtering software doesn’t scan adults’ faces.
Sex — a “subject of absorbing interest to mankind,” as one justice once put it — matters. Adults have the right to sexually explicit speech, free of the fear that their identifying information will be leaked or sent to the state. Texas can and should seek to protect kids without stoking that fear.
Santana Boulton is a legal fellow at TechFreedom and a Young Voices contributor. Her commentary has appeared in TechDirt. Follow her on X: @santanaboulton.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, age gating, age verification, free speech, ken paxton, porn, strict scrutiny, supreme court, texas
Companies: free speech coalition
Jim Jordan & Elon Musk Suppressed Speech; Don’t Let Them Pretend It’s A Win For Free Speech
from the that's-the-opposite-of-free-speech dept
Up is down, left is right, day is night. And now, to Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, clear, direct government censorship is, apparently, “free speech.”
This isn’t a huge surprise, but on Thursday, the World Federation of Advertising shut down GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, in response to legal threats from ExTwitter and Rumble, and a bullshit Congressional investigation led by Jim Jordan.
As we have detailed, GARM was setup following the mosque shootings in New Zealand, which was livestreamed. Brand advertisers were accused (arguably unfairly) of profiting off of such things, so they put together this alliance to share information about best practices on social media advertising for brand safety.
GARM was specifically a way for advertisers to set up those best practices, share them with each other, but also to share them with social media sites, to say “hey, this is the kind of trust & safety processes we expect if we’re going to advertise.”
I disagreed with GARM about lots of things, but in a free market, where there is free speech, they should absolutely be allowed to create best practices and to talk with platforms and advertisers and advocate for better trust & safety practices in order for brands to feel safe that their ads won’t show up next to dangerous content.
All of it was entirely voluntary. Advertisers didn’t have to abide by the standards, nor did platforms. This was literally just part of the marketplace of ideas. Some advertisers advocated for efforts to be made to protect their brand safety, and some platforms agreed while others, like Rumble, did not.
All GARM was at its core was advertisers using their own freedom of expression and rights of association to try to put some pressure on platforms to be better stewards, so that advertisers weren’t putting their brands at risk. You can (perhaps reasonably!) argue that they pushed too hard, or some of their requests were unreasonable, but it’s their free speech rights.
As we’ve detailed over the last month, ExTwitter had regularly used GARM’s standards to try to convince advertisers they were “safe” and officially “excitedly” rejoined GARM as a member just last month. A few days later, Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee released a blisteringly stupid and misleading report, falsely claiming that GARM was engaged in antitrust-violating collusion to punish conservative media. None of that was ever true.
However, Elon announced that he would be suing GARM and hoped that criminal charges would be filed against GARM, perhaps not realizing his own organization had rejoined GARM a week earlier and touted that relationship in its effort to attract advertisers. Earlier this week, he carried through on that plan and sued GARM for alleged antitrust violations.
The lawsuit is absolutely ridiculous. It assumes that because GARM, at times, criticized Elon’s handling of trust & safety issues, that was a form of collusion that abused its monopoly position to get advertisers to stop advertising on ExTwitter.
It is one of the most entitled, spoiled brat kind of lawsuits you’ll ever see. Not only does it seem to suggest that not advertising on ExTwitter is an antitrust violation, it assumes that the only reason that advertisers would remove their ads from the site was not due to any actions by the company or Elon, but rather that it must be because GARM organized a boycott (which, notably, none of the evidence shows they did). One thing is quite clear from all this: Elon seems incapable of recognizing that the consequences of his own actions fall on him. He insists it must be everyone else’s fault.
Indeed, the sense of entitlement shines through from those involved in this whole process.
For example, Rumble’s CEO Chris Pavlovski more or less admitted that if you turn him down when he asks companies to advertise, you would now get sued. The sheer, unadulterated entitlement on display here is incredible:
Rumble had sued GARM alongside ExTwitter, using some of the same lawyers that Elon did. When tweeting out the details to prove that these advertisers should be added to his lawsuit, Pavlovski only showed perfectly friendly emails from companies saying “hey, look, advertising on your site won’t be good for our reputation, sorry.”
That’s not illegal. It’s not collusion. It’s the marketplace of ideas saying “hey, we don’t want to associate with you.” But, according to Rumble, that alone deserves a lawsuit.
Anyway, the World Federation of Advertisers has apparently given in to this lawfare from Elon and Jim Jordan and announced on Thursday that they were shutting down GARM because of all of this.
In other words, Elon, Jordan, and others have used the power of the state, both in the form of lawsuits and congressional investigations, to browbeat advertisers into no longer speaking up about ways to keep social media sites safe for their brands.
This is the exact opposite of free speech. It’s literally using the power of the state to shut up companies which were expressing views that Elon and Jordan didn’t like.
And, so, of course, they and their fans are celebrating this state-backed censorship as a “win for free speech.” It’s ridiculously Orwellian.
This is not a “win” for the First Amendment in any way. It is, in every way, the opposite. The House Judiciary Committee, under Jim Jordan, abused the power of the state to shut up companies from talking about which sites they felt were safe for brands or what those sites could do to be better.
And, of course, a bunch of other very foolish people repeated more of this kind of nonsense, including some of MAGA’s favorite journalists, who pretend to support free speech. Ben Shapiro called it an “important win for free speech principles,” which is just disconnected from reality.
Linda Yaccarino claims it proves that “no small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.” This makes no sense at all. No small group monopolized anything. They just tried to put in place some basic best practices to protect their brands and no one had to agree with them at all (and many didn’t).
And if Linda or Elon thinks this will magically make advertisers want to come back to ExTwitter, they’re even more delusional than I thought. Who would ever want to advertise on a platform that sued advertisers for leaving?
Filed Under: 1st amendment, advertising, antitrust, best practices, censorship, elon musk, entitlement, free speech, garm, jim jordan
Companies: garm, rumble, twitter, wfa, world federation of advertisers, x
Educate, Don’t Isolate: How To Combat Elon Musk’s Misinformation Machine
from the elon-is-not-a-nation-state dept
You may have heard that Elon Musk and the UK are fighting. And both of them are looking ridiculous.
Riots are happening across the UK in response to the stabbing deaths of three children. The background for the riots is that a bunch of shitlord agitators used Telegram to organize further nonsense on other social media channels, leading to riots over misleading claims about who was responsible. Elon Musk, as he’s been known to do, has been a gullible simp for the lies and conspiracy theories that the agitators are pushing out blaming asylum seekers and refugees, and has been not just endorsing the nonsense, but spreading it further.
Most normal people would recognize that this is not great. But there’s a question of what to do about it, and the UK seems to be choosing the worst possible approach: yelling at Elon Musk, which only enables him to pretend he’s a martyr for free speech.
I wrote a piece at the Daily Beast talking about how the UK’s response to Musk is extremely counterproductive. The key point is that the UK’s Secretary for Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, says they need to treat Elon as if he’s a nation state. But, as I argue in my piece, that makes no sense, in part because nation states and individuals are very different, and because the affordances for dealing with each are totally different. But, also, because it only works to Musk’s advantage here.
The different realities and the different ways that nation states and private entities can and do interact lead to very different affordances and very different outcomes.
Also, most of the interactions over the past decade were along the lines of: “you need to be better about limiting the spread of content designed to incite violence.” Often, these are situations where the companies agree and want to limit the spread of such content for their own reasons, but may just disagree on how to do so.
It’s entirely different when one of the companies is owned and operated by an individual who himself is one of the leading spreaders of that kind of content.
Most companies don’t want to be spreading that kind of information because it’s bad for their own reputation and the willingness of both advertisers and users to continue to use the platform. But, in Elon’s case, there appear to be extraordinarily different incentives at play.
As I note, Elon lives for this kind of thing, and it only fuels him:
Elon relishes fighting with certain governments (so long as they’re not run by his ideological kindred spirits among right-leaning authoritarians). Pushing or threatening Elon over this is likely to just lead him to playing “free speech martyr” as he’s done in the past. And, to some extent, he wouldn’t be wrong.
The key is understanding that the UK isn’t necessarily mad about general disinformation trending on ExTwitter. They’re mad that Elon’s speaking. And, yes, even in the UK with much lower levels of free speech rights, if you’re arguing over the right of one person to say nonsense, it just becomes a fight over free speech. And there are plenty of others saying the same thing. Musk isn’t the only one doing this.
So, I suggest in the article that rather than focus on yelling about Elon, we should do more to better educate people not to fall for the kind of nonsense that Elon falls for. We should focus on enabling there to be more competition and other places for people to speak, so that one person isn’t in control of one of the most popular spots to speak.
In other words, focus on making fewer people care what he has to say, rather than focusing on trying to silence Elon.
And, of course, some of that should be to take a page from the Democratic party of the last few weeks and move away from scolding to mockery. Elon is the richest man in the world, has access to any expert he wants, and can absolutely find out what’s true. Shouldn’t people start calling out how absolutely ridiculous it is that he instead decides to get his information from a rando named CatTurd2?
There’s a lot more in the full article, so go check it out. I fear we’re just going to keep making the same mistake over and over again, which only plays into the framing that we need people like Elon controlling our speech platforms. He’s not a nation state. He’s a very, very wealthy gullible sucker spreading conspiracy theories. Just point out how ridiculous he is and move on.
Filed Under: elon musk, misinformation, peter kyle, riots, uk
Companies: twitter, x
Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ All Jack Up Prices As Streaming Enshittification Continues
from the bleed-them-dry dept
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
After Max just imposed a new round of streaming service price hikes, Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ (all owned by the same company) have all followed suit, imposing higher prices to access streaming catalogs of deteriorating quality as companies try to claw back at debt loads. Some of Disney’s price hikes are as much as 25 percent, and the hikes are hitting ad-based and ad-free versions alike.
User opinions on Reddit and other online forums haven’t been kind:
“The enshittification of media in the last few years is insane and it’s wild how seemingly no one cares anymore about making something that is actually enjoyable to watch and not their egotistic[al] pipe dream.”
The price hikes come not because Disney is desperate; Disney this week reported its first ever modest streaming profit ($47 million on revenue of $6.5 billion).
The business press of course treated the discovery that you make more money when you charge more as an act of uncanny business savvy; not mentioned is the fact that these kinds of price hikes simply aren’t sustainable, or the fact that the costs for a “growth for growth’s sake” mindset are always borne by the consumer or the employee.
Publicly-traded companies can’t just provide a quality, affordable service people like. They have to provide Wall Street ever-escalating quarterly returns. If it’s not possible to achieve those returns through innovation and subscriber growth (which is no longer possible now that the market is saturated), that’s when big companies get in trouble and start creatively nickel-and-diming their userbase.
Traditional cable TV, of course, went through this exact life cycle. And despite the fact many of those executives have shifted over to streaming, they’ve learned nothing from history or experience because they’re not financially incentivized to learn from experience. They’re incentivized to make stock values climb at any cost, then flee when things get rough; fat executive or investor compensation in hand.
Price hikes, annoying restrictions, or crackdowns on the villainy of (previously encouraged) password sharing won’t be enough. You’ve also got to cut back on customer service, push cheaper, lower-quality content, and ultimately embrace utterly pointless mergers that trigger waves of layoffs.
This cycle for streaming won’t end until they’re disrupted in turn by better alternatives, even if those alternatives wind up being a resurgent interest in film and TV piracy. At which point, to be sure, any remaining executives that haven’t fled or retired are guaranteed to blame everything and everyone but themselves.
Filed Under: cable, disney plus, enshittification, espn, growth for growth's sake, hulu, piracy, streaming, tv, video
Companies: disney
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