Social Media Watch
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EXCERPT:
The First Amendment has been under a decade-long attack from the left with mainstream oppressors bulldozing anyone who opposed COVID’s origin story, engaged in scientific debates over climate change and gender norms, or argued about the emerging reality of voter fraud.
Now, a new bipartisan bill led by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) aims to tamp down the onslaught of online censorship pervading modern society with real repercussions for any government agency or representative that violates that sacred right.
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Americans are spending significantly less time socializing face-to-face than they were 20 years ago, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey.
Axios reports that the average time Americans spend socializing per day has dropped from 45 minutes to 35 minutes over the last 20 years, a trend that cuts across every generation, ethnicity, and income level.
The drop-off has sparked concern among sociologists and public health officials, who warn of a growing epidemic of loneliness and social isolation
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Often untethered to unfair foreign trade practices, President Donald Trump’s fetish for tariffs is foolish. Tariffs reduce prosperity and opportunity for the vast majority of the public in order to benefit far smaller numbers of Americans in specific industries. Still, tariffs have value when it comes to penalizing unfair economic activity by U.S. trade partners. Trump is thus right to now threaten new tariffs on the European Union and European nations over their threat to American technology companies.
In a social media post last Friday, Trump warned that European countries were discussing the “imminent” introduction of digital services taxes on U.S. technology giants. He added that any “country that imposes such a Tax will immediately be met with a 100% TARIFF on any and all Goods sent to the [U.S.].” While Trump’s 100% tariff rate is arbitrary, he is right to warn of robust action. Contrary to their claims of justified regulation, the European digital taxes in question serve a simple and wholly unjustified purpose: extorting American companies.
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Meta is pausing a divisive employee tracking program after an internal security issue exposed potentially sensitive data collected through the initiative to other workers.
“We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we’re pausing it while we investigate,” says company spokesperson Tracy Clayton.
Meta rolled out the Model Compatibility Initiative (MCI) tool in April to US employees. The tool “collects computer inputs such as mouse movements, click locations and keystrokes, as well as screen content,” according to workers who have been petitioning against it over privacy, security, and personal liberty concerns. When MCI first launched, employees couldn’t opt out, but that changed to a limited degree after workers protested.
Meta executives have repeatedly defended the data-gathering project, saying it was necessary to train AI systems to operate computer software the way humans do and that employees were the best examples for the artificial intelligence to learn from.
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One of Canada’s top constitutional freedom groups warned that a proposed social media ban for children under age 16 could create a host of “privacy-violating” rules leading to a nationwide-mandated digital ID.
Reacting to news of a social media ban proposed by the Liberal government, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) warned in an X post that the ban could lead to overreaching digital ID laws, noting that parents should be in charge of their children’s online use.
“The Justice Centre opposes government internet surveillance and the displacement of parents as the primary decision-makers responsible for protecting young people from online harms,” it said in its X statement.
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EXCERPT:
That old saw about politicians eventually getting around to taxing the air we breathe hasn’t quite come true in Illinois — yet. First, Illinois Democrats have to figure out how to tax social media.
Judging by this first effort, we can relax because if Democrats in the Land of Lincoln don’t understand what social media is and how to figure out how to tax it, our air is safe.
“A nearly $56 billion state spending plan is headed to Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk after the Democratic-controlled Illinois legislature approved it in the early-morning hours of another overtime spring session,” the Chicago Tribune‘s Dan Petrella noted last week. “The biggest source of new revenue is a new per-user tax on large social media companies.”
Just over three months ago, Australia’s world-leading regulations attempting to ban social media use by under-16s came into force. The relevant regulator, the eSafety Commissioner, has released its first compliance report on the effectiveness of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024. The report makes interesting reading, given the number of countries apparently considering whether to emulate the Australian endeavors.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the eSafety Commissioner finds “progress” to be remarkably modest. Based on a survey of 898 parents and caregivers of children age eight to 15 taken between January 19 and February 2, 2026, the commissioner reports that while just under half reported their children having their own account on at least one of the banned platforms prior to the law coming into force on December 10, 2025, that proportion decreased to only 31.3 percent in the survey period.
Judge Dismisses Elon Musk Antitrust Lawsuit Let’s Data Science
from news.google.com
A California jury found Alphabet’s Google and Meta liable for $3m in damages in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit that accused the companies of being legally responsible for the addictive design of their platforms.
The decision was handed down by a Los Angeles-based jury on Wednesday after more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, and more than a month after jurors heard opening statements in the trial.
A landmark jury verdict holding Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google liable for harming a young user with products designed to be addictive threatens to put the social networking companies in the same category as Big Tobacco and opioid makers — a potential crack in their shield from legal responsibility for what happens on their platforms.
While the $6 million in damages a jury in Los Angeles awarded to the 20-year-old plaintiff — which the companies vowed to appeal — will barely register on their balance sheets, the impact of the verdict will likely be more damaging and harder to quantify. The loss, in the first of thousands of product-liability lawsuits against Meta, Google and other social networks, is the kind of black eye that often leads to an increase in government regulations.
Musk says Labour looking for ‘any excuse for censorship’ amid X row Daily Mail
from news.google.com
The DOJ and multiple states have filed notices to appeal a federal court ruling in the Google Search antitrust case that imposed limited restrictions on the internet giant’s conquest of the search and AI market. The verdict was so friendly to Google that one analyst called it “a home run for the status quo.”
Bloomberg reports that the DOJ and a coalition of states announced Tuesday they will appeal a September 2025 federal court decision that is widely considered to be the best case scenario for Big Tech following a landmark antitrust case. The appeal targets a ruling by US District Judge Amit Mehta that allowed the tech giant to avoid major structural changes despite being found guilty of operating an illegal monopoly in the search market.
PARIS — French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.
The investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement. It is looking into alleged “complicity” in possession and spreading of pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.
In addition, prosecutors filed a request for “voluntary interviews” of Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X from 2023 to 2025, scheduled for April 20. Employees of the platform X have also been summoned that same week in April to be heard as witnesses, the statement said.
Big Tech social media companies could face Big Tobacco moment as landmark trial begins baltimoresun.com
from news.google.com
TikTok Faces Backlash, Outages, Competition Following Change In U.S. Ownership 01/27/2026 MediaPost
from news.google.com
PARIS: French lawmakers on Monday (Jan 26) were set to vote on draft legislation to ban social media for under-15s, an effort championed by President Emmanuel Macron as a way to protect children from excessive screen time.
The legislation, which also provides for a ban on mobile phones in high schools, follows Australia banning social media for under-16s in December, a world first.
As social media has grown around the world, so has concern that too much screen time is arresting child development and contributing to declining mental health in minors.
“The emotions of our children and teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, either by American platforms or Chinese algorithms,” Macron said in a video broadcast on Saturday.
The socialist UK government is mulling plans to ban the social media giant X, owned by Elon Musk, over supposed online safety concerns.
UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has voiced support for regulator Ofcom to potentially restrict access to X if the platform fails to comply with national online safety laws.
The nation’s censors are specifically citing the use of X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok, which has been used to manipulate digital images.
The government argues that it is a crime to create AI-generated images of people without their consent.