MC Weekly Update 12/19: Twitter's Thursday Night Massacre

Moderated Content

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:

A bill that would ban TikTok in the U.S. and could be extended to other social media companies with ties to “foreign adversaries” was introduced in the House and Senate, but lacks Democratic co-sponsors in the upper chamber. - Lauren Feiner/ CNBC, Rebecca Shabad/ NBC News

Meta released its annual report on “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Enforcements,” noting the milestone of 200 takedowns. - Ben Nimmo, David Agranovich/ Meta, Alexander Martin/ The Record by Recorded Future, @DavidAgranovich, @benimmo

Tech trade association NetChoice sued the state of California in an attempt to block the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act over First Amendment protections for content moderation. The law would go into effect next year with broad online privacy and safety components for children. - Natasha Singer/ The New York Times, Cat Zakrzewski/ The Washington Post, Rebecca Klar/ The Hill, Lauren Feiner/ CNBC, Rebecca Kern/ Politico Pro

The Supreme Court schedule is set for hearings on Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh on February 21 and February 22. The cases are focused on content moderation and recommendation algorithms. - Adi Robertson/ The Verge, @GregStohr

"Former President Trump said Thursday that he’d ban the U.S. government from labeling any domestic speech as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ if he returns to the White House.” - Julia Mueller/ The Hill

Matt Taibbi named the Election Integrity Partnership in a Friday afternoon version of the Twitter Files. - @mtaibbi

Twitter suspended over 25 accounts that track private planes and nine journalists — including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post — who shared links about the @elonjet account which posts public information about the location of Musk’s private jet. Most reporter accounts have since been reinstated after Musk conducted a Twitter poll on whether to enforce his new policy against sharing flight trackers and similar information. - Jason Abbruzzese, Kevin Collier, Phil Helsel/ NBC News, Ashley Capoot/ CNBC, Ryan Mac/ The New York Times, Paul Farhi/ The Washington Post, Jordan Pearson/ Vice

Musk banned linking out to other platforms… and then conducted a Twitter poll, subsequently reversing the decision, with 87% of voters opposed, and taking down the tweet announcement and blog page on the policy. Some users are still unable to post links to Mastodon and other social media sites in tweets. - Mack DeGeurin/ Gizmodo, @JuddLegum

Musk conducted a scientific Twitter poll asking if he should step down as CEO. Nearly 58% of the more than 17 million respondents voted for him to step down. - Alexa Corse/ The Wall Street Journal

It was coincidentally just after he was at the World Cup with Jared Kushner and... a bunch of Emiratis. Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer quipped that twitter’s content moderation panel looks different these days. - @ianbremmer

Sports balls were kicked and a team scored more points than the other team after time was added, and then stopped, and then added, and then people lined up to kick more balls into the net than the other team. Congratulations to Argentina! - Ben Church/ CNN

Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.

Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.

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