August 2019

Beto O’Rourke seeks new limits on Section 230 as part of gun violence proposal

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke announced a sweeping policy plan to counter hate speech and gun violence in America that specifically proposes changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, one of the tech industry’s most pivotal legal protections. Outside of proposing a nationwide gun licensing system/registry and requiring universal background checks, O’Rourke laid out a plan aimed at making social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube more responsible for hateful content on their platforms.

Did Zuckerberg lie under oath?

Recent revelations about Facebook’s collection of user audio data are fueling talk in Washington (DC) that company CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have misled Congress about the firm’s privacy practices during a Senate hearing in 2018. Zuckerberg at the time dismissed a question about whether the company used “audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users," calling it a “conspiracy theory.” But recent reporting that the company until just recently paid contractors to transcribe some users’ audio is raising eyebrows about his remarks on the Hill.