Lauren Feiner

At a Senate hearing on government censorship of tech platforms, a Meta executive expressed regret to Republican lawmakers for failing to speak out more against the Biden administration’s requests that it remove health and election misinformation, including satire. Google, meanwhile, held firm in its stance, saying that evaluating — and often rejecting — government content requests is business as usual.

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, the Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner fired by President Donald Trump without cause, can at least temporarily return to work while her legal case plays out. This happened once before when Slaughter briefly returned to her office months after Trump claimed to fire her, when US District Court Judge Loren AliKhan found h

Every morning, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez says she checks her email “to see if I’m going into work.” She’s the last remaining Democrat at the now two-person FCC and has been touring the country to speak out about actions by President Donald Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who she says seek to censor and control Americans’ speech. Gomez has accused her own agency under Carr’s leadership of “weaponizing” its authority “to silence critics,” and opening “sham investigations” into news outlets like NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, and NBC.

President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law, enacting a bill that will criminalize the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII)—including AI deepfakes—and require social media platforms to promptly remove them when notified. The bill sailed through both chambers of Congress with several tech companies, parent and youth advocates, and First Lady Melania Trump championing the issue.

The Take It Down Act is heading to President Donald Trump’s desk after the House voted 409-2 to pass the bill, which will require social media companies to take down content flagged as nonconsensual (including AI-generated) sexual images. President Trump has pledged to sign it.

2024 was shaping up to be the year Congress regulated how kids engage with social media, particularly through one bill, the Kids Online Safety Act. A debate about its risks to free expression still raged, but the voices of the bill’s advocates seemed to ring loudest in senators’ ears. The momentum was there. The Senate vote was virtually unanimous. Then, unexpectedly, House Republican leadership—worried KOSA would make Silicon Valley giants remove more conservative content—let it fade away.

Meta has spent more than a year advocating for new laws requiring app stores to give parents control over kids’ app downloads, and just saw an early victory in the states.

Attorneys for the Federal Communications Commission and groups representing the broadband industry argued about the future of net neutrality to a panel of appeals court judges on October 31. The hearing was part of an endless political ping-pong game over net neutrality rules—which reclassify internet service providers (ISPs) as common carriers, barring them from selectively throttling web traffic. After being enacted under President Barack Obama and repealed under his successor, Donald Trump, they were reinstated by Joe Biden’s FCC in April.

While billionaires have pushed Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA) to depart from President Joe Biden’s antitrust policy, the Democratic Party seems to be doubling down. The word “competition” comes up 18 times in the party’s 2024 platform, compared to nine in the 2020 version.

A federal appeals court in California upheld part of a district court ruling that blocked a landmark online safety bill for children from taking effect.