Tech Talk: Protecting Journalists and Tackling Fake News
CDT’s Tech Talk is a podcast where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. You can find Tech Talk on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play.
What is fake news? Is it it something that is fiction being presented as fact? An opinion posted as a news story? Or is it simply any news story that you don’t like? It seems that the last one is really what many mean, especially when an article or outlet is being shouted down on twitter or called out on Facebook.
Unquestionably, there certainly is non-factual news out there and social media can help in advancing false stories. And yet, when authorities attempt to address this sort of so-called fake news, they often suggest policies that can harm free speech. And it’s also far too common for an authoritarian regime to give journalists the fake news label to discredit them and clamp down on free speech.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
