Slashdot reader rtfa0987 spotted this on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. "Silicon Valley is poised once again to cash in on other people's products, making a data grab of unprecedented scale that has already spawned lawsuits and congressional hearings. Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories, photos, art, music, code and more — to produce answers, imagery or sound in response to user prompts... But a thorny, contentious and highly consequential issue has arisen: A great deal of the bots' fodder is copyrighted property...

The new AI's intellectual-property problem goes beyond art into movies and television, photography, music, news media and computer coding. Critics worry that major players in tech, by inserting themselves between producers and consumers in commercial marketplaces, will suck out the money and remove financial incentives for producing TV scripts, artworks, books, movies, music, photography, news coverage and innovative software. "It could be catastrophic," said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which represents nearly 2,000 U.S. news publishers, including this news organization. "It could decimate our industry."

The new technology, as happened with other Silicon Valley innovations, including internet-search, social media and food delivery, is catching on among consumers and businesses so quickly that it may become entrenched — and beloved by users — long before regulators and lawmakers gather the knowledge and political will to impose restraints and mitigate harms. "We may need legislation," said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who as a member of the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on copyright and generative AI last month. "Content creators have rights and we need to figure out a way how those rights will be respected...."

Furor over the content grabbing is surging. Photo-sales giant Getty is also suing Stability AI. Striking Hollywood screenwriters last month raised concerns that movie studios will start using chatbot-written scripts fed on writers' earlier work. The record industry has lodged a complaint with federal authorities over copyrighted music being used to train AI.
The article includes some unique perspectives:

• There's a technical solution being proposed by the software engineer-CEO of Dazzle Labs, a startup building a platform for controlling personal data. The Mercury News summarizes it as "content producers could annotate their work with conditions for use that would have to be followed by companies crawling the web for AI fodder."

• Santa Clara University law school professor Eric Goldman "believes the law favors use of copyrighted material for training generative AI. 'All works build upon precedent works. We are all free to take pieces of precedent works. What generative AI does is accelerate that process, but it's the same process. It's all part of an evolution of our society's storehouse of knowledge...."

"Compared to the website's average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop..." reports Engadget (citing data provided by internet analytics firm Similarweb). [A]s many subreddits continue to protest the company's plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That's unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).

"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."

More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."

Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."

Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.

CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."

Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:

r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...

On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

Reddit "appears to be laying the groundwork for ejecting forum moderators committed to continuing the protests," CNN reported Friday afternoon, "a move that could force open some communities that currently remain closed to the public.

"In response, some moderators have vowed to put pressure on Reddit's advertisers and investors." As of Friday morning, nearly 5,000 subreddits were still set to private and inaccessible to the public, reflecting a modest decrease from earlier in the week but still including groups such as r/funny, which claims more than 40 million subscribers, and r/aww and r/music, each with more than 30 million members. But Reddit has portrayed the blacked-out communities as a small slice of its wider platform. Some 100,000 forums remain open, the company said in a blog post, including 80% of its 5,000 most actively engaged subreddits...

Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman told NBC News the company will soon allow forum users to overrule moderators by voting them out of their positions, a change that may enable communities that do not wish to remain private to reopen. In addition, one company administrator said Thursday, Reddit may soon view communities that remain private as an indicator that the moderators of those communities no longer wish to moderate. That would constitute a form of inactivity for which the moderators can be removed, the company said. "If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users," the administrator said, adding that Reddit may intervene even if most moderators on a team wish to remain closed and only a single moderator wants to reopen...

Omar, a moderator of a subreddit participating in this week's blackout, told CNN Friday that many subreddits have participated in the blackouts based on member polls that indicate strong support for the protests... Content moderation on Reddit stands to worsen if the company continues with its plan, Omar said, warning that the coming changes will deter developers from creating and maintaining tools that Reddit communities rely on to detect and eliminate spam, hate speech or even child sexual abuse material. "That's both harmful for users and advertisers," Omar said, adding that supporters of the protests have been contacting advertisers to explain how the platform's coming changes may hurt brands. Already, Omar said, the blackout has made it harder for companies to target ads to interest groups; video game companies, for example, can no longer target ads to gaming-focused subreddits that have taken themselves private...

Huffman has also said that the protests have had little impact on the company financially.
NBC News adds: In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk's aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted "a handful of times" with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform. Huffman said he saw Musk's handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

Reddit is pledging it will respect the subreddit blackout where thousands of subreddits are currently staying dark -- but it's not clear the company actually will. From a report: "We are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally reopening communities," reads a line from a "Reddit API Fact Sheet" that the company shared with The Verge alongside our full Reddit CEO interview. But that word "unilaterally" may be doing a awful lot of work -- because Reddit has apparently given itself a framework and justification to eject the moderators who support a blackout, replacing them with those who would re-open the sub. On Reddit, the ModCodeofConduct account has informed moderators that it will replace inactive moderators with active ones, even if they all agree to "stop moderating." That Reddit admin suggests that it breaks Rule 4 of Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct and is nothing new -- even though Rule 4 says nothing of the sort.

European Union officials have voted in favor of stricter regulations on artificial intelligence, including a ban on AI use in biometric surveillance and a requirement for AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT to disclose when content is generated by AI. Ars Technica reports: On Wednesday, European Union officials voted to implement stricter proposed regulations concerning AI, according to Reuters. The updated draft of the "AI Act" law includes a ban on the use of AI in biometric surveillance and requires systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT to reveal when content has been generated by AI. While the draft is still non-binding, it gives a strong indication of how EU regulators are thinking about AI. The new changes to the European Commission's proposed law -- which have not yet been finalized -- intend to shield EU citizens from potential threats linked to machine learning technology.

The new draft of the AI Act includes a provision that would ban companies from scraping biometric data (such as user photos) from social media for facial recognition training purposes. News of firms like Clearview AI using this practice to create facial recognition systems drew severe criticism from privacy advocates in 2020. However, Reuters reports that this rule might be a source of contention with some EU countries who oppose a blanket ban on AI in biometric surveillance. The new EU draft also imposes disclosure and transparency measures on generative AI. Image synthesis services like Midjourney would be required to disclose AI-generated content to help people identify synthesized images. The bill would also require that generative AI companies provide summaries of copyrighted material scraped and utilized in the training of each system. While the publishing industry backs this proposal, according to The New York Times, tech developers argue against its technical feasibility.

Additionally, creators of generative AI systems would be required to implement safeguards to prevent the generation of illegal content, and companies working on "high-risk applications" must assess their potential impact on fundamental rights and the environment. The current draft of the EU law designates AI systems that could influence voters and elections as "high-risk." It also classifies systems used by social media platforms with over 45 million users under the same category, thus encompassing platforms like Meta and Twitter. [...] Experts say that after considerable debate over the new rules among EU member nations, a final version of the AI Act isn't expected until later this year.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says he is refusing to undo the company's decision to increase prices for third-party app developers, despite thousands of subreddits pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted in protest. "It's a startling change for many members of the Reddit community, but it's one that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tells The Verge that he's fine with making," writes The Verge's Jay Peters. "Those third-party apps, in his eyes, aren't adding much value to the platform." From the report: "So the vast majority of the uses of the API -- not [third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit] -- the other 98 percent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That's what the API is for," Huffman says. "It was never designed to support third-party apps." According to Huffman, he "let it exist," and "I should take the blame for that because I was the guy arguing for that for a long time." Huffman now takes issue with the third-party apps that are building a business on top of his own. "I didn't know -- and this is my fault -- the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities."

I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don't add value to Reddit. "Not as much as they take," he says. "No way." "They need to pay for this. That is fair. What our peers have done is banned them entirely. And we said no, you know what, we believe in free markets. You need to cover your costs," he says. Apollo developer Christian Selig recently did the math for us on The Vergecast, though, and suggested that covering Reddit's asking price with only 30 days' notice would have been nigh-impossible.

Huffman didn't have an answer for why the deadline was so short, beyond wanting there to be a deadline. "We're perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us, including figuring out what the transition period will look like. But I think a deadline forces people, us included, to negotiate that." I also asked if Huffman truly believes that the blackouts haven't impacted his decision-making around the API pricing changes at all. "In this case? That's true," says Huffman. "That's our business decision, and we're not undoing that business decision."

PDF Association, in a blog post: We live in a world where the only constant is accelerating change. The twists and turns in the technology landscape over the last 30 years have drained some of the hype from the early days of the consumer digital era. Today we are confronted with all-new, even more disruptive, possibilities. Along with the drama of the internet, the web, broadband, smart-phones, mobile broadband, social media, and AI, the last thirty years have revealed some persistent truths about how people use and think about information and communication. From the vantage-point of 2023 we are positioned to recognize 1993 as a year of two key developments; the first specification of HTML, the language of the web, and the first specification of PDF, the language of documents. Today, both technologies predominate in their respective use cases. They coexist because they meet deeply-related but distinct needs.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has signed a bill prohibiting children under 18 from joining various social media platforms without parental consent. Similar legislation has been passed in Utah and Louisiana. The Verge reports: The bill, HB 18, requires social media companies to receive explicit consent from a minor's parent or guardian before they'd be allowed to create their own accounts starting in September of next year. It also forces these companies to prevent children from seeing "harmful" content -- like content related to eating disorders, substance abuse, or "grooming" -- by creating new filtering systems.

Texas' definition of a "digital service" is extremely broad. Under the law, parental consent would be necessary for kids trying to access nearly any site that collects identifying information, like an email address. There are some exceptions, including sites that primarily deliver educational or news content and email services. The Texas attorney general could sue companies found to have violated this law. The law's requirements to filter loosely defined "harmful material" and provide parents with control over their child's accounts mirror language in some federal legislation that has spooked civil and digital rights groups.

Like HB 18, the US Senate-led Kids Online Safety Act orders platforms to prevent minors from being exposed to content related to disordered eating and other destructive behaviors. But critics fear this language could encourage companies like Instagram or TikTok to overmoderate non-harmful content to avoid legal challenges. Overly strict parental controls could also harm kids in abusive households, allowing parents to spy on marginalized children searching for helpful resources online.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: A strange letter showed up on Kay Dean's doorstep. It was 2017, and the San Jose resident had left a one-star review on the Yelp page of a psychiatry office in Los Altos. Then the letter arrived: It seemed the clinic had hired a local lawyer to demand that Dean remove her negative review or face a lawsuit. The envelope included a $50 check. Dean, who once worked as a criminal investigator in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, smelled something fishy. She decided to look into the clinic, part of a small California chain called SavantCare. By the time her work was done, she'd found a higher calling -- and SavantCare's ex-CEO was fighting felony charges.

Since then, Dean, 60, has mounted a yearslong crusade against Yelp and the broader online review ecosystem from a home office in San Jose. Yelp, founded in San Francisco in 2004, is deeply entrenched in American consumer habits, and has burrowed itself into the larger consciousness through partnerships with the likes of Apple Maps. The company's crowdsourced reviews undergird the internet's web of recommendations and can send businesses droves of customers -- or act as an insurmountable black mark. Dean follows fake reviews from their origins in social media groups to when they hit the review sites, methodically documenting hours of research in spreadsheets and little-watched YouTube videos. Targets accuse her of an unreasonable fixation. Yelp claims it aggressively and effectively weeds out fakes. But Dean disagrees, and she's out to convince America that Yelp, Google and other purveyors of reviews cannot be trusted.

"This is an issue that affects millions of consumers, and thousands of honest businesses," she said in her YouTube page's introductory post on April 30, 2020, facing the camera dead-on. "I'm creating these videos to expose this massive fraud against the American public and shine a light on Big Tech's culpability." "I don't do it lightly. If I put a video up, it's serious," she told SFGATE in May. "I'm putting myself out there." Dean is particularly motivated by the types of small businesses that she's found gaming Yelp's recommendation algorithm. She has spotted seemingly paid-for reviews on the pages of lawyers, home contractors, and doctors' offices -- high-ticket companies for which she says she'd "rather have no information than fake information."

Sens. Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal want to clarify that the internet's bedrock liability law does not apply to generative AI, per a new bill introduced Wednesday. From a report: Legal experts and lawmakers have questioned whether AI-created works would qualify for legal immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that largely shields platforms from lawsuits over third-party content. It's a newly urgent issue thanks to the explosive of generative AI. The new bipartisan bill bolsters the argument that Section 230 doesn't cover AI-generated work. It also gives lawmakers an opening to go after Section 230 after vowing to amend it, without much success, for years.

Section 230 is often credited as the law that allowed the internet to flourish and for social media to take off, as well as websites hosting travel listings and restaurant reviews. To its detractors, it goes too far and is not fit for today's web, allowing social media companies to leave too much harmful content up online. Hawley and Blumenthal's "No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act" would amend Section 230 "by adding a clause that strips immunity from AI companies in civil claims or criminal prosecutions involving the use or provision of generative AI," per a description of the bill from Hawley's office.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Moderators of many Reddit communities are pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted indefinitely. For the vast majority of subreddits, the blackout to protest Reddit's expensive API pricing changes was expected to last from Monday until Wednesday. But in response to a Tuesday post on the r/ModCoord subreddit, users are chiming in to say that their subreddits will remain dark past that 48-hour window. "Reddit has budged microscopically," u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, "our core concerns still aren't satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began." SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge -- "like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well" -- and said that "more is needed for Reddit to act."

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in. SpicyThunder335 notes that not everyone will be able to go dark indefinitely for valid reasons. "For example, r/stopDrinking represents a valuable resource for a communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns," SpicyThunder335 wrote. As an alternative, SpicyThunder335 recommended implementing a "weekly gesture of support on 'Touch-Grass-Tuesdays,'" which would be left up to the discretion of individual communities. SpicyThunder335 also acknowledged that some subreddits would need to poll their users to make sure they're on board. As of this writing, more than 8,400 subreddits have gone private or into a restricted mode. The blackouts caused Reddit to briefly crash on Monday.

In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the "noise" and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass. From a report: The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, is in response to popular subreddits going dark this week in protest of the company's increased API pricing for third-party apps. Some of the most popular Reddit clients say the bill for keeping their apps up and running could cost them millions of dollars a year. More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday, some have said they'll stay private indefinitely until Reddit makes changes.

Huffman says the blackout hasn't had "significant revenue impact" and that the company anticipates that many of the subreddits will come back online by Wednesday. "There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well," the memo reads. "We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail."

Influencers in the video-game industry are evolving from playing games to making them. From a report: Over the weekend, One True King, a media company focused on gaming content, launched Mad Mushroom, a new publishing division. "We have a unique competitive advantage in this space," said OTK co-founder Asmongold, a top streamer on Twitch, Amazon's live-streaming platform. "We can give games the push they need to actually go out to market, get eyes on the game and give [developers] insight." Moving forward, OTK's stable of gaming influencers will collaborate with lead adviser Mike Silbowitz, a gaming industry veteran who has previously worked at Square Enix, to publish, distribute, test and market games.

Currently, publishers pay top influencers tens of thousands of dollars to demo new games in front of their sizable audiences of live viewers on social media platforms, particularly Twitch and Google's YouTube. According to company executives, by reducing such marketing and user-acquisition costs, the organization can take a reduced cut of sales, say, 30% rather than the regular 40% or 50%, potentially benefiting the makers of independent games. "Twitch streamers have a large tool that is effectively a non-cost, which is their time and their audience," Asmongold said.

Influencers are increasingly diversifying their income streams beyond social media networks, which can be culturally and financially volatile. Popular gamers have said they anticipate that selling products directly to their audience will eventually form a larger fraction of their revenue. Top streamers, particularly those who have carved out a niche within a specific genre, are looking to publish and advise on both top tier and indie games that might appeal to the specific tastes of their fans.

Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site's new API pricing terms. From a report: According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. "A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we've been working on resolving the anticipated issue," spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. Reddit's status page reported a "major outage" affecting Reddit's desktop and mobile sites and its native mobile apps. [...] More than 7,000 subreddits have gone private or read-only in response to the API pricing terms, which is forcing the developers of apps like Apollo for Reddit to shut down at the end of the month.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: Two senators sent a letter to TikTok's chief executive on Tuesday, accusing the company of making misleading claims to Congress around how it stores and handles American user data, and demanding answers to more than a dozen questions by the end of next week.

The letter, from Senators Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, focused on how sensitive data about American users may be stored in China and how employees there may have access to it. The lawmakers said recent reports from The New York Times and Forbes raised questions about statements made during congressional testimony in March by Shou Chew, TikTok's chief executive, and in an October 2021 hearing involving Michael Beckerman, TikTok's head of public policy for the Americas. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

"We are deeply troubled by TikTok's recurring pattern of providing misleading, inaccurate or false information to Congress and its users in the United States, including in response to us during oversight hearings and letters," the senators wrote...

Forbes reported last month that TikTok has stored the sensitive financial information of creators, including Social Security numbers and tax IDs, on servers in China, where employees there can have access to them... The Times reported earlier in the month that American user data, including driver's licenses and potentially illegal content such as child sexual abuse materials, was shared at TikTok and ByteDance through an internal messaging and collaboration tool called Lark. The information was often available in Lark "groups" — chat rooms of employees — with thousands of members, alarming some workers because ByteDance workers in China and elsewhere could easily see the material.

CNN summarizes the issue. "A recent advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy says there's not enough evidence to determine whether social media is safe enough for children and adolescents when it comes to their mental health." (Although a CNN news anchor points out that "Nearly all of the research points to negative impacts.")

CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent interviewed U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy "to examine what led him to sound the alarm, and who should be responsible for tackling the issue." And the surgeon general remembers when his five-year-old daughter asked to post a picture on social media. "I think finding the right balance is not easy, in part because, you know, the platforms weren't necessarily designed for balance. They were designed to maximize how much time we spend on them." CNN: How worried are you? When people hear something coming from the surgeon general's office, they think of, you know, smoking, opioids, things like this. Social media — is it at that level of concern for you?

Surgeon General: Yes, I would say yes, it is. And, and — but it's it's more complicated... because we know that some kids do actually get benefit from their experience of social media. Some are able to connect more easily with friends and family, to express themselves more creatively and more openly than they otherwise would, and to find community... But one of the things that has become an increasing source of worry for me is that the the association between social media use and harmful outcomes... [W]e're asking parents to somehow figure it out all on their own. And the reason I issued an advisory on this topic is I worry that we have not taken enough action to support parents and kids...

CNN: What is the level of evidence about the dangers of social media and what is the level of evidence that you want? I mean, what does it take for you as a surgeon general to act on this...?

Surgeon General: I think the first question I'm asking is where is the evidence of safety...? There's a lot of association data, right, that's showing an association between use and certain and negative outcomes, like for example, for kids who who use more than 3 hours of social media a day, they face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. But we also know that kids are telling us in their own words and their own experience how they're experiencing social media. So, for example, about nearly half of adolescents are saying that using social media makes them feel worse about their body image...

And one of the consistent messages I hear from researchers who's been studying this area for a long time is that they are having a hard time getting access to the data from social media companies. You know, as a parent, I don't ever want to feel like someone or anyone is hiding information from me about how a product affects my child. But that's how a lot of parents are feeling right now. And so that's a place where I think transparency matters. Let's get the data out there so independent researchers can assess it and can help us understand the harms and benefits and which kids are most impacted so we can design, you know, our approach, you know, in a more informed way...

One of the things we call for in my advisory is for the policymakers to step in and establish actual, transparent, enforceable safety standards like we do for other products so that parents have some reassurance around safety... This technology is already being used by 95% of kids, Right. And I don't think that's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle here or to say somehow nobody should be using social media, that that's not the goal here... We don't like leave it up to car manufacturers to determine whether or not they've hit the standards or not. We don't do that with medications either. There should be, you know, independent authority that parents can trust are looking primarily in solely out for the welfare of their kids, and they should be the ones who enforce these standards....

You know, just to put it bluntly, I do not think we have done our job as a society to have the backs of kids and parents on this because we haven't moved fast enough to get the information to ultimately guide them on safe use... [P]arents across the country, people are trying to do the best they can with limited information.
The surgeon general also says their ideal legislation would also "help to reduce kids exposure to harmful content" and include "restrictions on features that seek to manipulate kids into spending excessive amounts of time on these platforms."

During a companywide meeting, Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, revealed a preview of the company's upcoming Twitter competitor, a standalone app based on Instagram that will integrate with the decentralized social media protocol, ActivityPub. "That will theoretically allow users of the new app to take their accounts and followers with them to other apps that support ActivityPub, including Mastodon," reports The Verge. From the report: The forthcoming app, which, in the meeting today, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox called "our response to Twitter," will use Instagram's account system to automatically populate a user's information. The internal codename for the app is "Project 92," and its public name could be Threads, based on internal documents also seen by The Verge.

"We've been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution," Cox said, throwing direct shade at Elon Musk's handling of Twitter, to cheers from the audience. He said the company's goal for the app was "safety, ease of use, reliability" and making sure that creators have a "stable place to build and grow their audiences."

Cox said the company already has celebrities committed to using the app, including DJ Slime, and was in discussions with other big names, including Oprah and the Dalai Lama. He said "coding began" for the app in January and that Meta will be making the app available "as soon as we can."

Longtime Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from The Guardian: China is planning to restrict and scrutinize the use of wireless filesharing services between mobile devices, such as airdrop and Bluetooth, after they were used by protesters to evade censorship and spread protest messages. The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country's top internet regulator, has released draft regulations on "close-range mesh network services" and launched a month-long public consultation on Tuesday.

Under the proposed rules, service providers would have to prevent the dissemination of harmful and illegal information, save relevant records and report their discovery to regulators. Service providers would also have to provide data and technical assistance to the relevant authorities, including internet regulators and the police, when they conduct inspections. Users must also register with their real names. In addition, features and technologies that have the capability to mobilize public opinion must undergo a security assessment before they could be introduced.

Apple, in particular, came under the spotlight after some Chinese protesters used airdrop in 2022 to bypass surveillance and circulate messages critical of the regime by sending them to strangers on public transport. The tool was a relatively untraceable method for sharing files in China, where most social media and messaging platforms are tightly monitored. Shortly later, Apple limited the use of airdrop on iPhones in China, allowing Chinese users to receive files from non-contacts for only ten minutes at a time. The proposed rules will take control of similar functions up a notch, requiring the receiving of files and preview of thumbnails to be disabled by default.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem fazed by Apple's introduction of the Vision Pro. In a companywide meeting with Meta employees today that The Verge watched, the CEO said Apple's device didn't present any major breakthroughs in technology that Meta hadn't "already explored" and that its vision for how people will use the device is "not the one that I want." He also pointed to the fact that Meta's upcoming Quest 3 headset will be much cheaper, at $499 compared to the Vision Pro's $3,499 price tag, giving Meta the opening to reach a wider user base.

"I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important," Zuckerberg told employees, who were gathered at the company's Menlo Park, California, headquarters for its first all-hands meeting since 2020. Zuckerberg said that the Quest is about "people interacting in new ways and feeling closer" while also "about being active and doing things." "By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself," he said of Apple's WWDC keynote earlier this week. "I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want."

Louisiana lawmakers have passed a bill that would prohibit minors from creating their own social media accounts without parental consent, potentially impacting popular platforms like Instagram and online games such as Roblox and Fortnite. The Verge reports: The bill, HB61, would ban "interactive computer services" from allowing people under 18 to sign up for their own accounts without parental consent. The bill's definition of online services is extremely broad, seemingly barring minors from creating social media accounts on sites like Instagram, accessing popular online games like Roblox and Fortnite, or even registering for an email address. The bill also goes as far as allowing parents to cancel the terms of service contracts their children entered into when signing up for existing accounts.

As of publication, it's unclear how the state plans to enforce these new rules, but it calls on state entities to review the bill and provide feedback before it would go into effect. The Louisiana State Legislature passed the bill unanimously on Tuesday, sending it to Gov. John Bel Edwards' desk for final approval. The ban would go into effect August 1st of next year if he chooses to sign it. "We are hopeful that Governor Edwards will veto this bill. It violates First Amendment rights, takes away parental rights for their families and requires massive data collection on all Louisiana citizens," NetChoice vice president and general counsel Carl Szabo said in a statement Thursday.

"It's true that Big Tech's advertising model hurts kids and teens," Fight for the Future said in a call for people to tell their elected officials not to pass online age restrictions. "But age-gating all social media, for anyone under 18? That won't solve the problem, and it's a direct attack on millions of young people's First Amendment rights."

Further reading: Congress Shocked To Discover 10 Year Olds Check the 'I'm Over 18' Box Online [Not The Onion]