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First Amendment · Section 230 · AI Liability Nerdy Skynet! April 14, 2026 |
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Coverage: 2026-04-10 through 2026-04-14 · 2 new developments this period |
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Techdirt |
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Trump’s Two-Faced AI Policy Techdirt · 2026-04-11 CommentaryThe post examines the Trump administration's contradictory AI policy — publicly embracing deregulation while simultaneously threatening AI companies like Anthropic with supply chain risk designations and executive coercion to remove ideological content restrictions from their models. This raises significant First Amendment jawboning concerns, as the administration's threats to impose "major civil and criminal consequences" and procurement bans unless Anthropic removed usage constraints mirrors the government coercion doctrine addressed in Bantam Books and Backpage.com v. Dart. Anthropic's resulting federal lawsuit challenging the designation directly implicates whether government pressure on AI providers to alter content policies constitutes unconstitutional compelled speech or unlawful retaliation. Key point: The Trump administration's use of supply chain security designations and procurement bans to coerce Anthropic into removing content constraints on its AI models presents a novel jawboning scenario — applying government-pressure-on-intermediary doctrine to an AI developer rather than a traditional content platform. |
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Eric Goldman (Technology & Marketing Law Blog) |
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With Opinions Like This, Congress Doesn’t Need to Repeal Section 230–Massachusetts v. Meta Eric Goldman (Technology & Marketing Law Blog) · 2026-04-12 CommentaryEric Goldman analyzes a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision unanimously holding that Section 230 does not immunize Meta from state AG claims alleging unfair and deceptive business practices arising from Instagram's design targeting children and Meta's alleged misrepresentations about platform safety, finding the court's statutory analysis results-oriented and deeply flawed — particularly its omission of the word "speaker" from § 230(c)(1) and its reliance on the criticized Henderson Fourth Circuit decision. The post identifies the case as part of a broader wave of state AG lawsuits running parallel to the federal social media addiction MDL, and flags the court's novel two-part "dissemination and content" test for publisher liability as a significant doctrinal development that could severely limit Section 230's scope in Massachusetts. This matters because the decision represents a state supreme court substantially narrowing § 230 immunity for platform design and deceptive-practice claims — directly implicating the core Zeran publisher/speaker framework and the product design carve-out question central to the newsletter's coverage. Key point: The Massachusetts Supreme Court's holding that § 230 immunity requires both a "dissemination element" and a "content element" effectively strips immunity from platform design-defect and deceptive-practice claims, representing one of the most significant state-court limitations on Section 230 in the statute's history. |
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Sources: CourtListener API ·
All 13 federal circuit RSS feeds ·
All 50 state supreme courts + intermediate appellate courts (8 states)
via Justia ·
Eric Goldman · Techdirt |