What the FTC's consent decrees with platforms actually require
A consent decree binds a company to court-supervised conduct for decades, and the Facebook order of 2019 shows both the reach and the limits of the instrument.
Editorial Staff
Section 230 is twenty-six words, and most of the debate skips them
The provision's protection and its limits both live in the exact statutory text, which is shorter than almost any headline written about it.
Alexandria Lucas
Why platform transparency reports don't actually let you compare platforms
Meta, TikTok and YouTube each publish detailed content-moderation numbers, but their headline metrics measure different things, and no regulator currently requires a shared standard.
Aleksandr KomarovAnalysis & Opinion
How Community Notes decides which fact-checks the public actually sees
A note doesn't go public because a majority of raters like it — it goes public only when people who usually disagree agree it helps, a design choice now shaping correction systems on both X and Meta's apps.
What the EU's content-moderation database actually discloses, and what it doesn't
The DSA Transparency Database logs every platform takedown across the bloc in near-real time. Researchers say its categories are too vague to show what's really being removed.
Cloudflare's crawler deadline puts a price on AI's use of news
A September 15 default that blocks mixed-use AI crawlers turns publisher content into a metered, billable resource — but leaves Google's existing search advantage untouched.
How political ad-transparency libraries work — and where two still fall short
Meta and TikTok both publish searchable archives of political and social-issue ads. The European Commission's preliminary finding that both give researchers only partial or unreliable data shows what these tools promise and where the promise breaks down.
Policy
More in Policy →What does an FTC consent decree actually require a platform to do?
The government's most common tool for disciplining a tech platform after a privacy failure is not the fine — it is a multi-year compliance regime, and Meta's own record shows how much can still go wrong inside one.
Alexandria LucasMedia News
More in Media News →Ireland's data regulator fined TikTok €345 million over children's accounts
The September 2023 decision targeted public-by-default settings for under-18s, and its remedy is design change rather than a payment alone.
Colin ReyesBusiness News
More in Business News →What federal law actually requires of a political ad's disclaimer
A 2026 FEC rule sets the legal floor for who must be named as an ad's payor online — and platform policies like Google's verification system go well beyond it, with their own gaps.
Editorial Staff