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This Week's Updates:
Following the assault on Israel by Hamas, X –formerly known as Twitter– announced that it would be enforcing policies to prevent terrorist content from circulating on its platform. However, a new report from CfA's Tech Transparency Project (TTP) found a number of X accounts that had been allowed to upload Hamas propaganda videos, including those that contained graphic footage from recent attacks. These videos violate X’s own policies against “violent and hateful entities,” as well as its ban on the sharing of content generated by the perpetrators of terrorism. TTP identified multiple “X Premium” accounts that had uploaded the videos, which also appeared on the website for the military wing of Hamas, the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades. Despite X’s commitment to fighting terrorist content, TTP did not find that it had taken action against the accounts reposting Hamas propaganda. In fact, the report notes multipleinstances of X placing advertisements in the comments of the videos, many of which contained unblurred images of the deceased.
In September, X conducted another round of trust and safety layoffs, which may have diminished the company’s capacity to respond to a crisis of this magnitude. Some have written that the loss of verification and even article headlines has made the platform more difficult to navigate, and reduced its value for news gathering. Now, TTP’s findings suggest that terrorist propaganda is flowing freely on X, which also appears to be profiting from this content through ad placements and premium subscriptions. TTP’s report was covered by USA Today’s Jessica Guynn and Will Carless.
This week, an SEC filing revealed that the IRS is seeking to collect more than $29 billion from Microsoft for the tax years 2004 through 2013 – a claim that Microsoft says it will “vigorously contest.” The IRS’s probe appears to revolve around a practice known as “transfer pricing,” in which large, multinational companies shift their profits to jurisdictions with lower tax rates to avoid paying higher bills in countries like the United States. It’s an arrangement that has worked in Microsoft’s favor for decades; in one notable case investigated by ProPublica, the company transferred $39 billion to Puerto Rico after working with the territory’s officials to negotiate a tax rate of nearly 0%. One senior Microsoft employee referred to the move as a “pure tax play,” while the accounting firm KPMG assured Microsoft executives that it had struck similar deals for other US-based companies. This arrangement extends beyond Puerto Rico; last year, the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research published a report alleging that Microsoft used a network of subsidiaries to shelter itself from taxes, including a Singapore-based entity with zero employees that reported an income of over $22 billion in 2020. Now, with the IRS bolstered by new AI tools and funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, Microsoft’s reckoning may only be the start.
New York Social Media Legislation Targets Algorithms
This week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced a pair of bills designed to protect children’s safety online, which target both algorithmic content recommendations and the collection of minor’s personal data. The first bill, known as the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, would force platforms to give parents a greater level of control over their children’s social media use. Rather than outright banning children from social media, the legislation age-gates features that researchers believe to be harmful, like recommendation algorithms and late-night notifications. These protections could be overridden with a parent’s permission, if they decide their child is ready to handle the more addictive or disruptive aspects of social media. The second bill would restrict the ability of online platforms to collect a minor’s data without their consent – for users under 13, that consent would have to come from a parent. Unlike California’s California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which was recently blocked by a judge on the grounds of free speech, New York’s child safety legislation would not require online platform’s to estimate the age of their users, or to compile data impact assessments to minimize privacy risks for minors.
