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This Week's Updates:
TTP Report: Google Activates D.C. Influence Machine for Pivotal Supreme Court Case: Last Friday, CfA's Tech Transparency Project (TTP) released a report documenting Google's efforts to build fake grassroots support for its legal arguments ahead of the Supreme Court's hearing of Gonzalez vs. Google, a lawsuit brought against the tech giant by the family of an American woman killed in an Islamic State attack in Paris. The suit argues that Google-owned YouTube’s amplification of ISIS content through recommendation algorithms is not covered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—an over two-decade-old law that shields Google and other tech platforms from liability over user-generated content.
TTP review’s found that 44 parties that signed amicus briefs in support of Google’s position in the case are funded by or linked to the company. Among these were a group of YouTube influencers and a number of organizations tied to the Koch network, which often makes common cause with Google.
Before publishing the report, TTP shared it exclusively with reporters at Politico, who questioned the groups behind the YouTuber brief about the apparent coordination.
Ultimately, most who followed the Gonzalez vs. Google hearing agreed that the Justices are unlikely to side against Google in the case, after Justices expressed some degree of worry that their rolling back of Section 230 protections could "break the internet."
A second case, Twitter vs. Taamneh, was also thought to have the potential to shake up Section 230, but left the Justices similarly confused.
The week was summed up rather well in Justice Kagen's admission during the Gonzalez hearing that “[The Justices] are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the internet."
NLRB Rules Against Broad Non-Disparagement Severance Agreements for Laid Off Workers - This week, the National Labor Relations Board released its decision in McLaren Macomb, "returning to longstanding precedent holding that employers may not offer employees severance agreements that require employees to broadly waive their rights under the National Labor Relations Act."
Effectively, the NLRB decision prohibits employers from including non-disparagement agreements as a condition of severance packages for laid off employees. With thousands of tech workers at Twitter, Google, and Meta laid off in recent months (and more from Meta expected soon), the ruling may clear the way for those workers to speak candidly about their former Big Tech employers.
"Big Tech’s new business model is making you pay for security and basic customer service when you get hacked. That’s called a protection racket when mobsters do it."
"As employers slash perks and order remote workers back to offices, job cuts are seen by some as part of an insidious message: Do what we say or you’re next."
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