Louisiana heads to the U.S. Supreme Court “to defend our First Amendment rights against government censorship,” said a media alert Wednesday from the office of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R), trumpeting oral argument Monday in Murthy v. Missouri (docket 23-411) (see 2401290058). Louisiana and Missouri are the two state respondents challenging the government’s petition to vacate the injunction that would block officials from the White House and four federal agencies from coercing social media platforms to moderate their content. The Supreme Court has stayed the injunction pending its resolution of the case (see 2310230003). When George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949 as a warning against tyranny, “he never intended it to be used as a how-to guide by the federal government,” said the Murrill media alert. Yet Murthy v. Missouri has uncovered more than 20,000 pages of documents “highlighting an extensive censorship campaign stemming directly” from President Joe Biden and his federal government, it said: “As a result, this has become one of the most important cases in a century related to the First Amendment.” The state respondents “will present a powerful argument” to the Supreme Court, “which we believe will validate the original ruling by a district judge that Biden’s censorship enterprise is a massive violation of the First Amendment,” it said. “We hope to get a strong, powerful message” from the Supreme Court that the First Amendment “still matters and that the federal government cannot engage in a broad ranging enterprise to stifle protected speech,” it said.
Fourteen plaintiffs represented by Moskowitz Law filed a trio of complaints Thursday in three different jurisdictions alleging sports and entertainment defendants used the now-bankrupt FTX global cryptocurrency exchange to participate in FTX Group’s “massive, multi-billion-dollar global fraud.”
Counsel for parties in a fraud suit involving Amazon Prime Video were unable to resolve their issues following Amazon’s March 1 motion to consolidate plaintiff Wilbert Napoleon’s case with In re Amazon Service Fee Litigation, said Amazon Wednesday in a motion (docket 2:24-cv-00186) for temporary stay in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle.
NetChoice wants the California Court of Appeal for the 2nd Appellate District to reverse a trial court’s opinion “that would undermine Section 230’s protections for free discourse online," said its amicus brief Wednesday (docket B335533) with the Chamber of Progress and Team Awareness Combating Overdose, a nonprofit fighting accidental drug overdoses among young adults.
The National Association of Attorneys General requested “immediate action” from Facebook and Instagram for the “dramatic increase in user account takeovers and lockouts” on the social media platforms, said their Tuesday letter to Meta Platforms Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead. The letter came on the same day both platforms experienced disruptions when users weren’t able to log in to their accounts for over two hours. Meta issued a cursory tweet on X Tuesday acknowledging the outage but not giving a reason for it: “We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!” The Tuesday letter, signed by 41 AGs, cited a “dramatic and persistent spike in complaints in recent years concerning account takeovers that is not only alarming for our constituents but also a substantial drain on our office resources.” In account takeovers, threat actors compromise Facebook and Instagram user accounts and change passwords so the rightful owner can’t access the account, the AGs said. The hackers can then “usurp personal information, read private messages, scam contacts, post publicly, and take other nefarious actions,” the letter said. There’s risk of financial harm to those users who use Facebook Marketplace for their business and those who have credit cards tied to their accounts, it said, referencing complaints of hackers “fraudulently charging thousands of dollars to stored credit cards.” In 2019, the New York Attorney General’s office received 73 account takeover complaints on Meta platforms; the number rose to 783 last year, and in January alone, the office received 128 complaints, it said. “While we may not be completely certain of any connection, we note that the increase in complaints occurred around the same time Meta announced a massive layoff of around 11,000 employees in November 2022, which reportedly focused on the 'security and privacy and integrity sector,'” the letter said. The AGs urged Meta to “substantially increase its investment in account takeover mitigation tactics, as well as responding to users whose accounts were taken over.” The AGs “refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” it said, saying “proper investment in response and mitigation is mandatory." In addition, they requested materials on the number of account takeovers over the past five years; suspected causes of the increase in account takeovers; safeguards in place to prevent account takeovers; current policies and procedures related to Meta’s response to account takeovers; and staffing related to safeguarding the platforms against account takeovers and responding to complaints. A Meta spokesperson emailed Wednesday: "Scammers use every platform available to them and constantly adapt to evade enforcement. We invest heavily in our trained enforcement and review teams and have specialized detection tools to identify compromised accounts and other fraudulent activity." Meta regularly shares tips and tools people can use "to protect themselves, provide a means to report potential violations, work with law enforcement and take legal action," she said. AGs from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming signed the letter.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied the Feb. 15 motion of the five individual social media respondents in Murthy v. Missouri for 10 extra minutes of their own oral argument time and for the government when oral argument is held March 18 (see 2402160005), said a text-only docket entry Wednesday (docket 23-411). The government’s petition asks SCOTUS to vacate the injunction, temporarily stayed until resolution of the case, that bars federal officials from coercing the social media platforms to moderate their content. The individual respondents sought the 10 extra minutes “with an attorney familiar with the record and law in this case as it pertains to them.” An attorney for the respondent states Missouri and Louisiana shouldn’t be “tasked with diverting preparation or argument time to address facts and law” regarding the individual respondents, said their unsuccessful motion.
Here are Communications Litigation Today's top stories from last week, in case you missed them. Each can be found by searching on its title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, plus five individual social media users, are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to “rewrite” the constitutional boundary between the public and private sectors by affirming the 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court’s “sweeping and unprecedented” social media injunction against Biden administration officials (see 2309110001), said DOJ’s reply brief Monday in Murthy v. Missouri (docket 23-411). Oral argument is March 18.
Statements in Fertility Center of Las Vegas’ (FCLV) privacy policy that it doesn’t share patients’ private information with third parties are "false,” alleged a class action Thursday (docket 2:24-cv-00411) in U.S. District Court for Nevada in Las Vegas.
The arguments in the State Department’s opposition to expedited preliminary injunction discovery in the First Amendment case brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and the right-leaning Daily Wire and Federalist media outlets lack merit, said the plaintiffs’ reply Wednesday (docket 6:23-cv-00609) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Tyler in support of that expedited discovery.