States move to regulate social media companies

Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley breaks down regulatory efforts states have taken up against social media platforms.

影片文字轉錄稿

[AUDIO LOGO]

- As Congress fails to rein in big tech, US states have taken the reins in crafting legislation to regulate social media platforms. However, with different states come different opinions, leaving a muddied picture for CEOs of social media companies.

With more on this, let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley. Dan, so how will this impact social media companies? How will this impact users that use these platforms?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, it really is kind of a patchwork of laws that we're seeing-- not just the big ones that I'll get to in a second, but across the country. But those aforementioned big ones are the ones that we've seen in Texas, which the Fifth Circuit Court managed to reinstate. They basically, that law would allow users to sue social media companies if they've banned them from their platforms for posting content that the social media companies find objectionable or that run afoul of their actual user agreements.

So the companies basically have nothing they can do, nothing they can fall back on to stop users from posting things that, perhaps, spread misinformation, or are just outright violent, or you know, things along those lines.

And then we have another law in California that was recently signed that is designed to stop social media companies from selling con-- selling the user information of children. Children's user information as well as geolocation data.

So we're seeing these different laws come up. By the way, the Texas law, it has-- there's a similar law in Florida that was struck down by the 11th Circuit Court as being unconstitutional. So we're expecting all of this to kind of end up in the Supreme Court with that side of things.

And experts that I spoke to really said that, you know, we're seeing this kind of red state, blue state approach to regulating social media. On the red state side of things, it's-- you know, they're blocking Conservative voices, although there's no real evidence that we've seen come about of that. On the blue state side of things, we're looking at these legislators saying, look, we have to stop these companies from collecting user data or abusing user data.

Now, the California law sounds good, in theory, but there are people that have come out and said, no, it's not because it could end up outing individuals who want to remain anonymous on platforms.

They said, it could be a risk to LGBTQ+ users because it could force them to put their ages into these platforms to prove that they're not children. And then that information could then be used to identify them using other data that's collected through social media on the usual basis.

So there are these kind of patchwork of laws. And for us, it becomes, what do we do, right? We're using these services. And can I post what I want? Can I not post what I want? Is my information going to be collected here but not there?

And then for the companies, it just becomes this morass of so many laws that are kind of counterintuitive to each other and fighting. And it makes the entire situation almost untenable for them.

So that's why we've seen the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, among others come forward and say, Congress, do your job. Give us one law that we can all follow. So we're not stuck using these different laws and trying to figure out what we can do on our own.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, I guess the alternative is more fragmentation. But the argument on the other side would be that it just hasn't been federal leadership, which is why states are stepping in.

DAN HOWLEY: Exactly.

AKIKO FUJITA: Certainly, Dan, I know you're gonna continue to follow. Thanks so much for that.