Twitter

• Twitter Inc. placed a warning label on one of President Donald Trump’s tweets about the protests in Minneapolis for violating its rules against “glorifying violence” – marking the third time in a week that the company flagged one of the president’s posts. The move came a day after Trump signed his executive order targeting social media companies.

• Trump’s re-election campaign and a handful of conservative news outlets started spreading three-year-old anti-Trump tweets from Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, after the company fact-checked the president. The attacks, including a Fox News story and several social media posts about Roth, are growing despite a statement from Twitter saying that “no one person at the company is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions.”

• Twitter declined to remove tweets from Trump about a decades-old conspiracy theory that falsely claims that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was responsible for the death of Lori Klausutis, who was working for his Florida congressional office while he was a representative, after a letter from Klausutis’ husband, T.J., to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking for the removal of Trump’s tweets was made public.

Section 230

• Trump signed an executive order Thursday targeting social media companies’ content moderation policies, imploring the Federal Trade Commission to review complaints of political bias on the platforms and the Federal Communications Commission to review how it regulates liability protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

• The executive order Trump signed on Thursday to target social media companies was “essentially rammed” through the process and seen as a direct response to Twitter’s fact-check labels on two of the president’s tweets, according to a White House official with directly knowledge of the matter, who noted that “the direction from on high was: ‘Do something.’” The official also said the order had support within the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, especially from Chief Digital Officer Ory Rinat and Dan Scavino, the White House’s social media director.

• Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) announced they are separately working on legislation to curtail the liability protections afforded to Twitter under Section 230 after the social media company’s fact-checking decision. Hawley also sent a letter to Twitter’s Dorsey asking for more information about why the platform should still qualify for such protections and whether the decision to fact-check Trump’s tweets was an attempt to “target the President for political reasons.”

FISA vote

• The House of Representatives voted to negotiate a deal with the Senate for a final bill to reauthorize three surveillance powers after House leadership canceled votes on the measure due to waning Republican and progressive lawmaker support. The Senate will next need to vote to start a conference committee as well.

• House Democratic leaders also scrapped plans for an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requiring law enforcement to procure a warrant before searching Americans’ web browsing history after a similar measure failed in the Senate. Progressive groups and lawmakers pulled their support for the measure after Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) suggested that the House’s amendment would still allow law enforcement officials to collect online records as a part of foreign intelligence investigations.

Cybersecurity and privacy

• Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is suing Google for allegedly violating the state’s consumer-protection laws by collecting users’ location data through its Android smartphone operating system even after they had opted out of such collection. Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said Arizona and its “contingency fee lawyers filing this lawsuit appear to have mischaracterized our services” and that Google has “always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data.”

• The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in Illinois against Clearview AI contending that the facial recognition startup violated the state’s biometric privacy law by collecting information about residents’ fingerprints and face scans without their consent. Clearview lawyer Tor Ekeland said that the company obtains only publicly available images online and that it is “absurd that the ACLU wants to censor which search engines people can use to access public information on the internet.”

Social media and technology

• After being presented with research in 2018 that detailed the polarizing effects its algorithms can have on users, Facebook Inc. executives weakened or blocked attempts to resolve the underlying issues, according to internal documents and people familiar with the effort, in part because of fears that the solutions would disproportionately affect conservative users and publishers. A Facebook spokeswoman said the company has “learned a lot since 2016” and that the company has implemented a number of new policies and practices to “limit harmful content” in recent years.

• In a confidential whistleblower’s complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a consortium of Facebook insiders and critics allege that the company has failed to warn investors about the proliferation of illegal drug sales on its platforms and its struggles to crack down on such activities. Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne said the company hasn’t seen the official complaint yet, but that “we’ve regularly disclosed potential risks related to content in our SEC filings, including at least four times in the last year.”

• The U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court decision to toss a lawsuit from nonprofit Freedom Watch and conservative YouTube personality Laura Loomer alleging that the large tech companies — Twitter, Google, Facebook and Apple Inc. — violated antitrust laws and the First Amendment when they banned Loomer from the platforms for 30 days after she accused Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) of being “anti-Jewish” and favoring Sharia law. The judges ruled that there was not enough evidence to prove an antitrust violation and noted that in general, the First Amendment only applies to government efforts regarding speech.

Antitrust

• Tile, a tracking app that relies on Bluetooth to help people locate their items, sent a letter to European competition head Margrethe Vestager alleging that Apple has made it more difficult for the company’s app to operate on iOS devices compared to Apple’s competing app and calling on the commission to open an antitrust probe into Apple’s business practices. Kirsten Daru, Tile’s general counsel, said in the letter that Apple has been disabling several key features related to the app’s user experience since the company launched its competing FindMy app; Apple denied the allegations.

• The Senate is in session. The House is operating remotely.

• The FCC’s next open commission meeting is June 9. Tentative agenda items include a vote on a plan to clarify rules for updating existing wireless infrastructure in an effort to speed up the buildout of 5G networks.

1) Twitter warns about Trump tweet ‘glorifying violence’
The Associated Press

2) The executive order Trump could use to take on Twitter and Facebook
Emily Birnbaum, Protocol

3) Amazon gave TV stations coronavirus propaganda, and some aired it
Nick Statt, The Verge

4) Trump Threatens to Shut Social Media Companies After Twitter Fact Check
Josh Wingrove et al., Bloomberg

5) Tech billionaires are plotting sweeping, secret plans to boost Joe Biden
Theodore Schleifer, Recode

6) Trump Signs Executive Order Targeting Social Media’s Content Policies: Instant Reaction
Sam Sabin, Morning Consult

7) Democrats drop controversial surveillance amendment
Chris Mills Rodrigo, The Hill

8) Where Are Most Tech Layoffs? Not Silicon Valley
Cory Weinberg, The Information

9) Republicans working on legislation to strip Twitter of federal liability protections
Maggie Miller, The Hill

10) Out of charity and self-interest, tech lobbies for the ‘little guys’ in D.C.
Issie Lapowsky, Protocol