Four lawsuits against the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule will be consolidated into a case before the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) said Thursday in its consolidation order (see 2411210035 and 2411070025). NCTA, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Electronic Security Association filed one of the lawsuits with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce filed a suit with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The National Federation of Independent Business and the Michigan Press Association filed a lawsuit with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Custom Alarm filed a lawsuit with the 8th Circuit. The 8th Circuit was “randomly selected” for the consolidation, the JPML said.

Snap accused the New Mexico attorney general of making false allegations against the social media platform and misrepresenting its undercover investigation into the Snapchat app in a case about children’s safety and privacy. The platform said Thursday that it filed a motion to dismiss the AG’s lawsuit on Nov. 18. “Instead of working with Snap and New Mexico’s law enforcement officials on these efforts to combat bad actors,” AG Raul Torrez (D) "has chosen to work against them,” the motion said. “The result is a highly charged, headline-grabbing lawsuit founded upon gross misrepresentations of the State’s ‘investigation,’ dubious ‘evidence’ mined from the dark web, screenshots from platforms other than Snapchat, and cherry-picked references to old features that no longer exist.” Torrez filed a suit against Snap on Sept. 4 alleging that the social media app’s design features foster sextortion, sharing of child sexual abuse materials and child sexual exploitation. The New Mexico Department of Justice conducted an undercover investigation into the social media platform, including creating a decoy account of a 14-year-old. The decoy exchanged messages with dangerous accounts, several of which attempted to coerce it into sharing child sexual abuse materials. The investigation found the app’s recommendation algorithm connected Snapchat accounts that capture, circulate and sell child sexual abuse materials, as well as a network of dark websites dedicated to sharing these materials, among other allegations. In the motion to dismiss, Snap asserts that the decoy account searched for and instigated connections with the dangerous accounts, contrary to claims that they came up as algorithmic recommendations. On these and other grounds, including violations of the First Amendment and the legal liability shield Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Snap seeks to dismiss the lawsuit.

The FTC failed to meet a statutory deadline in response to a request to consolidate various lawsuits against the agency’s click-to-cancel rule, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a filing Tuesday (see 2411070025). NCTA, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Electronic Security Association earlier this month filed a mandamus petition with the 5th Circuit. The organizations filed one of four lawsuits against the new agency rule, which groups are seeking to consolidate within one federal court. The groups’ petition said the agency failed to forward the request for consolidation to the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation within a 10-day window of the rule’s issuance. The 5th Circuit agreed Tuesday, dismissing the agency’s argument that the 10-day window begins when the rule is published in the Federal Register, not when the rule was publicly announced, on Oct. 16. The agency failed to cite authority establishing that timeline, and the court hasn’t found legal justification, the filing said. The court granted the mandamus, forcing the agency to forward the complaints to the JPML. The court denied the groups’ request for an administrative stay, saying placing a hold on the rule is unnecessary because it’s not yet in effect. The associations have argued they’re incurring compliance costs in preparation for the rule.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) demanded information from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) about a possible coordinated plan to withhold ad dollars from certain social media platforms. Paxton sent a civil investigative demand on Thursday seeking “documents and information related to WFA and its sub-organization known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media … organizing their membership to potentially boycott social media platforms that are deemed to violate their ‘Brand Safety Standards,’” the AG office said. Paxton said, “Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine.” The Texas AG seeks “to hold WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to rig the system to harm organizations they might disagree with,” he said.

Congress should approve the Kids Online Safety Act, attorneys general from 31 states and the District of Columbia wrote congressional leaders Monday (see 2411180046). “While an increasingly online world has improved many aspects of our material well-being, prolific internet usage negatively impacts our children—with some studies suggesting minors spend over 5 hours daily on the internet,” the letter reads. “KOSA will establish better safeguards for minors online.” This effort comes as many AG offices have launched investigations and lawsuits against social media platforms, such as Meta and TikTok, for targeting minors. The letter lists the many ways KOSA addresses threats to children online, including having the strongest safety settings on by default, the option to disable addictive product features and algorithmic recommendations and giving parents more ways of identifying harmful behaviors and report them. “The states have been consistently acting to vigorously protect kids from online dangers using their existing consumer protection authority, and we look forward to further collaboration,” the letter said. “These changes will help create a safer online environment that reduces harm to kids.” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) was the letter's lead. AGs from Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, New York and South Carolina signed it.

The Trump administration will focus on First Amendment rights, and its agenda could include a review of the tech industry’s role in weakening those rights, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote in letters to Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft last week. Carr requested information that could “inform the FCC’s work to promote free speech and a diversity of viewpoints.” He noted the FCC’s role in administering the Communications Act, which includes the tech industry’s liability shield, Section 230. The statute grants tech companies benefits when it operates in “good faith,” said Carr. He’s seeking information about the industry’s relationship with NewsGuard, a tool that ranks news and information on social media sites. Carr requested the companies identify their ad and marketing partners. The companies didn’t comment Friday.

California’s SB-976 violates free speech and puts children’s safety at risk, NetChoice said Tuesday in a lawsuit seeking to block the measure before it becomes effective Jan. 1 (see 2409230032). SB-976 violates the First Amendment when it limits access to online speech, forces companies to track children and increases the risk of data breach, said NetChoice in the complaint filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Academics raised concerns Friday about who makes decisions about the accessibility for the disabled of broadband, media and websites. During a Silicon Flatirons symposium at the University of Colorado Boulder, Blake Reid, a University of Colorado Law School professor, said that while the idea of designing technology to work well for everyone by having accessibility features is good in theory, in practice it can prompt “universal designs” that don't benefit the disabled community. A disconnect exists between those making the product and users, he said. “The technologists in the room need to be the people that are using the technology,” said Reid. “We need better technologists. And we need technologists that have alignment with communities.” Said Meg Leta Jones, a Georgetown University professor, “Giving people seats at the accessibility table that aren't disabled is such an important point about why exclusions matter to power shifts in decision-making structures”: “Sometimes for people to matter, you have to exclude other people.”

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday remanded the tech industry’s lawsuit against Texas’ social media law (see 2409260062). A three-judge panel agreed with the U.S. Supreme Court that the “record is underdeveloped,” and said the lower court must answer key questions about application of HB-20. Given NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a facial challenge against all applications of the law, they have the burden of developing a “factual record” to support that request, said Thursday's opinion. Judges Edith Jones, Leslie Southwick and Andrew Oldham heard oral argument in May 2022 (see 2205090061). “Plaintiffs have not yet developed that record or proved their claims,” the court said. “Therefore, the cause is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.” The ruling lists a number of outstanding questions about whom HB-20 covers, how companies must moderate content and the impact on free expression. “Because these are fact-intensive questions that must be answered by the district court in the first instance after thorough discovery, we remand.” The panel said it expects the district court to also “thoroughly” address questions about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and Texas’ argument that the tech industry’s position on free speech is inconsistent with its views on the liability shield. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the 5th Circuit in July (see 2407010053). CCIA Chief of Staff Stephanie Joyce said in a statement: "CCIA looks forward to further proving in court that Texas HB20 violates the First Amendment." The office for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) didn’t comment.

There’s no evidence malicious cyberactivity had a “material impact on the security or integrity” of U.S. election infrastructure on Tuesday, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said Wednesday. A CISA official said Tuesday the agency hadn’t detected “national-level” foreign interference campaigns targeting the presidential election (see 2411050047). U.S. election infrastructure “has never been more secure and the election community never better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free, and fair elections for the American people,” said Easterly. “This is what we saw yesterday in the peaceful and secure exercise of democracy.” The FBI said in a statement Tuesday that it was aware of bomb threats at polling locations in several states. Many of the threats appeared to "originate from Russian email domains," the bureau said. "None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far."