News

Meta and YouTube are accused of intentionally designing addictive features that hooked a now-20-year-old woman as a child and harmed her mental health. The lawsuit brought by “Kaley” and her mother is the first of more than 1,500 similar lawsuits to go to trial.

The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world’s most popular apps.

Online age assurance requirements are reshaping how people access digital services worldwide. KGI’s latest report examines how these systems work and the tradeoffs inherent in their deployment.

Provisions in a new bill introduced in Alabama would advance transparency and user control in algorithmic feeds on social media platforms, reflecting key recommendations from KGI’s Better Feeds guidelines. The legislation signals a shift beyond existing “addictive feeds” approaches toward algorithms designed to promote long-term user value.

State lawmakers across the political spectrum are once again preparing to push for social media regulations aimed at protecting kids, despite a series of court rulings that have halted the implementation of new laws.

The bills filed so far for this year’s legislative sessions include a range of proposals, including requiring age verification and parental permission and banning addictive feeds.

In this episode, Anush and Jasper are joined by Dr. Alissa Cooper, Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute, to discuss KGI’s recent submissions to competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic regarding Google’s search monopoly.

The Knight-Georgetown Institute unveiled model legislation for state lawmakers seeking to regulate social media algorithms without requiring a default to old-school chronological feeds.

This Tech Policy Press podcast episode was recorded in Barcelona at this year’s Mozilla Festival, with an in-depth conversation on why researcher access to public platform data matters more than ever. TPP’s Justin Hendrix speaks with Peter Chapman, LK Selig, and Brandi Geurkink to unpack the current state of research access to public platform data and to discuss KGI’s new report “Better Access: Data for the Common Good.”

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against online platform companies alleging harms related to social media, artificial intelligence, and gaming products. Together with the Tech Justice Law Project and the USC Neely Center, KGI is building a network of collaborators developing practical resources for use by litigators as they shape their approaches to discovery and remedy. Our Litigating Platform Design initiative bridges the gap between litigators, technology researchers, and legal scholars – equipping their joint efforts towards tech accountability.

What a great time to be Google. Not only is it facing only the meekest of punishments for abusing its monopoly of the search market, it is actually now positioned to further entrench its dominance of our information landscape. This is a perilous moment to be granting one company this much control over global access to knowledge.

When the government launched an antitrust lawsuit against Google five years ago, it was all about whether the tech giant had a monopoly on internet search. But by the time the judge ruled on punishments for the company this month, the future of artificial intelligence was front and center.

New web standards could limit AI’s access to websites in profound ways, and Big Tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are trying to halt or water down the effort.