WASHINGTON — News outlets in Florida may soon be able to sue Facebook and Twitter if the social media companies take down their content.
Arkansans shopping on Amazon will be able to see contact information for third-party merchants, which the site won’t be required to show people outside the state.
Residents of Virginia can ask Google and Facebook not to sell their personal data, and the state can sue the companies if they don’t comply.
The moves are the result of an extraordinary legislative blitz by states to take on the power of the biggest tech companies. Over the past six months, Virginia, Arkansas, Florida and Maryland have been among at least 38 states that have introduced more than 100 bills to protect people’s data privacy, regulate speech policies and encourage tech competition, according to a tally by The New York Times.
That is a drastic escalation from past years. For online privacy alone, states proposed 27 bills in 2021, up from two in 2018, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Only a handful of the bills have been signed into law, but the push signals that states are no longer content to sit on the sidelines of setting the rules for the internet — especially as Washington has moved slowly. While Congress has ramped up hearings and reports to curtail the power of Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook in recent years, lawmakers have passed only one bill, which opened social media giants to more legal liability if they facilitate sex trafficking.
Tom Wheeler, a former chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said the recent barrage of state actions “proves once again nature abhors a vacuum.”
“The failure of policymakers at the national level to act has invited both state and foreign regulators to act,” he said.
The states’ legislative push is set to lead to uneven online experiences across the country. Internet users are beginning to have different rights depending on where they live. That creates complications for the tech companies, which are navigating a geographical legal thicket. Facebook, Google, Amazon and others may have to revise their products to comply with the laws and decide whether to implement the changes even in places where they aren’t legally required to.
Critics of the state regulations warned that tech companies weren’t the only ones that would have to maneuver through the patchwork of rules. “For consumers, this means confusion,” said Daniel Castro, a vice president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a think tank sponsored by tech companies.
Apple and Google declined to comment. Jodi Seth, a spokeswoman for Amazon, pointed to an April blog post from the company’s policy executive Brian Huseman, who said the state laws risked creating a hodgepodge of regulations that wouldn’t serve users well.
Will Castleberry, Facebook’s vice president of state and local public policy, said that instead, the social network largely backed more federal legislation. “While we support state efforts to address specific challenges,” he said in a statement, “there are some issues, like privacy, where it’s time for updated federal rules for the internet — and those need to come from Congress.”
To fight against the splintering rules, the tech companies have gone on the offensive. While data on state lobbying is inconsistent and often underreported, Google, Amazon and Facebook funneled a combined $5 million into those efforts in 2019, according to the National Institute on Money in Politics, a nonprofit. The companies also increased their lobbying ranks to dozens in state legislatures compared with skeletal forces five years ago.
