Latest news with #ConsumerFraudAct
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New Jersey attorney general sues Discord app for ‘alarming' security lapses
New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin has sued Discord, a messaging app that caters to teens and gamers, for failing to enforce its security features. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor) New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin sued the messaging app Discord Thursday under the state Consumer Fraud Act, saying the tech giant has failed to protect underage users from sexual predators, harassment, and violent content. Platkin, who also has sued TikTok and Meta, alleges Discord misleads parents and users about the efficacy of its 'porous security features that Discord knows do not work as promised.' The decade-old platform, which caters to teens and gamers, has 200 million users. 'Too often, parents feel helpless as rich and powerful corporations find new ways to put harmful content literally directly into our kids' hands, callously placing their own profits ahead of the safety and well-being of our children,' Platkin said at a news conference in Newark. Platkin pointed to violent incidents involving white supremacists who used the platform to plan or publicize their crimes, including a deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a 2022 mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket that left 10 dead. Platkin said his office launched its investigation after the Buffalo massacre and found that Discord, even as it publicly promotes its safety measures, fails to enforce them, making it 'alarmingly easy for predators and other malicious actors to target children on the app.' 'There's very little to prevent kids from connecting with and receiving messages from complete strangers on their platform. This includes strangers who are adults pretending to be kids, something that should be a red flag for every parent,' Platkin said. Discord prohibits children under 13 on its platform, he added, 'but it barely enforces its own rule.' 'All a child has to do to access the app is just say they're 13. Discord will take any 8-year-old's word for it,' he said. He added: 'There are very few roadblocks between a child under the age of 10 accessing Discord and being groomed in a private chat or coerced to engage in self-harm. It's horrifying, sickening, and it's especially horrifying and sickening given that Discord users in New Jersey exchange billions of direct messages on the app every year.' Officials from Discord, which is based in San Francisco, did not respond to a request for comment. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
WIRED
17-04-2025
- Business
- WIRED
New Jersey Sues Discord for Allegedly Failing to Protect Children
Apr 17, 2025 11:00 AM The New Jersey attorney general claims Discord's features to keep children under 13 safe from sexual predators and harmful content are inadequate. Photograph:Discord is facing a new lawsuit from the state of New Jersey, which claims that the chat app is engaged in 'deceptive and unconscionable business practices' that put its younger users in danger. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, comes after a multiyear investigation by the New Jersey Office of Attorney General. The AG's office claims it has uncovered evidence that, despite Discord's policies to protect children and teens, the popular messaging app is putting youth 'at risk.' 'We're the first state in the country to sue Discord,' Attorney General Matthew Platkin tells WIRED. Platkin says there were two catalysts for the investigation. One is personal: A few years ago, a family friend came to Platkin, astonished that his 10-year-old son was able to sign up for Discord, despite the platform forbidding children under 13 from registering. The second was the mass-shooting in Buffalo, in neighboring New York. The perpetrator used Discord as his personal diary in the lead-up to the attack, and livestreamed the carnage directly to the chat and video app. (The footage was quickly removed.) 'These companies have consistently, knowingly, put profit ahead of the interest and well-being of our children,' Platkin says. The AG's office claims in the lawsuit that Discord violated the state's Consumer Fraud Act. The allegations, which were filed on Thursday morning, turn on a set of policies adopted by Discord to keep children younger than 13 off the platform and to keep teenagers safe from sexual exploitation and violent content. The lawsuit is just the latest in a growing list of litigation from states against major social media firms — litigation that has, thus far, proven fairly ineffective. Discord's child and teen safety policies are clear: Children under 13 are forbidden from the messaging app, while it more broadly forbids any sexual interaction with minors, including youth 'self-endangerment.' It further has algorithmic filters operating to stop unwanted sexual direct messages. The California-based company's safety policy, published in 2023, claims 'we built Discord to be different and work relentlessly to make it a fun and safe space for teens.' But New Jersey says 'Discord's promises fell, and continue to fall, flat.' The attorney general points out that Discord has three levels of safety, to prevent youth from unwanted and exploitative messages from adults: 'Keep me safe,' where the platform scans all messages into a user's inbox; 'my friends are nice,' where it does not scan messages from friends; and 'do not scan,' where it scans no messages. Even for teenage users, the lawsuit alleges, the platform defaults to 'my friends are nice.' The attorney general claims this is an intentional design that represents a threat to younger users. The lawsuit also alleges that Discord is failing by not conducting age verification to prevent children under 13 from signing up for the service. In 2023, Discord added new filters to detect and block unwanted sexual content, but the AG's office says the company should have enabled the 'keep my safe' option by default. 'Consider me unimpressed by their PR campaign,' Platkin says. He contends that the new features are insufficient, easy to get around, and are less than what the company has made available to users in other countries. 'If you put lipstick on a pig,' he says, 'it's still a pig.' WIRED reached out to Discord for comment about its child safety measures, but has not heard back. 'Together, these open design features and default settings make it so that anyone can gain direct, private access to a child user with just a few clicks,' the filings allege. Later, the AG goes further, writing that 'Discord promised parents safety but made deliberate choices to design its Application and establish default settings that rendered those promises utterly meaningless.' The lawsuit lists a half-dozen criminal cases where adults allegedly used Discord to lure and exploited children, including the case of 764, a digital far-right pedophile ring. The lawsuit proposes several different remedies, including a court injunction requiring that Discord improve its safety features and possible financial penalties if it's found to be failing to keep its users safe. While this appears to be the first state-level lawsuit against Discord, a number of private law firms have taken aim at the company on similar grounds. In 2022, the family of a then-11-year-old girl filed a class action lawsuit against Discord, alleging that the platform failed to implement enough safeguards to prevent her exploitation by other users. A similar case was filed in California earlier this year. Both cases are ongoing. But these lawsuits are growing more and more common: Meta, in particular, is facing two massive lawsuits, led by dozens of states, claiming it harmed its teenage users. A similar lawsuit was filed by a coalition of school boards in the Canadian province of Ontario. The European Union, meanwhile, has crafted a suite of regulations meant to tackle these externalities—but, thus far, it is having trouble getting the American tech giants to comply. Platkin has filed a number of other lawsuits—most recently against TikTok—in an attempt to force social media giants to improve their child protection measures. 'They can't knowingly put out a product that's unsafe for kids,' Platkin says. 'I don't care if you're a social media company, or an opioid manufacturer or any other company that's telling the public your product is safe when it's not. We're going to hold the company accountable.' Platkin says he's hopeful that the Trump administration, which has indicated some willingness to go after major social media companies, is interested in keeping children safe — not just targeting supposed conservative censorship. 'Hope springs eternal for me,' Platkin says.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's War on the Press (opinion)
A month before last November's presidential election, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris that was edited to make her response to a question about Israel "more succinct," as the show's producers put it. But Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, complained that "her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better." As Trump saw it, that was "A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal." How so? According to a lawsuit that Trump filed against CBS in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on October 31, editing the Harris interview to make her seem slightly more cogent violated that state's Deceptive Trade Practices Act and caused Trump "at least" $10 billion in damages. A lawsuit that Trump filed against The Des Moines Register on December 16 follows the same playbook, claiming the newspaper's coverage of an inaccurate presidential poll violated a similar Iowa law. In both cases, Trump—the man now elected president—implausibly describes news reporting as "election interference" that constitutes consumer fraud because it misleads viewers or readers. It is hard to overstate the threat to freedom of the press posed by such reasoning, which transforms journalism that irks Trump into a tort justifying massive damage awards. Although neither lawsuit is likely to make much headway, the cost of defending against such litigation is apt to have a chilling effect on journalism, which is what Trump wants. "We have to straighten out the press," he told reporters, explaining his motivation for suing CBS and the Register. The lead defendant in the latter case is pollster J. Ann Selzer, who conducted a preelection voter survey for the Register that indicated Harris had a small lead over Trump in Iowa. According to that poll, which was released on the Saturday before the election, 47 percent of Iowa voters favored Harris, compared to 44 percent for Trump. Those results proved to be off by more than a little: Trump won Iowa by a 13-point margin. Trump was outraged by the poll. "It's called suppression," he said at a rally in Pennsylvania the day after the Register reported that Harris had taken the lead in Iowa. "And it actually should be illegal." In fact, it was illegal, Trump's lawsuit argues. It says publication of the erroneous poll's surprising results, which generated wide news coverage, amounted to "brazen election interference" that violated Iowa's Consumer Fraud Act. Trump's use of that law, like his use of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, is plainly frivolous. Both laws are aimed at fraud that harms consumers by misleading them in connection with their purchases of products or services. "You would have to prove that a false statement was made and that the statement was made" with the intent that consumers would "rely on it," UCLA law professor Rick Hasen told The Washington Post. "If someone is accurately reporting the results of a poll, that wouldn't be a false statement. The poll might have errors in it, but that wouldn't be a false statement." Hasen added that the lawsuit's "somersaults" do not plausibly connect Trump's complaints to the sort of commercial misrepresentations that the fraud statute covers. Why bother then? "I'm doing this not because I want to," Trump told reporters. "I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to…..I shouldn't really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else. But I have to do it [because] our press is very corrupt." As Trump sees it, the U.S. Department of Justice should be policing the press to make sure it is telling the truth. Exactly how that would work is unclear: What statutes, specifically, would authorize the Justice Department to sue or prosecute news outlets for reporting that Trump views as inaccurate or unfair? More to the point, any such action would be clearly unconstitutional. But Trump thinks he can achieve similar results by filing his own lawsuits. "Newspapers and polling firms are not engaged in 'deceptive practices' just because they publish stories and poll results Trump doesn't like," said Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is representing Selzer pro bono, in a statement. "Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud." Corn-Revere called the "absurd" lawsuit "a direct assault on the First Amendment." The post Trump's War on the Press appeared first on
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Assembly panel advances three abortion bills over vehement opposition from critics
Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-Passaic), chair of the Assembly's community development and women's affairs committee, listens to people testify on March 20, 2025, against several abortion-related bills. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor) Anti-abortion pregnancy centers that use deceptive or misleading advertising to lure pregnant women through their doors would face penalties for violating the state's Consumer Fraud Act under a bill an Assembly panel advanced Thursday despite heated opposition from anti-abortion advocates. The bill also would require violators to issue a statement correcting false or misleading information and authorize the state attorney general to seek a court order prohibiting violators from advertising or providing counseling services. It comes 16 months after the Office of the Attorney General issued a consumer alert warning residents about deceptive advertising by crisis pregnancy centers, which are typically religiously affiliated centers that offer pregnant women testing, ultrasounds, counseling, and information that discourages abortion. There are more than 50 such centers around the state, with at least one in every county. It was one of three abortion-related bills the Assembly Community Development and Women's Affairs Committee advanced along party lines Thursday. The other two bills would: Establish a reproductive health travel advisory that would inform New Jersey residents about abortion restrictions in other states. This bill passed the full Senate in October by a 25-14 vote, largely along party lines. Protect people who get or give abortions in other states by entering New Jersey in the Women's Reproductive Health Care Compact. Under that compact, member states would block the extradition or investigation of people who get or provide abortions by states that restrict the procedure, among other things. This bill does not yet have a Senate companion. The measures come as the Trump administration has pardoned abortion protesters convicted of federal crimes, banned federal funds for abortion, and rolled back support of the abortion pill. Forty-one states now ban or restrict abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Thursday, Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-Passaic), the committee's chair, lamented this 'time of uncertainty' for women's rights. She told listeners — mostly anti-abortion advocates — that the bills would ensure women have the freedom to make informed decisions about their reproductive health. 'The issues before us today are not just policy matters,' Sumter said. 'They are matters of justice, dignity, and the well-being of families and communities across our state.' The activists who packed the hearing room, though, decried the bills as discriminatory against religious groups. 'This is nothing more than a campaign of hostility toward faith-based, pro-life pregnancy centers, and it has resulted in actions that are unconstitutional, groundless, unduly burdensome, and purposefully harassing,' said Shawn Hyland of the New Jersey Family Policy Center. Opponents of the bill targeting anti-abortion pregnancy centers said the centers should not be subject to the state's Consumer Fraud Act because that 1960 law was passed to police commercial speech. 'No precedent exists for applying the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act to the offering of free charitable services to members of the community who voluntarily accept them,' said Eileen S. Den Bleyker, an attorney who sued the state in 2023 over the consumer alert. Den Bleyker's group lost that challenge at the appellate level, but a separate action over public records remains ongoing. Critics also warned legislators the bill violates free speech protections and would be struck down as unconstitutional, citing a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case that challenged a California law. That case targeted a law that required licensed anti-abortion pregnancy clinics to alert patients that the state provides free or subsidized abortions and mandated that unlicensed clinics advertise their non-medical status. But the justices agreed with the anti-abortion pregnancy centers that the First Amendment prohibits compelled speech. The New Jersey bill awaits a hearing before the Senate's commerce committee. Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-Sussex) and Assemblyman Al Barlas (R-Passaic) voted against all three bills. 'We should not be weaponizing government against those who provide women with a choice, the choice to be supported, the choice to receive care, and the choice of life,' Fantasia said. On all three bills, several speakers veered into religious preaching, driving Sumter to repeatedly try to redirect their comments back to the legislation under consideration. But anti-abortion lobbyist Barbara Eames ignored Sumter as she testified about slavery, Benjamin Franklin, Babylon, the Book of Psalms, North Korea, and China before ending with a warning. 'I am quite sure that this committee will approve these bills today, and they will likely pass the Legislature and be signed into law by Governor Murphy. But God executes justice in his own time and will call us all to account for our actions taken in our earthly life. These bills violate his law and his will,' Eames said. No abortion rights advocates testified during Thursday's hearing, although several did testify in support of several bills to protect abortion access in October. Sumter appeared unruffled after the 90-minute hearing, saying: 'What I love about our state is we protect reproductive freedoms, whatever your choice may be.' 'Chaos' on the federal level makes home rule matter more for state policymakers, she added. 'It's a form of leadership that doesn't serve the public well,' she said of the Trump administration. 'Anxiety is high. There's pressure down on the state level to make sure that we provide some leadership, calmness, and stability on what rights you have in your state.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Keith Ellison: Settlement reached with Maplewood man in lawsuit over ‘deceptive' nonprofits
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Friday a settlement has been reached in his lawsuit that accuses a Maplewood man of engaging in a 'deceptive pattern' through his five nonprofits and one for-profit business — all of which have government-sounding names — as a means 'to sow confusion for his own gain.' The consent judgment, filed Friday in Ramsey County District Court, dissolves David Singleton's nonprofits named in the Jan. 30 lawsuit and bans him from incorporating or serving as an officer or director of nonprofits in the future. It also bans Singleton from advertising that his for-profit business, Midwest Arbitration and Special Conciliation Authority Inc., can provide legal services. In addition, Singleton must pay back the $5,000 the lawsuit says he took from a New Ulm, Minn., woman as payment for legal services he could not legally provide. A judge will need to sign off on the settlement. Singleton, 55, is the founder and president of the nonprofits Minnesota Civilian Public Safety Commission Inc., DWI Prevention Services Inc., and Minnesota Police Reserve Officers Association, and president of League of Minnesota Human Rights Commissions, and United Criminal Justice Reform Commission. The lawsuit maintained that none of the organizations abided by the requirements of the Minnesota Nonprofit Corporation Act, and used images, words and verbiage to 'confuse and mislead Minnesota citizens as to the organizations' affiliation with a government agency.' Singleton also used one of his nonprofits' websites to direct Minnesotans to his for-profit 'legal consulting' business, despite not having a license to practice law in Minnesota or any other state, according to the lawsuit, which alleges violations of the Consumer Fraud Act and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. 'It is deeply disappointing when nonprofits are used to deceive, as this risks undermining public trust in charitable organizations generally,' Ellison said in a Friday statement. 'Fear of trickery should never stand between Minnesotans and contributing to a cause they believe in.' Singleton will be liable for an additional $100,000 if he violates any condition of the agreement. He did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement Friday, and an attorney is not listed in the court file. The attorney general's office said its charities division began investigating Singleton, his organizations and business after receiving complaints from government agencies, including the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. The agency said that Singleton's similar-sounding League of Minnesota Human Rights Commissions name and government images on its website confused people into contacting the League for help when they meant to contact the state agency. The lawsuit said the investigation found violations of the Minnesota Nonprofit Corporation Act for 'failure to perform any activities that meet the organizations' nonprofit purpose, lack of board of directors, no annual board meetings, failure to maintain financial records, and breaches of an officer's fiduciary duties.' In March 2022, a Minnesota Civilian Public Safety Commission 'commissioner' opened a Capital One credit card for the nonprofit and added Singleton as an authorized user. Singleton made over 60 purchases on the card, most of which did not appear to have a nonprofit purpose, including purchases at liquor stores, drug stores, restaurants and gas stations, the lawsuit alleges. After payments on the account stopped for eight months, the account was suspended and Capital One referred the account to its recoveries department with a balance of $1,480.77. The lawsuit also alleges deceptive solicitation of donations by using names, verbiage and images to create confusion of a government affiliation. Until the attorney general's office began its investigation, Singleton's Civilian Public Safety Commission used the website to advertise itself, displaying images commonly associated with government agencies, including a picture of the Minnesota State Capitol and Minnesota state seal. Midwest Arbitration's Facebook page, meanwhile, showed Singleton wearing what appeared to be a judge's robe. Crime & Public Safety | Apple Valley man jailed in fatal Bloomington hit-and-run Crime & Public Safety | Hudson man charged with killing wife with knife in the couple's townhome Crime & Public Safety | Residents in St. Paul's Payne-Phalen file class action suit against Northern Iron foundry Crime & Public Safety | Woodbury man sentenced for string of Washington County bank robberies Crime & Public Safety | Former Oakdale man treated 'like a dog' before murder in upstate New York, prosecutor says
