Prohibition on prioritized access to covered social media accounts

(a) Prohibition (1) In general It shall be unlawful for a social media platform, directly or indirectly, to knowingly offer, provide, sell, license, or otherwise make available prioritized access to a communication issued through a covered social media account. (2) Rules of construction Nothing in paragraph (1) shall be construed to restrict— (A) the ability of a social media platform to offer prioritized access to a communication issued through an account or profile that is not a covered social media account; (B) the use by a social media platform of algorithmic content ranking or the delivery of content or information intended for a specific user at no additional cost to the user and on the basis of data held by the social media platform that identifies, or is used to predict, content or information that could be of interest to that user; (C) the ability of a social media platform to offer prioritized access directly to a Federal, territorial, Tribal, State, or local agency or to first responders and a segment of the public at the direction of such an agency, for the purpose of communicating information concerning public health or public safety, or in the event of emergency or disaster, provided that no fee is charged to any third-party recipient of such prioritized access; or (D) the offering, provision, or licensing by a social media platform of programmatic, application programming interface, or data-licensing access to a communication issued through a covered social media account, provided that such access— (i) is offered on reasonable terms that do not discriminate among recipients of comparable programmatic or data-licensing access; (ii) does not make the communication available to a person, or class of persons, before the communication is generally available; and (iii) does not confer any advantage in timing or latency, relative to the general availability of the communication, that is conditioned on the payment of a fee or on membership in a closed or restricted class of recipients. (b) Civil penalties (1) In general A social media platform that violates subsection (a) shall be subject to a civil penalty in an amount equal to the total revenue received by the platform for the prioritized access that gave rise to the violation. (2) Recovery The Attorney General may bring a civil action in an appropriate district court of the United States to recover a civil penalty under paragraph (1).