Elections and Media

Despite having many fewer followers and much less engagement on social media than President Donald Trump, Joe Biden's campaign raised record amounts of money and ultimately neutralized Trump’s vaunted “Death Star” — the name his erstwhile campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gave to the campaign’s digital operation. Figuring out whether any particular online strategy decisively moved the needle for President-elect Biden is probably impossible. Offline factors, such as Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and the economic devastation it has caused, undoubtedly played a major role.

Lapses in tech companies’ policies to address Spanish content led to a proliferation of misinformation targeting Latino voters around Election Day, according to several advocacy groups. Spanish misinformation campaigns largely mimicked those in English that cast doubt on the security of mail-in ballots, later calling into question the election results.

The CEOs of Twitter and Facebook defended their efforts to reduce the spread of online disinformation about the presidential election and the integrity of the US voting system as they faced an onslaught of criticism from Senate Republicans who accused the tech giants of censoring conservative views and favoring Democrats.

The runoff for Georgia’s two Senate seats will have implications for a dizzying number of policy issues for President-elect Joe Biden’s administration—including the future of net neutrality. The two Senate seats in Georgia will determine the balance of power in Congress’ upper chamber. Controlling both chambers of Congress and the presidency would give Democrats wide latitude in shaping policy. “Winning both changes the calculus.

A Q&A with former President Barack Obama. 

House Commerce Committee leaders wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons demanding that the two commissions stop work on all partisan or controversial items currently under consideration in light of the results of the presidential election. “We note that you have previously welcomed calls from congressional leaders for the FCC to ‘halt further action on controversial items during the transition period.’ We hope you will respect this time-honored tradition now.”

A Q&A with former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler. He says one major issue for the Biden FCC will likely be restoring Obama-era net neutrality rules that required internet service providers to offer equal access to content on the web. Current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai reversed those rules in 2017. President-elect Joe Biden will prioritize more spending on broadband infrastructure.

The first 100 days of a new Administration and new Congress are critical to charting a clear, bipartisan course for our nation’s policy agenda. From COVID relief to budget decisions, take bold and decisive action to finish the job of connecting every American home, business and anchor institution to U.S. broadband infrastructure. Particularly amid a global pandemic, the fact that an estimated 18 million American homes do not have broadband access is unacceptable.

Technological innovation has long been and will continue to be critically important to per-capita income growth, economic competitiveness, and national security. So it is important to examine President-elect Joe Biden’s policy agenda through that lens. This report compiles information from the president-elect’s campaign website and policy documents, from the Democratic Party platform, and from media accounts of statements he has made.

If Democrats win a majority of Senate seats, it would give regulatory-minded congressional Democrats the ability to put an end to the legal wrangling over a neutral internet, impose tougher new privacy laws or pass their version of social media regulation. With Republicans holding onto the Senate, there would be no legislation reclassifying internet access as a Title I telecommunications service subject to mandatory access and potentially rate regulation.