November 2014

When a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for shooting an unarmed teenager, Twitter predictably lit up -- a sudden, sweeping surge of 3.5 million tweets that spiked just before 9:30 p.m. Eastern and simmered for hours.

#Ferguson was active in the US, of course. But a visualization of tweets on the hashtag, published by Twitter, show tens of thousands of tweets outside the US as well: Messages from Germany, Spain and Britain. Tweets from Chile and Brazil. South Africa. South Korea. Indonesia. Mongolia. Saudi Arabia, even. The death of a teenage boy in a small town outside St. Louis had somehow come to mean something to people all over the world, for a variety of reasons: the racial inequities that many thought it exposed; the escalation of violence on the ground; the stubborn impression that, even in the world’s most powerful democracy, justice simply wasn’t being done. Each of those tensions and impressions and escalations also had a megaphone it wouldn’t have had 10 years ago. They became the purview of the many, not the few.

With the CableCARD regime set to end following passage of the satellite reauthorization bill and the Federal Communications Commission now tasked with pursuing a successor platform, consider TiVo to be pleased as punch about all of it.

“We’re all for moving on beyond CableCARD, because that has been one helluva lot of friction in our consumer business,” TiVo president and CEO Tom Rogers said, referring to TiVo’s years-long battle to reduce CableCARD-induced installation headaches for its retail products. “Our issue,” he said, “has simply been to make sure the cable industry supports CableCARD until we’re really transitioning to a new standard of downloadable security that works better.”

[Commentary] The circulation of unverified claims, particularly on social media but also from journalists, is arguably inevitable in a story like Ferguson (MO). The trick is in learning how to find and evaluate it, keeping mindful of what Zeynep Tufekci has called “algorithmic censorship”—the fact that readers can miss information based on the automated workings of various sites and platforms.

From a news literacy perspective, awareness of how algorithms affect what we do and don’t see on social networks is just as important as awareness of how network news channels source and spin their stories. Rather than avoiding the untethered bits of information we find on social media, we need more of it, and also better skills to process and contextualize it all. “The Ferguson story underscores why it is vital for the public to have the tools to discern what information is reliable in the midst of such fast-breaking and highly charged news events,” NLP founder and president Alan Miller said after reviewing the McCulloch statement, “and why people need to look for a variety of credible sources and follow a story over time as verified facts emerge.”

[Jolly is a freelance journalist and video producer]

A United Nations committee has passed a resolution that explicitly condemns mass online surveillance and calls for its victims to have legal redress.

The UN General Assembly will vote on it in December. The resolution is a modification of an earlier resolution, passed a year ago, that slammed the monitoring and collection of people’s communications. The new version makes it clear that arbitrary surveillance and/or interception of communications is still a rights violation and possibly anti-democratic “when undertaken on a mass scale.” The resolution, which would not place binding restrictions on countries as such, also calls on the UN Human Rights Council to consider setting up a “special procedure” for protecting privacy. It was passed by the General Assembly’s Third Committee by consensus.