October 2015

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel calls for national computer coding requirement in schools

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called on the federal government to make computer coding classes a requirement of high-school graduation. Mayor Emanuel, who previously served as President Barack Obama's chief of staff, predicted that if the Administration made it a national priority, a host of other education policy decisions would fall into place around it.

"Just make it a requirement," he said during a tech policy event. "I am fine with Common Core. We adopted it in the city, one of the first cities to do it. I'm great. [But] you need this skill -- national policy. Make it a high-school graduation requirement." Mayor Emanuel also talked about the importance of the Federal Communications Commission's E-rate program, which provides Internet connections for schools and libraries usually paid for by extra costs tacked on phone customers' bills.

Rep Shimkus pushes back against critics of Internet transition bill

Rep John Shimkus (R-IL), the lawmaker behind a bill giving Congress oversight of the transition shifting control of the Internet domain name system away from the US, said he disagrees with critics who question whether the transition is entirely legal. Rep Shimkus pushed back against four Republican lawmakers who sent a letter in Sept asking for a Government Accountability Office review of whether the government has the legal authority to complete the transition. The letter questioned whether the transition would involve handing over United States property. In particular, they questioned whether the root zone file -- a part of the domain name system -- was property of the United States.

“Yeah, I don’t agree with that analysis,” Rep Shimkus said. "Because we’re not giving up that root address. That’s the basis of their argument, is that the root address will be given up. Well, we’ll still maintain the root address. So I don’t agree with their analysis of, in essence, the ownership rights of the government, because we’re keeping what we have.”

‘YouTube effect’ has left police officers under siege, law enforcement leaders say

Chiefs of some of the nation’s biggest police departments say officers in American cities have pulled back and have stopped policing as aggressively as they used to, fearing that they could be the next person in a uniform featured on a career-ending viral video. That was the unifying -- and controversial -- theory reached Oct 7 at a private meeting of more than 100 of the nation’s top law enforcement officers and politicians. With homicide rates soaring inexplicably this year in dozens of US cities, the group convened by new US Attorney General Loretta Lynch concluded with a brief news conference promising a robust response to the reversal of decades of falling violent crime rates. But for hours preceding that, mayors, police chiefs, US attorneys and even FBI Director James Comey privately vented in a Washington ballroom that they don’t really understand the alarming spike in murders and applause filled the room when mayors said police officers’ sinking morale could be a factor.

Chiefs said patrol officers still do their jobs, clocking in and policing their beats. But fewer take extra steps such as confronting a group loitering on a sidewalk late at night that might glean intelligence or lead to arrests, for fear that any altercations that ensued would be uploaded to the Internet. New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton called it the “YouTube effect” that has emerged for officers post-Ferguson and, in New York, after the death of Eric Garner in 2014 after he was put in a chokehold by an officer making an arrest.

Internet Access Affecting Behaviors In Africa

Access to the Internet is affecting African civic engagement, corruption perceptions and focus on the welfare of its children, according to research released today by the BBG and Gallup. The data examined Internet use in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Ethiopia and found that going online had measurable impact on the activities, attitudes and behaviors of people in those countries.

“We cannot underestimate the influence that the Internet is having on the communities we’ve surveyed,” said Sonja Gloeckle, Director of Research for the BBG. “And while we see disparities in the amount of access to the Internet in the different countries researched, we are seeing similar behaviors and attitudes among those who go online.” Internet users in each of the countries surveyed are more likely to volunteer their time or provide assistance to others, as measured by Gallup’s Civic Engagement Index.

Gender Bias in Hollywood Reportedly Draws Federal Scrutiny

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is looking into gender discrimination in Hollywood and sent letters to women directors asking them to share details of roadblocks they have encountered in their careers. The agency is responding to requests the American Civil Liberties Union made to state and federal governmental bodies in May, asking them to investigate major studios, networks and talent agencies for overwhelmingly hiring men.

Citing dismal statistics about representation of women behind the camera -- just 4 percent of top-grossing movies were directed by women over the last 12 years -- the ACLU said women were purposefully excluded from being recruited and hired by what remains an old boys’ club in Hollywood, and that was a violation of civil rights.

Social Media Usage: 2005-2015

Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65 percent) use social networking sites, up from 7 percent when Pew Research Center began systematically tracking social media usage in 2005. Pew Research reports have documented in great detail how the rise of social media has affected such things as work, politics and political deliberation, communications patterns around the globe, as well as the way people get and share information about health, civic life, news consumption, communities, teenage life, parenting, dating and even people’s level of stress. Across demographic groups, a number of trends emerge in this analysis of social media usage:

Age differences: Seniors make strides – Young adults (ages 18 to 29) are the most likely to use social media – fully 90 percent do. Still, usage among those 65 and older has more than tripled since 2010 when 11 percent used social media.
Gender differences: Women and men use social media at similar rates -- Women were more likely than men to use social networking sites for a number of years, although since 2014 these differences have been modest. Today, 68 percent of all women use social media, compared with 62 percent of all men.
Socio-economic differences: Those with higher education levels and household income lead the way.
Racial and ethnic similarities: There are not notable differences by racial or ethnic group: 65 percent of whites, 65 percent of Hispanics and 56 percent of African-Americans use social media today.
Community differences: More than half of rural residents now use social media -- Those who live in rural areas are less likely than those in suburban and urban communities to use social media, a pattern consistent over the past decade. Today, 58 percent of rural residents, 68 percent of suburban residents, and 64 percent of urban residents use social media.

For Whom the First Amendment Matters

[Commentary] Free speech matters to the hundreds of millions of Internet users who exercise this right every time they connect with others online. But if you ask some of the lawyers working for the companies that sell you Internet access, they’ll insist that it’s more important to protect the free speech rights of phone and cable giants like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. In a convoluted twist, they argue that the First Amendment gives these same companies the right to block, throttle and degrade the communications of everyone using their services. Did you get that? The First Amendment gives Comcast the right to censor you.

We owe this Orwellian shift in thinking to a growing number of court decisions, among them Citizens United, that define corporations as people and their business practices as speech. Harvard Law School’s John C. Coates documents this change in a study released last February, noting that “corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment.” It’s a trend Coates describes as “bad law and bad politics” and “increasingly bad for business and society.” As the court case against the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules rages in the courts, the First Amendment should not be used to take communication rights away from the very people it was designed to protect.

[Tim Karr is senior director of strategy for Free Press]