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November 2016

Trump is turning Twitter into a state disinformation machine

Donald Trump used Twitter to make outrageous claims during the entire 2016 election, and he’s still making them after winning the presidency. He is now turning Twitter into a state-media machine capable of quickly and widely spreading disinformation.

In the middle of a rant about the Electoral College, President-elect Trump tweeted a preposterous claim: that millions of people voted illegally in the election he just won. (He also trashed democratic norms before the election, saying it would be rigged and that he would not accept the results if he lost.) President-elect Trump made the false claim about illegal voting in the middle of saying there should be no vote recount in Wisconsin. President-elect Trump has given no indication that he will restrain his careless speech or improve his standards for evidence. He has used Twitter to tweet and retweet false and misleading information at a volume that has challenged the bandwidth of fact checkers. In many cases the fact-checkers don’t get a word in before the false claim. When President-elect Trump becomes President, his Twitter account won’t just be the ramblings of a private citizen — it will be the remarks of the chief executive of the US government. And if his Twitter account is the most open part of his administration, the platform could effectively become the White House press office.

Trump vs. the White House Press Corps

[Commentary] Outsider Donald Trump was elected president in significant part because of his promise to shake up Washington. He’ll soon find that one of the most entrenched forces that object to any change affecting them is the White House press corps. As recent meetings with the media showed, a clash is coming.

The clash will go beyond ideology and the media’s dislike of President-elect Trump personally. It will happen because, while the press as an institution is largely in decline throughout the US, the White House briefing room is one of the mainstream media’s last bunkers of power. It’s a place where they dominate—satisfied with the traditions and practices that predate social media—even as the press struggles, especially financially, with how news is made and covered today. The briefing room itself, the place where reporters sit, and the adjacent space in which they are provided offices reflect the power of the mainstream press, based largely on the media-consuming habits of the American people from decades ago. The White House press secretary used to decide who got what seats, but this authority was given to the White House Correspondents Association in the middle of the George W. Bush administration. Nothing prohibits the incoming administration from taking it back. The valuable West Wing real estate occupied by the White House press corps isn’t the property of the press. It belongs to the US government.

[Fleischer was the White House press secretary for George W. Bush]

Why Blind Americans are Worried about Trump’s Tech Policy

The Federal Communications Commission’s self-imposed hiatus means that a number of high-profile regulations are unlikely to be acted upon until President-elect Trump takes office, if ever. One of those issues is video description – when a narrator explains, for the benefit of the blind or visually impaired, what’s happening onscreen during a TV show or movie, squeezing his or her voice-over into the gaps between dialogue.

The problem is that not many shows have video description. Currently, FCC regulations require the four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) to provide just four hours of the service per week, for primetime or children’s programming. Five cable channels (USA, TNT, TBS, History, and Disney) are subject to the same requirement. A deleted agenda item from a November FCC meeting would have expanded the FCC’s requirement by more than half, up to nearly seven hours per week, and applied it to the top ten non-broadcast channels, including premium ones such as HBO and AMC. Today, the fear in the blind community is that a temporary delay might become a permanent halt.

An Auction That Could Transform Local Media

[Commentary] With the demand for wireless broadband growing, the Federal Communications Commission is auctioning off a big chunk of the public airwaves. Billions of dollars are likely to change hands, a windfall that could transform local media across the country.

This broadband spectrum is now used by TV stations to broadcast their signals to the comparatively small number of customers who rely on antenna reception at a time when most people use cable, satellite or streaming services. The proceeds from these sales could produce enormous public benefits if they are used to build a 21st-century infrastructure for public interest media. For states, communities and universities holding licenses in play, the auction presents an important opportunity to invest in new ways to meet the information needs of the public. At least 54 public television stations in 18 states and the District of Columbia applied to participate in the auction, according to research by the nonprofit group Free Press. These include three stations in the Los Angeles market, a major outlet on Chicago’s South Side, and the public station at Howard University in Washington. Each could be worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Perhaps nowhere is there a better opportunity to take advantage of the auction than in New Jersey. The governor and State Legislature should create a permanent fund to support a new model for public-interest media, financed by a significant portion of any auction revenue. This approach could serve as a model for other states, universities and communities seeking to sell their spectrum.

[Daggett is the president and chief executive of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation]

In Europe, Is Uber a Transportation Service or a Digital Platform?

In July 2015, a judge in Barcelona referred a case to the European Court of Justice, asking the Luxembourg-based court to determine whether Uber should be treated as a transportation service or merely as a digital platform. If the court decides that Uber is a transportation service, the company will have to obey Europe’s often onerous labor and safety rules, and comply with rules that apply to traditional taxi associations.

Though Uber already fulfills such requirements in many European countries, the ruling could hamper its expansion plans. But if the judges rule that Uber is an “information society service,” or an online platform that merely matches independent drivers with potential passengers, then the company will have greater scope to offer low-cost products like UberPop and other services that have been banned in many parts of Europe. A ruling is not expected before March 2017 at the earliest. The judges may decide to consider Uber a transportation service, an online platform, or a combination of the two, further complicating the legal standoff.

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