Ina Fried

Facebook spent 3 hours detailing its efforts to fight misinformation, highlighting points of improvement but leaving unanswered the overarching question of whether users are safer than they were 2 years ago. Facebook is getting better at both detecting and removing some types of content, with a particular focus on efforts to subvert democratic elections. But other types of negative content remain prevalent on Facebook. Facebook's pledge to shift toward private, encrypted conversations is likely to make it harder for the company to monitor and remove objectionable content.

For all the many controversies around Facebook's mishandling of personal data, Google actually knows way more about most of us.  It likely knows everything you've ever typed into your browser’s search bar and every YouTube video you’ve ever watched. But that's just the beginning. It may also know where you've been, what you've bought and who you communicate with.

On Facebook's map of humanity, the node for "you" often includes vast awareness of your movements online and a surprising amount of info about what you do offline, too. The company has near-total awareness of every move you make on its website or in its apps. Facebook does scan your chat messages, but it isn't exactly reading them — it runs an automated scan for child pornography and other banned content. Facebook sees you less thoroughly outside its own digital turf, but it still sees a lot.

When leaders in Silicon Valley assess the new antitrust fever among candidates and policymakers, the prospect of corporate breakups isn't their biggest worry. Instead, insiders fear missing the next cycle of industry change if they're distracted and hobbled by antitrust conflicts. If executives are busy answering lawmaker inquiries and defending regulator lawsuits, they're less likely to be protecting their businesses from upstart challengers.

A proposal from the Donald Trump 2020 re-election campaign to create a national, wholesale 5G network is drawing criticism from FCC commissioners on both sides of the aisle. Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr joined Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel in speaking out against the plan. Commissioner Carr wrote, "The US won the race to 4G and secured billions of dollars in growth for the US economy by relying on America’s exceptional free market values.

The internet is an invisible mesh that enables instantaneous global communications, but delivering all those bits quickly to more people in more places requires increasingly exotic approaches. Here are a few things you may not realize about how communication pipes work around the world:

Although hate continues to flourish on social media, experts say the situation is not hopeless. Among the recommendations are allowing broader reporting of hate speech, offering a similar reporting system across different social networks, and putting content moderation on par with finding bugs in code. "It’s common for a bounty to be paid for reporting code issues to a company — companies should do the same with content moderation," said Newhouse School of Public Communications professor Jennifer Grygiel. "The public, researchers, experts etc.

The confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh were a poignant, painful and raw moment for the country. They were also a defining moment for social media. People posted their tears, their stories, their outrage wherever they were — in schools and on buses, at work and at home. From 9am to 7pm ET there were 8.8 million hearing-related tweets. That's well more than the 4.5 million tweets about this year's State of the Union address, but still far less than the 75 million vote-related tweets on Election Day 2016.

Fight #1: The race to get 5G networks up and running, a three-way game among US, China, and South Korea. While the US may be technically first with 5G in a few places, China is spending significantly more and will likely be first with 5G en masse.

With new attacks by President Donald Trump, high-stakes testimony Sept 5 on Capitol Hill, and a midterm election vulnerable to online manipulation, tech’s giants are bracing themselves for two months after Labor Day that could decide whether and how much the government regulates them. The companies — led by Facebook and Google but with Twitter, Apple, and Amazon also in the mix — are caught in a partisan vise, between privacy-oriented critics on the left who fear further election interference and newer charges from the right of anti-conservative bias and censorship.