Lauren Frayer

President Donald Trump slammed the media for being “rude” to his representatives. "It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives," he tweeted. "Be nice, you will do much better!"

In 2015, shortly after Donald Trump announced that he was running for president, polls found that only 19% of Americans trusted the government “always” or “most of the time.” (The survey has not been repeated, but presumably, the numbers have not improved.) Only 11% approved of Congress. Those numbers are historic lows; in 1958, when a poll first asked the question, 73% of Americans said that they could trust the government most of the time.

Flux’s app is one of a handful of new platforms that aim to use technology to let people participate directly in politics, at scale. All are premised on the fact that–around the world–representative democracy isn’t working well. But technology could potentially help end corruption and lobbying, allow people to delegate votes to trusted friends rather than politicians, and empower experts in a field to meaningfully impact policy.

A fascinating story emerged about Netflix recently. It was reported that the streaming television service was developing new interactive technology allowing viewers to direct the plots of certain television shows, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. The company later told me that the experiment was focused on children’s programming, more as a developmental learning tool than as some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.

No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week. So why not extend the idea to the plots of your favorite shows?

[Commentary] The U.S. economy added 10.3 million jobs during President Obama’s second term, or 214,000 a month. This brought the official unemployment rate below 5 percent, and a number of indicators suggested that by late last year we were fairly close to full employment. But Donald Trump insisted that the good news on jobs was “phony,” that America was actually suffering from mass unemployment. Then came the first employment report of the Trump administration, which at 235,000 jobs added looked very much like a continuation of the previous trend. And the administration claimed credit: Job numbers, Trump’s press secretary declared, “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.” Reporters laughed — and should be ashamed of themselves for doing so.

For it really wasn’t a joke. America is now governed by a president and party that fundamentally don’t accept the idea that there are objective facts. Instead, they want everyone to accept that reality is whatever they say it is. And it’s not just about serving one man’s vanity. If you want to see how this attitude can hurt millions of people, consider the state of play on health care reform. So don’t make the mistake of dismissing the assault on the Congressional Budget Office as some kind of technical dispute. It’s part of a much bigger struggle, in which what’s really at stake is whether ignorance is strength, whether the man in the White House is the sole arbiter of truth.

[Commentary] There are few signs at the moment that a détente will come in the poisonous relationship between this administration and the mainstream news media. Both sides seem willing to dig in on opposite sides of the battle line, perhaps as their forebears did when Adams, Jefferson, Nixon, and others occupied the White House. This isn’t an encouraging prospect. But to me conflict between the press and the president is less worrisome than the prospect of being led by an administration for which facts and truths are fungible or irrelevant. The optimist in me believes, like Lincoln, that while the people can be fooled some of the time, they will not be fooled all of the time. I believe that most people know that real knowledge is rooted in facts, and that getting these facts makes them smarter. I therefore believe that the people will search for, find, and support those sources that consistently strive to deliver facts. Those sources are called journalists.

[Tom Fiedler, a former White House correspondent and editor of the Miami Herald, is dean and professor of the practice of journalism at Boston University’s College of Communication.]

[Commentary] Network neutrality is not a First Amendment issue — or at least, not in the ways supporters suggest.

As any first-year law student knows, the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” The Fourteenth Amendment extends that prohibition to state governments as well. But with rare exceptions not applicable here, the Constitution does not similarly restrict private entities. This limitation, called the “state action doctrine,” is why the New York Times is not compelled to print every letter I write — and why I am not required to let any student speak whenever he or she wishes in my classroom, or my office, or at my dining room table. Simply put, a non-governmental entity may take actions that interfere with a speaker’s desire to communicate a message — and if it does so, the First Amendment is not implicated.

By leaning on the First Amendment, the progressive left suggests that net neutrality is about suppression of speech. Under this framework, the big threat is broadband providers inhibiting access to controversial websites or sites with which they disagree. But such actions are unlikely. The FCC cited no evidence of a broadband provider engaging in such behavior during the two decades before the net neutrality rules went into effect. And any company foolish enough to take such action would be pilloried in the press. In reality, net neutrality is about the more mundane question of vertical integration.

[Lyons is an associate professor at Boston College Law School]

[Commentary] The number of internet users world-wide has roughly doubled in the past eight years to around 3.5 billion. The people who have come aboard in the past few years are spending their time in something that was overshadowed long ago in developed countries by apps: the mobile web browser.

Single-purpose apps like Facebook and Snapchat are the product of markets where monthly data plans and home Wi-Fi are abundant. App stores require email addresses and credit cards, two things many new phone owners just don’t have. In places like India, Indonesia and Brazil, it’s easy to buy an Android phone for as little as $25—even less for older second-hand (or third-hand) refurbished phones. But there’s likely to be little onboard storage, and the pay-as-you-go data plan is too precious to waste on apps, especially those that send and receive data even when you aren’t using them.

“Saying, ‘[regulation] is going to slow down our incentive to invest’ is everybody’s first line of defense...It’s balderdash.”

— Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler

[Commentary] March 11 marks 28 years since I submitted my original proposal for the worldwide web. I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries. In many ways, the web has lived up to this vision, though it has been a recurring battle to keep it open. But over the past 12 months, I’ve become increasingly worried about three new trends, which I believe we must tackle in order for the web to fulfill its true potential as a tool that serves all of humanity.

1) We’ve lost control of our personal data
2) It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web
3) Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding

[Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He founded and Directs the World Wide Consortium (W3C) the forum for technical development of the Web. He founded the Web Foundation whose mission is that the WWW serves Humanity, and co-founded the Open Data Institute in London]

As the health care debate thundered away in Washington, Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) stirred up a social media squall by suggesting that uninsured Americans should invest in their own health care “rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love.”

In Chaffetz’s solidly Republican district, one of those uninsured Americans watched the viral CNN interview on — what else? — her cellphone. Not a new iPhone, though, but a Samsung with a cracked screen, one that Shari Hunter and her husband, Anthony, bought with their tax refunds two years ago. “An iPhone and insurance are not the same thing at all,” Hunter said. “If you need to be able to decide between an iPhone and health insurance, you need to look at: Why is that the choice?” To Chaffetz’s supporters, his comments sounded like a tough-love defense of individual responsibility in the midst of a knockdown debate over the government’s role in providing health care to Americans. To his critics, they sounded like a callous and obtuse dismissal of the hard choices that struggling families face every day — and one that echoed earlier, racially noxious arguments over “welfare queens” and criticisms of programs that helped provide phone service to poor people.