Lauren Frayer

[Commentary] [P]revious US presidents have been able to exert their influence around the world on behalf of press freedom, however inconsistently. The issue is not partisan, either. The Obama administration raised concerns about press freedom abuses in Egypt, Ethiopia, Turkey, China, and Vietnam; former President George W. Bush told the Today Show that he raised the issue with Russia President Vladimir Putin. Sadly, President Donald Trump has expressed no such interest in protecting this framework or setting a positive example.

In fact, while speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania for his 100th day in office, Trump said the media was a "disgrace" and that members of the press were "incompetent, dishonest people." These comments are even more alarming for being part of a broader trend. Among former regional leaders such as Hong Kong, Japan, South Africa, and Kenya, press freedom has deteriorated. Still, because he is the president of the United States, Trump's comments are different. As the award-winning Salvadoran reporter Óscar Martínez put it, "Trump inhabits the global showcase. In attacking the US press, he attacks all of the press and puts it at risk."

[Commentary] There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape: concentration of media, and new ways for the powerful to game it.

First, we increasingly turn to only a few aggregators like Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s going on the world, which makes their decisions about what to show us impossibly fraught. Those aggregators draw—opaquely while consistently—from largely undifferentiated sources to figure out what to show us. They are, they often remind regulators, only aggregators rather than content originators or editors.

Second, the opacity by which these platforms offer us news and set our information agendas means that we don’t have cues about whether what we see is representative of sentiment at large, or for that matter of anything, including expert consensus. But expert outsiders can still game the system to ensure disproportionate attention to the propaganda they want to inject into public discourse. Those users might employ bots, capable of numbers that swamp actual people, and of persistence that ensures their voices are heard above all others while still appearing to be humbly part of the real crowd. What to do about it? We must realize that the market for vital information is not merely a market.

[Jonathan Zittrain is a professor at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government.]

The timing could not be more fortuitous for Sinclair Broadcast Group: a Republican president is in the White House, his regulators have just eased rules on owning television stations and the dominant name in conservative media is reeling from a sexual harassment scandal. But as Sinclair tries to expand by buying even more local television stations, it has locked horns with that other broadcast giant known for its political bent, 21st Century Fox. Now the battle for a bigger audience is on, as Sinclair and Fox each look to broaden their reach in the Trump era.

House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's effort to roll back Title II classification and rethink Open Internet rules was a threat to free speech online. Ranking Member Pallone, who strongly backed the Open Internet order, said that online dialog is critical to democracy but would be jeopardized by Republicans pushing to overturn the rules.

He said that without net neutrality rules, large corporations can "begin to choke off conversations they don’t like and speed up ones they do." He said network conglomerates that control the infrastructure are buying content, like news outlets, which gives them a financial incentive to give preference to their own news. But he says the incentive could also be political.

[Commentary] As with so many things, I can’t believe we are going to reboot this franchise [network neutrality] once again and run through pretty much the same arguments. But as with repeal of Obamacare, Republicans would rather focus themselves on undoing Obama’s legacy rather than moving on and getting stuff done. Since they run the show, we play this game again.

[Harold Feld is senior vice president at Public Knowledge]

Recent shifts in the media ecosystem raise new concerns about the vulnerability of democratic societies to fake news and the public’s limited ability to contain it. The relatively small, but constantly changing, number of sources that produce misinformation on social media offers both a challenge for real-time detection algorithms and a promise for more targeted socio-technical interventions.

There are some possible pathways for reducing fake news, including: (1) offering feedback to users that particular news may be fake (which seems to depress overall sharing from those individuals); (2) providing ideologically compatible sources that confirm that particular news is fake; (3) detecting information that is being promoted by bots and “cyborg” accounts and tuning algorithms to not respond to those manipulations; and (4) because a few sources may be the origin of most fake news, identifying those sources and reducing promotion (by the platforms) of information from those sources.

As a research community, we identified three courses of action that can be taken in the immediate future: involving more conservatives in the discussion of misinformation in politics, collaborating more closely with journalists in order to make the truth “louder,” and developing multidisciplinary community-wide shared resources for conducting academic research on the presence and dissemination of misinformation on social media platforms.

Nowadays, students looking to go to college complete almost the entire application process online: finding schools, sending in application forms and essays, and applying for financial aid, all with the click of a mouse or tap of a screen. By fall 2014, colleges and universities received 94% of their applications online, up from 68% in 2007 and 49% in 2005, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling (the NACAC).

But between getting into college and figuring out how to pay for it, a strictly online application process can become an additional challenge for teens who have limited financial means and minimal access to the internet. Students whose application fees are waived due to family incomes often end up only applying to a single college. Meanwhile, the average American teen applies to between four and six, according to Annie Reznik, executive director of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success, a group of more than 90 colleges including Harvard, Princeton, Penn State, and the University of Arizona working to improve application success. “This digital divide is essentially one more barrier that low-income students face,” says David Hawkins, NACAC’s executive director for educational content and policy.

Facebook said it would hire 3,000 more staffers to review content in an attempt to curb violent or sensitive videos on its site without scaling back its live-streaming tools. The planned hires, announced by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, are in response to the Facebook posting of such violent videos as one in April showing a Cleveland (OH) man fatally shooting another man.

Zuckerberg’s proposed fix, which would increase Facebook’s roster of 4,500 reviewers by two-thirds over the next year, addresses the amount of time it takes Facebook to remove graphic content, as opposed to preventing its site from being used to display such content. The Cleveland video was up for roughly two hours; the Thailand video stayed up for 24 hours.

A federal appellate court has sided with CNN in a dispute over whether its iTunes app violated a federal privacy law by allegedly sharing data about consumers with the analytics company Bango. A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that people who download CNN's iTunes app aren't "subscribers" to the service. Therefore, the court ruled, the company didn't violate the Video Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits video companies from sharing personally identifiable information about "subscribers," "renters," or "purchasers." The decision upheld a trial judge's dismissal of iPhone user Ryan Perry's class-action complaint against CNN.

A group of legislators has formed a new "reality" caucus focused on the new realities of augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality. Reps Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Suzan DelBene (D-WA), Bill Flores (R-TX), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ted Lieu (D-CA) have teamed up to launch the Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Technologies.

"As these technologies continue to advance and grow, this ‘Reality Caucus’ will work to foster information sharing between Congress and our nation’s world-leading technology industry," the legislators said. "These technologies have shown tremendous potential for innovation in the fields of entertainment, education and healthcare. As these technologies develop, questions will inevitably rise in privacy, intellectual property and other areas. This is an opportunity to educate our colleagues and others to ensure Congress is doing all it can to encourage – rather than hinder – these enterprising fields."