Sara Fischer

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has reached a historic settlement with Facebook over advertising practices that allegedly discriminated against minorities. As part of five settlements totaling nearly $5 million, Facebook has agreed to make major changes to its ad platform that will help curb discrimination against certain people when it comes to employment, housing and credit ads. Facebook is creating a new advertising process, specifically for marketers that are purchasing ads around employment, housing and credit.

While Democrats' campaign launches have sucked up national attention, President Donald Trump's re-election campaign has quietly spent nearly twice as much as the entire Democratic field combined on Facebook and Google ads. Political advertising strategists say that this level of ad spend on digital platforms this early in the campaign season is unprecedented. The data (captured between December 2018 and now) provides a window into the Trump campaign's 2020 strategy, which until now has been virtually invisible aside from a few rallies.

A global reckoning around the future of the internet is underway as autocratic regimes look to censor the internet in their countries, and races to develop new internet technologies, such as blockchain and 5G, heat up between the US and China. The next version of the internet could be split between countries that embrace an open web and isolationists that don't. It could also be fractured by different technologies that could fundamentally change the interconnected nature of the network and limit who can do business where.

New studies suggest that efforts to bring transparency to media — including attempts by journalists to publicly defend their work, media literacy campaigns, more transparent funding and improved fact-checking partnerships — have helped the media recover a bit of trust with the public after hitting an all-time low in 2016. While trust in the news media has recovered slightly since 2016, it still remains low compared to decades of prior research conducted by Gallup.

The big and powerful are getting bigger and more powerful — and the clear and dominant winners are big cities. With wealth, jobs, and power increasingly concentrated in a few large cities, we are witnessing a growing economic and political divide between urban and rural America. As we've previously written, it's part of a larger dynamic favoring "superstar" countries and companies, too — behemoths that appear positioned to dominate the future global economy. This fuels us-versus-them. New cool technologies hit cities first, be it 5G, autonomous transportation or drone delivery.

Nearly 8 out of 10 smartphone users in the US use their phones to access the internet at home more than or as much as a computer, according to an Axios/SurveyMonkey poll. It's a sign of how much people's online habits have evolved, as smartphones and smart TVs are becoming the primary gateway to internet at home compared to desktops and tablets. More than twice as many people said they use smartphones more often than computers to connect with the internet, compared to those who use computers more often. Other findings:

High-speed broadband and mobile internet have created more opportunities to access free news and information than ever before. But they have also made it harder for quality news and information outlets, particularly ones in rural areas, to survive. Tech has disrupted the local media business model and pushed more journalism behind paywalls — and there's no end in sight. Experts worry that the deployment of 5G over the next few years will worsen the digital divide and have a lasting impact on how rural communities will be able to access quality news and information.

A new report from Cisco forecasts an alarmingly slow internet traffic growth rate for Latin America, especially when compared to the other lagging regions, like the Middle East and Africa. When it comes to internet speed, Latin America is far behind all other regions and will continue to lag over the next five years, per the report.

Bots spreading misinformation are using more sophisticated techniques, like going after specific human influencers and targeting misleading information within the first few seconds of it being posted, according to new studies.

President Donald Trump continues to comment on antitrust matters related to media companies he doesn't like, and experts worry the resulting political fray could hinder the Justice Department's ability to independently evaluate mergers. Media companies looking to merge amid an already difficult economic climate now have to consider this reality as a part of their business decisions.