Op-Ed

[Commentary] While online rights are coming into question, it’s worth considering how those will overlap with offline rights and civic engagement. We need a conversation about data protections, empowering users with their own information, and transparency — ultimately, data rights are now civic rights.While the US still lacks such data standards, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), scheduled to take effect in May, demonstrates a path toward reliable online privacy balanced with transparency. 

[Commentary] If you just look at overall numbers, our population seems to be behaving just like they did in the industrial age – moving to cities where jobs and people are concentrated. Rural areas that lag in broadband connectivity and digital literacy will continue to suffer from these old trends. However, the digital age is young. Its full effects are still to be felt. Remember it took several decades for electricity or the automobile to revolutionize society.

[Commentary] Recently, US District Judge Richard Leon raised the question of whether an arbitration condition would be enough to address the potential harms from the AT&T-Time Warner merger. This proposal would create a mechanism where both sides in a fee dispute concerning Time Warner programming would present a rate to a third-party arbitrator, who would pick the one that was more reasonable. AT&T-Time Warner would not be permitted to take channels off the air and cut the distributor off from its content during the arbitration process.

[Commentary] When they live in remote rural areas, millennials are more likely to reside in a county that has better digital access. The findings could indicate that the digital economy is helping decentralize the economy, not just clustering economic change in the cities that are already the largest. If you just look at overall numbers, our population seems to be behaving just like they did in the industrial age – moving to cities where jobs and people are concentrated.  Rural areas that lag in broadband connectivity and digital literacy will continue to suffer from these old trends.

[Commentary] Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in Washington is a voluntary, one-off reaction to a scandal. It should be the start of the conversation, not the end: Facebook, like every company that collects and stores personal data, must be made permanently accountable to American political and regulatory institutions. Electronic media, social media and other innovations have created new challenges for law enforcement and national security; they have also helped to increase polarization and undermine trust in public institutions, in America and everywhere else.

Sinclair stands alone in its brazen use of the public airwaves to promote an extreme right-wing agenda to advance its business interests. From its hiring practices to its frequent disregard of journalistic values, the company is an unapologetic outlier among TV station owners. At one time, journalists applying for jobs at Sinclair were questioned by the company’s owners about their views on abortion and other hot-button political issues — and turned down if they were “too liberal.” Sinclair’s news website found a way to get around this time-consuming process by hiring as reporters the Repub

[Commentary] Democrats -- and much of the “liberal” media Trump frequently attacks -- continue to obsess over clumsy Russian efforts to interfere with our elections as the challenge of our times to American democracy. But they could pay more attention to this ongoing assault on two of our most precious rights, enshrined in the Constitution and fundamental to the functioning of any free Republic: the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression and the Fifth Amendment’s protections against government taking of private property without due process of law.

[Commentary] If you think Facebook’s “Cambridge Analytica problem” is bad, just wait until Comcast and Verizon are able to do the same thing. Facebook isn’t the only company that amasses troves of data about people and leaves it vulnerable to exploitation and misuse.

[Commentary] The inescapable, overwhelming and disorienting flurry of activity of news, which has become the new normal since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, begs two simple but profound questions: Can democracy survive information overload? And can it survive a president who knows how to use the resulting chaos to dodge democratic accountability?

After examining Russia’s 2014 disinformation campaign in Ukraine, we found that Russian propaganda has very uneven effects. Whether it sways individuals to vote for pro-Russian candidates — or backfires, and makes them less likely to do so — depends on the political predispositions of the target audience.