Op-Ed

[Commentary] Those who look at Washington and see only gridlock and bickering should look to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as an exception. By implementing improved transparency and review processes in the past months, the FCC has achieved far more transparency than ever before. A shining example of improved transparency at the Commission is the current review of regulations that are hindering innovation and investment through policies tethered to the past.

[Commentary] President Donald Trump’s appetite for shutting down the free press is a reminder of his open admiration for strong men dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. Those strongmen limit the freedom of the press and, in some cases, kill and jail journalists.

[Commentary]  In order to preserve our political democracy, which elevates the most popular among us (though perhaps not the finest) to power, we’ll seemingly abandon a total democracy of thought, which does the same for ideas. You can judge a people by how much freedom they can tolerate without destroying themselves. It seems the power for anyone to go viral and attain a global audience, through articulate reasoning or just clickbait-y libel, was a just bit too much freedom for us to bear.

[Commentary] In this age of “new” censorship and blunt manipulation of political speech, where is the First Amendment? Americans like to think of it as the great protector of the press and of public debate. Yet it seems to have become a bit player, confined to a narrow and often irrelevant role. It is time to ask: Is the First Amendment obsolete? If so, what can be done? These questions arise because the jurisprudence of the First Amendment was written for a different set of problems in a very different world.

[Commentary] If we want to reduce the dangers of political ignorance and deception, we should focus less on the details of technology and more on the structure of incentives we have created for voters and political elites. The painful truth about online fake news is that it is just a new symptom of a longstanding problem.

[Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University.]

[Commentary] It is this committee’s mission to protect consumers, and in the coming months, we will be taking a more expansive look at the online experience to ensure safety, security, and an unfiltered flow of information. Recently, the Equifax data breach compromised the personal information of 145 million Americans, including social security numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, and more. This committee held a hearing on the breach and will continue to deeply scrutinize the staggering amount of personal information changing hands online and the business practices surrounding those transactions.

My colleagues and I will hold a separate hearing to assess identity verification practices, and determine whether they can be improved to protect personal data on the web even after a consumer’s information has been breached. These hearings are just the start of a long-term, thoughtful, and research-focused approach to better illuminate how Americans’ data is being used online, how to ensure that data is safe, and how information is being filtered to consumers over the web. While technology is responsible for a lot of positive change in our world, malignant behavior online can have consequences that are not fully disclosed to the American people.

[Commentary] One of the biggest cases for the US Supreme Court’s current term could mark a watershed moment for the Fourth Amendment. In Carpenter v. United States, the court will consider whether police need probable cause to get a search warrant to access cell site location information (CSLI), data that's automatically generated whenever a mobile phone connects to a cell tower. Not only does this case offer a chance to protect privacy rights for cell phones, Carpenter also provides an opportunity to reevaluate an antiquated legal theory, called the third-party doctrine, that underpins many government surveillance programs.

If the Supreme Court rules that CSLI falls outside the Fourth Amendment, warrantless searches will inevitably lead to wrongful seizures.

[Nick Sibilla is a legislative analyst at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm.]

[Commentary] It struck me after a number of casual conversations with local Republicans over the past few weeks that they seldom mentioned the Democrats when discussing President Trump’s adversaries. Almost all conversations about roadblocks President Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance. If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. We are at a dangerous precipice in how Americans receive and digest information and, ultimately, form opinions. The influence of social-media feeds, which — through user choice or outside meddling — provide only a narrow flow of information, makes the credibility of news organizations more imperative than ever.

President Trump and the Republicans will survive the media’s resistance, and perhaps even flourish. The bigger question is, can the media survive on this path? Perhaps, but not in its traditional role. Instead, it will be viewed as just another partisan special interest.

[Gary Abernathy is publisher and editor of the (Hillsboro, Ohio) Times-Gazette.]

In so many ways, the underlying conditions of US democracy need repair. Among American citizens, ideological and philosophical divisions seem insurmountably sharp; among their representatives in Washington, compromise appears impossible. Whatever side you were on in last year’s election, it’s clear that the campaign brought these problems dramatically to the surface of our national life; it’s also clear that these challenges would have been with us, in equal measure, no matter who won. And so, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the election, we asked dozens of writers and artists to look beyond the day-to-day upheavals of the news cycle and propose one idea that could help fix the long-term problems bedeviling American democracy. The result: 38 conservative, liberal, practical, creative, broad, specific, technocratic, provocative solutions for an unsettled country.

[Commentary] Soon, a new law against hate speech will go into effect in Germany, fining Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies up to €50 million if they fail to take down illegal content from their sites within 24 hours of being notified. For more ambiguous content, companies will have seven days to decide whether to block the posts. The rule is Germany’s attempt to fight hate speech and fake news, both of which have risen online since the arrival of more than a million refugees in the last two years. Germany isn’t alone in its determination to crack down on these kinds of posts. For the past year, most of Europe has been in an intense and fascinating debate about how to regulate, who should regulate, and even whether to regulate illegal and defamatory online content.

Unlike the US, where we rely on corporate efforts to tackle the problems of fake news and disinformation online, the European Commission and some national governments are wading into the murky waters of free speech, working to come up with viable ways to stop election-meddling and the violence that has resulted from false news reports.

[Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media and Communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.]