Atlantic, The

Thus far, much of the post-election discussion of social-media companies has focused on algorithms and automated mechanisms that are often assumed to undergird most content-dissemination processes online. But algorithms are not the whole story. In fact, there is a profound human aspect to this work. I call it commercial content moderation, or CCM.

When you cross into or out of the United States, whether in a car or at an airport, you enter a special zone where federal agents have unusual powers to search your belongings—powers they don’t have elsewhere in the country. The high standard set by the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches, is lowered, and the Fifth Amendment, which guards against self-incrimination and prevents the government from demanding computer passwords or smartphone PINs, is rendered less effective. The rules around what information can be retained after Customs and Border Protection inspections—and for how long—aren’t entirely clear-cut.

[Commentary] “I love the First Amendment,” President Trump told the CPAC crowd. “Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.” “I mean, who uses it more than I do?” he added. He uses it all right, but to what end? Freedom of the press is not an institutional right, it’s a Constitutional one. It belongs to all American people—to you, and to me, and to Donald Trump. And no matter what the president says, no matter who he calls fake, the best journalists will be doing what they must. They’ll be reporting. Fearlessly, fairly, truthfully, and relentlessly.

Civil conversation in the comment sections of news sites can be hard to come by these days. Whatever intelligent observations do lurk there are often drowned out by obscenities, ad-hominem attacks, and off-topic rants. Some sites, like the one you’re reading, hide the comments section behind a link at the bottom of each article; many others have abolished theirs completely. For those outlets who can’t hire 14 full-time moderators to comb through roughly 11,000 comments a day, help is on the way. Jigsaw, the Google-owned technology incubator, released a tool that uses machine-learning algorithms to separate out the worst comments that people leave online.

The tool, called Perspective, learned from the best: It analyzed the Times moderators’ decisions as they triaged reader comments, and used that data to train itself to identify harmful speech. The training materials also included hundreds of thousands of comments on Wikipedia, evaluated by thousands of different moderators.

[Commentary] The relationship between the government and the press should be adversarial, as their missions are often at odds. As those seeking to downplay the current confrontation have rightly pointed out, this has resulted in a power struggle between that is as old as the Republic itself. But Trump’s relationship with the media represents something new and potentially dangerous to both. He is the first President to publicly question the place of the media in American society itself And his branding of the press as an "enemy" seems less an attempt to influence coverage than an invitation to repression and even violence. The level of antipathy or collegiality between the government and the press has always moved in cycles of confrontation and detente.

First, his assault on the press seems calculated not to influence coverage, but to destroy the credibility of the media so he can usurp the its traditional role as the arbiter of facts on which policy decisions are based.
Second, Trump chose a phrase ("enemies of the people") replete with ominous historical resonance in other societies as a prelude to violence.
Third, while every one of our previous Presidents may have criticized particular reporters...they never publicly questioned the press as an institution.

[Jon Finer was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State John Kerry and Director of Policy Planning at the State Department]

It’s not that Mark Zuckerberg set out to dismantle the news business when he founded Facebook 13 years ago. Yet news organizations are perhaps the biggest casualty of the world Zuckerberg built. There’s reason to believe things are going to get worse.

A sprawling new manifesto by Zuckerberg, published to Facebook on Feb 16, should set off new alarm bells for journalists, and heighten news organizations’ sense of urgency about how they—and their industry—can survive in a Facebook-dominated world. Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

A US-born scientist was detained at the Houston (TX) airport until he gave customs agents the passcode to his work-issued device.

Less than a month before he was elected president, Donald Trump promised to make cybersecurity “an immediate and top priority for my administration.” He had talked about technology often on the campaign trail—mostly to attack Hillary Clinton for using a private e-mail server when she was Secretary of State. But less than two weeks into his presidency, it’s Trump and his team who have struggled to plug important security holes, some of which are reminiscent of Clinton’s troubles. Rather than sparking an uproar, the problems have largely been buried the by other changes and crises of the Trump administration’s first days. But even without the distracting firehose of executive orders, announcements, and tweets, half of America wouldn’t blink at the new president’s computer-security shortcomings. That’s because cybersecurity, like just about everything else, has become burdened with political baggage.

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan 27 issuing a temporary ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, it went into effect immediately. The order had immediate consequences for thousands of people. But beyond harming long-term US residents, their families, their education, and their work, the executive order could cause long-lasting shockwaves in the business world—and especially in the technology sector.

Computer-related jobs are the top source of new wages in the US, according to analyses from Code.org, a nonprofit organization that advocates for more access to computer-science education. But there aren’t enough skilled American workers to fill open tech jobs in the US: There are more than 500,000 open computing jobs, but only about 43,000 Americans graduate from college with computer-science degrees every year. That’s a problem that H-1B visas—non-immigrant visas that allow high-skilled foreign workers to be employed, temporarily, by American companies—are designed to solve. A forthcoming executive order will likely change the rules to make it harder for companies to grant foreign workers H-1B visas.

Questioning a sitting president’s truthfulness and actually using the words “lie,” “lied,” or “lying” has often been relegated to the opinion pages, editorials, or put in quotation marks: Let somebody else suggest the chief executive is lying about Yalta, or Cuba, or Vietnam, or trading arms for hostages, or “no new taxes,” or sexual relations with that woman, or weapons of mass destruction. This is the stuff of standard journalistic fairness. The standard, however, is coming under pressure. Not just by the bombastic new president of the United States and his famous tendency to exaggerate, but by that president’s embrace of new-age publishing technology and his over-the-top disdain for journalism at a frenetic moment for the media industry.

Newsrooms have wrestled with how to characterize the misinformation Donald Trump spreads since the presidential campaign, when his eyebrow-raising statements tended more toward “pants on fire” than true, according to at least one fact-checking site. This challenge is only intensifying with Trump in the Oval Office, and backed by an administration eager to provide “alternative facts” when the actual facts don’t flatter the president.