Free Press

Facebook talks a good game when it comes to fighting for racial justice and protecting human rights. Mark Zuckerberg has made important symbolic statements in support of the Movement for Black Lives, including putting up a giant Black Lives Matter sign at Facebook headquarters. But Facebook often fails to live up to this kind of rhetoric — and that has dangerous consequences for people of color.

The company has a habit of removing documentation of human-rights abuses at the request of law enforcement and government agencies. This came up most recently in the case of Korryn Gaines: At law enforcement’s request, Facebook deactivated Gaines’ livestream of an encounter with Baltimore police that left her dead and her young son wounded. There have also been numerous other reports of Facebook censoring content from Black and indigenous activists; it’s also disabled the accounts of Palestinian journalists. By removing these kinds of recordings and documentation, Facebook is stifling activism and allowing law enforcement and government agencies to control the narrative on a platform that plays an increasingly important role in breaking news. It’s time for Facebook to make a conscious choice to change its policies and live up to the values it espouses.

Oct 27 marks the one-year anniversary of the “We the People” petition calling on the Obama Administration to publicly affirm its support for strong encryption. The petition platform, which is run by the White House itself, promises a substantive response within 60 days if petitioners can garner 100,000 signatures within 30 days. This is no easy lift, but with the support of nearly 50 organizations, the petition reached its goal last October.

Disappointingly, the White House has stayed silent and failed to hold up its end of the deal. Today Free Press joined a broad coalition of organizations calling on the administration to fulfill its promise, and explaining that while the president has remained silent over the past 365 days, misguided and dangerous efforts to undermine encryption have escalated.

AT&T is an enormous media, telecom and Internet gatekeeper with a horrible track record of overcharging you, limiting your choices and spying on you. It’s still fighting Net Neutrality. It helps the government spy on people by turning over its customer records to the National Security Agency. It tries to stop communities from building their own broadband networks. It’s a member of ALEC, the corporate-backed lobbying group that's pushed legislation like pro-fracking, voter-suppression and “stand your ground” bills that disproportionately harm people of color. And now AT&T wants to get even bigger.

This merger would create a media powerhouse unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. AT&T would control mobile and wired Internet access, cable channels, movie franchises, a film studio and more. That means AT&T would control Internet access for hundreds of millions of people and the content they view, enabling it to prioritize its own offerings and use sneaky tricks to undermine Net Neutrality. This merger would give one bad company way too much power. Massive mergers like this — and the billions of dollars they waste — never work out for the rest of us. Urge policymakers to block this deal.

Color Of Change and Free Press joined a group of civil rights and racial justice advocacy organizations supporting the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to adopt strong privacy safeguards for Internet users. “Throughout our nation’s history, the privacy rights of communities of color have too often gone unprotected,” reads the coalition letter. “Information about our communities has been used to target, exploit and harm the people who live in them.”

In the digital age, these harms are amplified by the speed and stealth with which the collection of information takes place. Internet service providers have a nearly unencumbered view of what people do online. They can track the websites we visit, the messages we send, even our physical location if we’re using mobile devices. Such a detailed view reveals such sensitive information as a person’s race and ethnicity, religious and political views — even address and income level. While privacy is important to everyone in the United States, it’s vital to those communities who are most often exploited via predatory marketing schemes. The FCC should move forward with its proposal and adopt the strongest online safeguards for these communities.

[Commentary] “Predictive policing” sounds good on paper. After all, what could go wrong with a data-based approach to law enforcement? It turns out: plenty. That’s why Free Press joined a broad coalition of civil rights, privacy and technology groups in sounding the alarm about how predictive policing reinforces racial bias. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights mobilized the coalition, which counts the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, Color Of Change and the NAACP among the 17 signers. The statement released last Wednesday notes that “the data driving predictive enforcement activities — such as the location and timing of previously reported crimes, or patterns of community- and officer-initiated 911 calls — is profoundly limited and biased.” Indeed, a damning report from the tech consulting group Upturn, which surveyed the nation’s 50 largest police forces, confirms this view. Upturn found “little evidence” that predictive policing works — and “significant reason to fear that [it] may reinforce disproportionate and discriminatory policing practices.”

While the idea of using data to direct police resources sounds like an effort to remove human bias from the equation, that isn’t how it works in practice. In fact, predictive policing embeds police bias in an algorithm that then has the appearance of being neutral. The police response to low-income communities — in particular communities of color — is completely different from the response to wealthy white communities.

[Commentary] A key takeaway from the Alliance for Community Media’s recent conference in Boston (MA): Community media can and must help fill the gaps in local news coverage that are growing across the country thanks to rampant consolidation and newsroom cutbacks. Community media is an umbrella term that refers to noncommercial media that isn’t part of NPR or PBS. ACM is an organization composed primarily of public access, education and government (PEG) TV channels available on cable television, along with the digital media centers and training programs such stations offer. There are more than 3,000 community media outlets in the US, and they’re diverse in terms of the resources they have, the programming they produce, the way they’re organized, and the scale at which they operate. What they have in common is that we need them more than ever.

These requests for en banc review are sour grapes from industry dead-enders who are determined to dismantle the FCC’s successful Net Neutrality rules in spite of their many failed attempts to do so. The D.C. Circuit was abundantly clear when it upheld the FCC last month. The court found that the FCC had acted on its well-defined authority to prevent internet service providers from unfairly interfering with our communications. The D.C. Circuit deferred to the FCC’s determination that its authority to do so stands on bedrock communications law. And the judges recognized the vital role the open internet plays in our society. The broadband industry has been doing just fine since the FCC adopted the Open Internet Order a year and a half ago. Not one of the industry’s doom-and-gloom predictions has come true. The order didn’t dampen investment or revenues for broadband providers, and internet users have added confidence that their rights to connect and communicate are protected. Last-ditch efforts like these petitions are unlikely to succeed. Big phone and cable companies obviously have plenty of money to waste on high-priced lawyers. But they should give up their foolish quest to overturn rules that benefit internet users.

The Federal Communications Commission took a highly touted step toward the future of wireless communications by opening up huge blocks of spectrum for “5G” broadband uses. (5G stands for “5th Generation” technology, a generic term for the evolution to follow today’s 4G smartphones.) These next-generation networks promise to be faster, denser and more robust than what we have today. They could help usher in an era of innovative services and applications such as self-driving cars and smart-city technology. 5G technologies are still in the testing phase, but the FCC’s decision makes room for early deployment efforts that could offer enormous benefits to the national economy. Unfortunately, as advocates for Internet users point out, the FCC’s decision is by no means perfect. It doesn’t do enough to guarantee that shared use of spectrum — think Wi-Fi — will be a big part of the 5G equation. Giving exclusive use of these frequencies to carriers like AT&T and Verizon would strengthen their stranglehold on valuable spectrum assets, and it could prevent these new technologies from flowing to everyone, especially those who are on the wrong side of the digital divide: rural residents, low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Nonetheless, everyone agrees that the technological advances are crucial, even if there’s debate about how to make those leaps forward.

Free Press filed a “Petition to Deny” the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

The Petition, submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, presents a definitive account of how the merger fails both the public interest and the antitrust tests required for regulatory approval. The merger would create a telecommunications and pay-TV entity of unprecedented size and scope, reaching into six out of every 10 US homes and controlling nearly half of the current advanced broadband service subscribers. Its control over high-speed Internet services would eclipse the power once held by the monopoly Bell system.

Comcast’s resulting nationwide market reach and power would lead to direct consumer harms such as higher prices and fewer choices among competitors. The merged entity "would immediately control half of the nation’s bundled Internet access and pay-TV customers, a share that would quickly grow as DSL continues its now-accelerated decline into irrelevancy" according to the Free Press Petition. Moreover, mobile, fixed LTE and satellite broadband should not be considered competitive alternatives to Comcast's wired services -- at a time when more and more consumers are seeking higher bandwidth options.

[Commentary] For years a lineup of phone and cable industry spokespeople has called network neutrality “a solution in search of a problem.” In reality, many providers both in the US and abroad have a history of violating the principles of network neutrality -- and they plan to continue doing so in the future.