Vox

Since 2016, everything that social media companies have done has been “either a bizarre idea or not really doing much of anything that’s actually gonna help people,” said Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR). As one of the more tech-savvy members of Congress, he’s a proponent of new legislation that will regulate voting machine companies and data firms such as Cambridge Analytica, but also believes existing laws have given platforms like Twitter more power than they have deigned to use. “I think what the Alex Jones case shows, we’re gonna really be looking at what the consequences are for just leaving comm

Attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia asked a federal court to reinstate network neutrality, saying the Federal Communications Commission failed to properly consider the issues when removing the policy in 2017. In a brief filed Aug 20, the attorneys general argue that the FCC’s decision “will cause [inevitable harms] to consumers, public safety, and existing regulatory schemes” and that the commission “entirely ignored many of these issues” when overturning net neutrality.

Facebook is caught in a secret legal fight with the FBI. The fight, which centers on an alleged MS-13 gang member in Fresno (CA), has been kept out of public court records, but Reuters broke the story on Aug 17. Apparently, prosecutors are looking to listen in on all Messenger voice calls from the target, similar to a conventional phone wiretap. Facebook says it’s impossible to comply because of the service’s end-to-end encryption, and the company is risking contempt charges to prove it.

You can boil Facebook’s election plan down into three main challenges: