Vox

On October 19th of 2017, a just-barely bipartisan group of senators held a press conference to announce a new piece of legislation. The Honest Ads Act, as the bill is called, would require Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms to retain copies of the political ads they host and make them available for public inspection. Platforms would have to release information about who bought the ads, how much they cost, and to whom the ads were targeted. Anyone who spent more than $500 on political ads would be subject to public scrutiny.

As many as 14 million Facebook users who thought they were posting items that only their friends or smaller groups could see may have been posting that content publicly, the company said. According to Facebook, a software bug, which was live for 10 days in May, updated the audience for some user’s posts to “public” without any warning. Facebook typically lets users set the audiences who get to see posts; that setting is “sticky,” which means it remains the default setting until manually updated.

On June 5, President Donald Trump tweeted an unfounded conspiracy theory that originated in some of the internet’s worst “fake news” corners. “Strzok-Page, the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers, have texts referring to a counter-intelligence operation into the Trump Campaign dating way back to December, 2015,” the president wrote. “SPYGATE is in full force!” The supposed source for this claim is text messages between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair during the 2016 campaign.

For years, Facebook has argued that it’s a platform: An unbiased technology service for all ideas, brands, media companies and people to distribute their work. That’s not really the case, argues Ben Thompson, the founder of the influential tech newsletter Stratechery. Thompson argued that Facebook and Google, two well-known “platforms,” are actually more like aggregators, an important distinction.

A Q&A with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. 

If politicians in the US make the mistake of over-regulating big tech, Chinese competitors could easily take over the market, according to Sen Mark Warner (D-VA). When asked if tech giants should be broken up under antitrust laws, Sen Warner said regulators need to be careful not to be too “heavy-handed” because breaking up those companies could create an opening for Chinese competitors.