Wall Street Journal

The world’s biggest social-media companies, under fire for failing to police content on their sites, have invited an array of outside groups to help them figure out who should be banned and what’s considered unacceptable. That solution is creating a new set of problems—public fights, complaints and legal battles. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have made a concerted push to seek out input from hundreds of groups, a growing number of which lean to the right. The companies have become receptive to behind-the-scenes lobbying as well.

Some residents and businesses in rural America face a perplexing problem: They know people are trying to call their phones and sometimes failing, but they don’t know why. Landline customers have logged hundreds of complaints with the Federal Communications Commission in recent years about calls that don’t reach them. When a call is dropped, the caller hears a phone ringing endlessly or gets dead air. Telecom experts say the failed calls are most often bound for landlines served by small rural phone companies, though the calls’ origin can be a cellphone, office line or automated system.

Two years after a congressional report labeled Huawei Technologies Co a national-security threat, the Chinese firm unexpectedly scored a big-name ally in Washington. It was the Redskins, the capital’s National Football League franchise. Huawei reached an agreement in 2014 to beam Wi-Fi through the suites at the team’s FedEx Field, in exchange for advertising in the stadium and during broadcasts. It was a marketing coup for a company hankering to beef up its meager US business and boost its image inside the Beltway. But the deal didn’t last long.

After more than a year of research and discussion, Facebook late in the summer of  2018 shelved a project called “Common Ground” that tried to encourage users with different political beliefs to interact in less-hostile ways. One reason: fears the proposed fix could trigger claims of bias against conservatives, apparently.  The objections were raised by Joel Kaplan, a former White House aide to George W.