Washington Post

On Nov 1, Congress released some of the 3,000 Facebook ads and Twitter accounts created by Russian operatives to sway American voters.  These disturbing messages, seen by up to 126 million Americans, raise thorny questions about Silicon Valley’s responsibility for vetting the information it publishes.

Lawmakers on Nov 1 released a trove of ads that Russian operatives bought on Facebook, providing the fullest picture yet of how foreign actors sought to promote Republican Donald Trump, denigrate Democrat Hillary Clinton and divide Americans over some of the nation’s most sensitive social issues. The ads that emerged, a sampling of the 3,000 that Russians bought during the 2016 presidential campaign and its aftermath, demonstrated in words and images a striking ability to mimic American political discourse at its most fractious.

[Commentary] By the time you finish reading this article, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will have made billions of decisions about what you and hundreds of millions of others will see next. Each time you log into a social media platform, its algorithms — sophisticated mathematical models designed by a few thousand engineers in Northern California — decide what information you should consume.

Google will begin using data from billions of credit and debit card transactions — including card numbers, purchase amounts and time stamps — to solve the advertising juggernaut’s long-standing quest to prove that online ads prompt consumers to make purchases in brick-and-mortar stores. The advance, which enables Google to tell retailers how many sales they created through their digital ad campaigns, is a step toward what industry insiders have long described as the “holy grail” of digital advertising. If effective, the program could help persuade marketers to choose Google’s services over the television advertising that still gobbles up the lion’s share of retailers’ ad budgets. “Google — and also Facebook — believe that in order to get digital dollars from advertisers who are still primarily spending on TV, they need to prove that digital works,” said Amit Jain, chief executive of Bridg, a digital advertising startup that matches online to offline behavior.

President Donald Trump asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government, according to current and former officials.

President Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election. Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the President. President Trump sought the assistance of Coats and Rogers after FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee on March 20 that the FBI was investigating “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

Trump’s conversation with Rogers was documented contemporaneously in an internal memo written by a senior NSA official, according to the officials. It is unclear if a similar memo was prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to document Trump’s conversation with Coats. Officials said such memos could be made available to both the special counsel now overseeing the Russia investigation and congressional investigators, who might explore whether Trump sought to impede the FBI’s work.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has struck a deal with Tribune Media to buy dozens of local TV stations. And what Fox News is for cable, Sinclair could become for broadcast: programming with a soupcon — or more — of conservative spin.

Already, Sinclair is the largest owner of local TV stations in the nation. If the $3.9 billion deal gets regulatory approval, Sinclair would have 7 of every 10 Americans in its potential audience. “That’s too much power to repose in one entity,” Michael Copps, who served on the FCC from 2001 to 2012, told me. Sinclair would have 215 stations, including ones in big markets such as Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago, instead of the 173 it has now. There’s no reason to think that the FCC’s new chairman, Ajit Pai, will stand in the way. Already, his commission has reinstated a regulatory loophole — closed under his predecessor, Tom Wheeler — that allows a single corporation to own more stations than the current 39 percent nationwide cap. And Pai has made no secret of his deregulatory fervor. The former Verizon lawyer, an FCC commissioner for five years, is moving quickly. The stakes are high — and not just for Sinclair’s business interests. There’s evidence that when Sinclair takes over, conservative content gets a powerful platform.

[Commentary] The unmistakable lesson of recent years is that the Internet is a double-edged sword. Despite enormous benefits — instant access to huge quantities of information, the proliferation of new forms of businesses, communications and entertainment — it also encourages crime, global conflict and economic disruption.

The drift seems ominous. We are dangerously dependent on Internet-based systems. This makes the Internet a weapon that can be used against us — or by us. The trouble is that we are aiding and abetting our adversaries. We are addicted to the Internet and refuse to recognize how our addiction subtracts from our security. The more we connect our devices and instruments to the Internet, the more we create paths for others to use against us, either by shutting down websites or by controlling what they do. Put differently, we are — incredibly — inviting trouble. Our commercial interests and our national security diverge.

A veteran Washington reporter says he was manhandled by security guards at the Federal Communications Commission, then forced out of the agency’s headquarters as he tried to ask a commissioner questions at a public meeting May 18. John M. Donnelly, a senior writer at CQ Roll Call, said he was trying to talk with FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly one-on-one after a news conference when two plainclothes guards pinned him against a wall with the backs of their bodies. Commissioner O’Rielly saw the encounter but continued walking, Donnelly said in a statement through the National Press Club, where he heads the Press Freedom Team. After Commissioner O’Rielly passed, the statement read, one of the guards asked why Donnelly hadn’t brought up his questions while the commissioner was at the podium. The guard then made him leave the building “under implied threat of force,” the statement read.