Digital Content

Both companies have long preferred to be vague on the details of their arrangement in which Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on its Safari internet browser. Some $4 billion a year is the most conservative view among analysts who have taken a stab at estimating these payments.

Democratic group Priorities USA is trying to improve the way Democrats compete digitally in elections. In addition to spending about $50 million on digital ads this cycle, the group ran experiments behind the scenes to create a new playbook for liberal groups as they rush to catch up with GOP advantages online. The goal was to bridge the gap with Republican campaigns, which have spent a higher percentage of their election money online in recent cycles.

At a broad level, 58% of Americans feel that computer programs will always reflect some level of human bias – although 40% think these programs can be designed in a way that is bias-free. And in various contexts, the public worries that these tools might violate privacy, fail to capture the nuance of complex situations, or simply put the people they are evaluating in an unfair situation. Public perceptions of algorithmic decision-making are also often highly contextual.

Facebook said it had removed more than a billion fake accounts and taken action against millions of posts, photos and other forms of content that violated its prohibition against hate speech, terrorist propaganda and child exploitation, the latest sign that the social-networking giant faces an onslaught of online abuse as it builds tools to spot it.

Facebook will create an independent oversight body to adjudicate appeals on content moderation issues, the company said. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the group, which will be formed in the next year, will attempt to balance an effort to expand the right to free speech with the need to keep people safe around the world. “I believe independence is important for a few reasons,” Zuckerberg said in a note posted to Facebook. “First, it will prevent the concentration of too much decision-making within our teams. Second, it will create accountability and oversight.

Wall Street analysts are doing data differently. Banks for years have crunched data on company earnings, price targets and other mundane metrics for clients who might use the information to make investing and trading decisions. Now they are pulling data from social-media sentiment, geospatial mapping and other unorthodox sources. They are also increasingly making their data feeds available directly to clients, without the surrounding research notes that often go unread.

A majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups are YouTube adopters, with younger Americans standing out as especially avid users of the site. A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that these users are turning to YouTube for much more than entertainment. Roughly half of YouTube users say the platform is very important for helping them figure out how to do things they’ve never done before. That works out to 35% of all U.S. adults, once both users and non-users of the site are accounted for.

Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage, and even on liberal outlets like MSNBC, and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right?

The web was designed to bring people together and make knowledge freely available. Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. By committing to the following principles, governments, companies and citizens around the world can help protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.

Governments Will

Ensure everyone can connect to the internet so that anyone, no matter who they are or where they live, can participate actively online.