Digital Content

The European Parliament voted on changes to the Copyright Directive, a piece of legislation intended to update copyright for the internet age. MEPs approved amended versions of the directive’s most controversial provisions: Articles 11 and 13, dubbed by critics as the “link tax” and “upload filter.” Article 11 is intended to give publishers and newspapers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories, while Article 13 requires platforms like YouTube and Facebook to scan uploaded content to stop the unlicensed sharing of copyrighted material.

Facebook  gave a "false rating" to an article after the Weekly Standard, a conservative publication used by Facebook as a fact checker, claimed the article was incorrect. The article in question, published by ThinkProgress, was titled, "Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v.

About two-thirds of American adults (68%) say they at least occasionally get news on social media, about the same share as at this time in 2017, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Many of these consumers, however, are skeptical of the information they see there: A majority (57%) say they expect the news they see on social media to be largely inaccurate. Still, most social media news consumers say getting news this way has made little difference in their understanding of current events, and more say it has helped than confused them (36% compared with 15%).

This survey is the second wave of an ongoing study tracking social media use among American teenagers: how often they use social media such as Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook; their attitudes about social media’s role in their lives; experiences they have on social media; and how social media makes them feel. As such, it offers a unique opportunity to observe changes in social media use over time, and to deepen our understanding of the role of social media in teens’ lives. Some key findings:

Google will appeal an order to extend the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” to its search engines across the globe, arguing before the EU’s top court that the order encourages countries to assert sovereignty beyond their borders. National laws used to stop at the border. In cyberspace, they increasingly stretch around the world, as regulators in Europe, the US and Canada have started asserting legal authority over the internet across country lines.

In one particularly revealing line of questioning during the Sept 5 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg how Facebook makes money and whether the company’s hate-speech policies are truly aimed to protect vulnerable communities that are often the subject of prejudice and animus. Her point was that there’s a real question as to whether Facebook, a company whose first responsibility is to its shareholders, is adequately poised to address false news, hate speech, or any other harmful—and highly engaging—content that users generate.

On September 5, 2018, lawmakers on Capitol Hill hosted two hearings with the heads of Facebook and Twitter. In the morning, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the hearing on Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms.

The most powerful false-news weapon in history is around the corner. The media industry has only a short time to get ahead of it. If technology continues its current advance, we may soon face totally convincing videos showing events that never happened — created so effectively that even experts will have trouble proving they’re fakes. “Deep fake” video will be able to show people saying, with the authentic ring of their own voices, things they never said. It will show them doing things they never did, by melding their images with other video or creating new images of them from scratch.

Racist and anti-Semitic content has surged on shadowy social media platforms — spiking around President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day and the “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville (VA) — spreading hate speech and extremist views to mainstream audiences, according to a recent analysis. The findings, from a newly formed group of scientists named the Network Contagion Research Institute who studied hundreds of millions of social media messages, bolster a growing body of evidence about how extremist speech online can be fueled by real-world events.

At a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, senators had no shortage of complaints for Facebook and Twitter. They decried the platforms’ vulnerability to foreign influence, their arcane handling of user data, and the perception that they buried conservative voices. Congress wanted to send a signal that Silicon Valley would no longer get a free pass — and that the laissez faire environment that has allowed them to reap billions in profits despite the vitriolic culture that social media has engendered was not guaranteed to last.