Digital Content

The News Media Alliance, which represents the newspaper industry, laid out a potential antitrust case against its foes, Google and Facebook, in comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission. The organization outlined legal considerations — including non-price harm to consumers, such as the newspaper industry’s ability to sustain journalism — and explained “how they connect to a potential antitrust case against one or more platforms.” 

The European Commission is drafting new rules designed to rid social media platforms of terrorist content after concluding that a voluntary program wasn't working. It had previously asked tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google, to remove terrorist propaganda within an hour. "With regards to terrorist content, the results have been positive but progress is not sufficient," said a spokesperson for the Commission.

Facebook is caught in a secret legal fight with the FBI. The fight, which centers on an alleged MS-13 gang member in Fresno (CA), has been kept out of public court records, but Reuters broke the story on Aug 17. Apparently, prosecutors are looking to listen in on all Messenger voice calls from the target, similar to a conventional phone wiretap. Facebook says it’s impossible to comply because of the service’s end-to-end encryption, and the company is risking contempt charges to prove it.

As her husband continued to rip into his adversaries on Twitter, first lady Melania Trump warned that social media can be used in a “destructive and harmful” manner during remarks at a conference on preventing cyberbullying. “In today’s global society, social media is an inevitable part of our children’s daily lives,” the first lady said.

In 2018, a federal judge signed a search warrant for a windfall of private information to help find the robber responsible for a string of crimes in southern Maine. Authorities were seeking a large amount of sensitive user data — including names, addresses and locations — of anyone who had been in the vicinity of at least two of the nine robbery locations, within 30 minutes of the crime.

President Trump said that conservative voices were being unfairly censored on social media, hinting that he might intervene if his allies’ accounts continued to be shut down. “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,” President Trump wrote on Twitter, saying that “censorship is a very dangerous thing.” “Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen,” he added.

Once silent on InfoWars, the controversial media outlet that publishes viral conspiracy theories, consumer-facing media companies like YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Apple, and Twitter have pulled an about-face in recent weeks, cutting ties with the website and its owner Alex Jones. The result: The ability for Jones and InfoWars to reach viewers with videos, listeners with podcasts, and followers with posts appears to have been severely curtailed. But Jones doesn’t need these companies to reach the InfoWars audience.

Housing Sec Ben Carson accused Facebook of enabling illegal housing discrimination by giving landlords and developers advertising tools that made it easy to exclude people based on race, gender, zip code or religion -- or whether a potential renter has young children at home or a personal disability. The action, which comes after nearly two years of preliminary investigation, amounts to a formal legal complaint against the company and starts a process that could culminate in a federal lawsuit against Facebook.

[Commentary] Millions of Americans use social media to get their news, and that number is growing rapidly by the year. But when they log on, they don’t always get the full story. Powerful social media companies are filtering the information that users receive on their platforms. As a result, the picture we get of politics is partial and distorted, like a carnival mirror. Twitter’s subtle censorship targeted conservatives, and seemingly only conservatives.

You can boil Facebook’s election plan down into three main challenges: