Digital Content

Russia’s social-media trolling operation began stepping up its Twitter presence to new heights in late July 2017 -- more than eight months after sowing discord and disinformation in the 2016 presidential election. The burst of activity -- revealed in a new, comprehensive dataset of nearly 3 million tweets -- had an overriding focus over the ensuing three months: popularizing headlines and news stories that were originally authored by a US-based news site called Truthfeed that supports President Donald Trump and specializes in hyper-partisan, factually incorrect stories.

As part of its ongoing Trust, Media and Democracy initiative, the John S. and James L.Knight Foundation partnered with Gallup to ask a representative sample of US adults for their views on the news editorial functions played by major internet companies. From a broad perspective, Americans credit major internet companies for connecting people and helping them become better-informed. At the same time, they are concerned about their role in spreading misinformation and in potentially limiting exposure to different viewpoints.

Sen Mark Warner’s (D-VA) proposals to regulate social media platforms are by far the most ambitious to come from Congress. ProMarket gathered three experts to discuss the pros and cons. Below is the reaction of Beton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn:

Alastair Mactaggart has became the most improbable, and perhaps the most important, privacy activist in America. Almost by accident, though, Mactaggart had thrust himself into the greatest resource grab of the 21st century. To Silicon Valley, personal information had become a kind of limitless natural deposit, formed in the digital ether by ordinary people as they browsed, used apps and messaged their friends.

The way you press, scroll and type on a phone screen or keyboard can be as unique as your fingerprints or facial features. To fight fraud, a growing number of banks and merchants are tracking visitors’ physical movements as they use websites and apps. Some use the technology only to weed out automated attacks and suspicious transactions, but others are going significantly further, amassing tens of millions of profiles that can identify customers by how they touch, hold and tap their devices. The data collection is invisible to those being watched.

Sen. Mark Warner’s proposals to regulate social media platforms are by far the most ambitious to come from Congress.  Here, three experts discuss the pros and cons: 1) Beton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn. She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. 2) Daniel Crane, an antitrust law expert and the Frederick Paul Furth Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. 3) Hal Singer, an antitrust economist and senior fellow of the George Washington Institute of Public Policy.

Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. Many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so. For the most part, Google is upfront about asking permission to use your location information. An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating.

We always assumed technology and the naked transparency of social media would feed people’s taste for freedom and thirst for democracy. Right now, that assumption looks flawed -- technology might actually solidify the standing of despots and provide them with a new way to exert their power. Ian Bremmer — political scientist, president and founder of Eurasia Group, and author of "Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism" — recently unpacked this issue in a letter to clients.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the internet are not media. They are something new we do not yet fully understand. To call these platforms publishers is to presume that their task is merely to produce content. It is to presume, then, that the internet should be produced, packaged, and polished, and that when someone says something bad anywhere on it then the entire internet is beschmutzed. The larger question, of course, is what the internet is and how it fits into society and society into it. We are just beginning to see what it can be.

Apple, Google and Facebook erased from their services many — but not all — videos, podcasts and posts from the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars site. And Twitter left Jones’s posts untouched. The differing approaches to Jones exposed how unevenly tech companies enforce their rules on hate speech and offensive content. There are only a few cases in which the companies appear to consistently apply their policies, such as their ban on child pornography and instances in which the law required them to remove content, like Nazi imagery in Germany.