Digital Content

Not long after several of the country’s biggest tech firms — Apple, Facebook and Google — kicked the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones off their various online platforms, Jones’s allies complained that he had been deprived of his First Amendment rights to free speech. Several scholars of free speech had already concluded that many of the things he has said online were not in fact protected by the First Amendment. 

A group of First Amendment advocates has urged Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to change the social media giant’s platform rules to enable public service journalism and research on its platform. The issue is especially pressing as reporters and researchers investigate Russian interference in the midterm elections through platforms such as Facebook’s.

Because the stakes are so high, we need to look with extreme skepticism at proposals primarily designed to prop up the current consolidated and dysfunctional media landscape. If we want to address the very real problems created by a dysfunctional media, we need to separate which of these problems can properly be attributed to dominant platforms and which to structural problems in the traditional news industry.

The Chinese government certainly has the ability to pursue an online political disinformation campaign directed at foreign elections — but hasn’t yet because it favors long-term thinking over Russia’s scorched-earth foreign policy, experts said. Researchers note that China could turn its sights on the US if it wanted to. “The question for me and some other researchers is: will they make that jump more aggressively to the English language space in the more heavy-handed manipulation sense?

An explosion of new digital options for kids' entertainment has pulled children's attention away from live TV to instant, on-demand programming, bringing with it new challenges for producers, policymakers and parents. TV networks are trying to modernize in order to keep up with kids' viewing habits. And a recent Federal Communications Commission proposal would relax kids' TV rules to let traditional broadcasters compete with digital channels, like Netflix, Amazon or YouTube, that do not have to follow those rules.

Left-leaning political activists accused Facebook of suppressing free speech when the social media giant removed an event listing that it said was part of a new disinformation campaign with ties to Russia.Facebook said it had to act quickly to disclose that inauthentic operators were behind an upcoming event in Washington (DC) to counter a white supremacist rally inspired by Charlottesville.

Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official. Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese gov

Apple has come under fire by Chinese state media, which claims the company isn’t doing enough to block texts and images trafficking in prohibited content including pornography, gambling, and counterfeit goods. China’s state-controlled news agency Xinhua and at least four state-supported media outlets have published criticisms of Apple for not doing enough to filter banned content on its iMessage service.

Facebook has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections. The company detected and removed more than 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference.