Digital Content

We’re announcing the Facebook Journalism Project: Local News Subscriptions Accelerator, a $3 million, three-month pilot program in the United States to help metro newspapers take their digital subscription business to a new level. The Accelerator will work with 10-15 metro news organizations to unlock strategies that help publishers build digital customer acquisitions on and off our platform. Participating publishers will convene in-person once a month, receive coaching from digital subscription experts, and participate in weekly trainings covering a broad array of digital subscriptions mar

Google and Facebook aren’t just incredibly profitable tech companies — they are “public goods” with a responsibility to serve the public, says former President Barack Obama. “I do think the large platforms — Google and Facebook being the most obvious, Twitter and others as well, are part of that ecosystem — have to have a conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a public good as well as a commercial enterprise,” the former president said at MIT’s Sloan Sports Conference. “They’re not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.”

[Commentary] No matter how you look at them, Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences).

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case that could have far-reaching implications for law enforcement access to digital data and for US companies that store customer emails in servers overseas. What began as a challenge by tech giant Microsoft to a routine search warrant for a suspected drug dealer’s emails has become a marquee case over data access in the Internet age. At issue is whether a US company must comply with a court order to turn over emails, even if they are held abroad — in this case in a Dublin server.

That old adage about the revolution not being televised? Rings true. But it might be podcasted. Helmed by former Obama aides—Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor—Pod Save America has become the voice of the Resistance. Once the hosts had the ear of the POTUS; now they've got the earbuds of 1.5 million liberal listeners. Which is why it seems like every ambitious Democrat wants to be booked as a guest on their show.

Five years ago. Nicco Mele warned that technology — particularly social media — was taking power from big institutions and and giving it to individuals. When used for good, he said in his 2013 book “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath,” new technologies could empower individuals, give smaller players a fighting chance and challenge incumbents. But there was also a dark side to the power shift, warned Mele, the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

State and federal emergency responders should have plans ready to go to counter rumors, misinformation and fake news in the wake of disasters, according to a new white paper from a Homeland Security Department advisory group. Those plans should include actively correcting misinformation on Facebook and Twitter with hashtags such as #rumor and #mythbuster, according to the draft report, which the Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee approved for final publication Feb 22.

[Commentary] Which hurts civilization more: no one believing anything, or everyone believing lies? If we fail to take immediate action to protect our news and information ecosystem, we may soon find out. We are careening toward an infocalypse — a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas. So what can we do? In short, we need massive investment across industry, civil society and government, to understand and mitigate threats to our information ecosystems. And we need it now.  As of now, there are a few particularly promising mitigations that deserve immediate consideration:

Twitter will no longer allow people to post identical messages from multiple accounts, cracking down on a tactic that Russian agents and others have allegedly used to make tweets or topics go viral. Twitter will also not allow people to use software to simultaneously perform other actions such as liking or retweeting from multiple accounts. Twitter said it would give users until March 23 to comply before suspending accounts. It made an exception for bots of broad interest such as earthquake alerts.

Conservative Twitter users are speaking out about a loss in followers after Twitter reportedly suspended thousands of accounts. Twitter has yet to announce the purge, but there is speculation that the action was part of the social media giant's effort to get rid of suspected Russian bots. Conservatives say they have been targeted in the purge. Some users are also claiming they were locked out of their accounts. By the morning of Feb 21, the hashtag "#TwitterLockOut" was trending on Twitter.