Digital Content

Within its digital borders, China has long censored what its people read and say online. Now, it is increasingly going beyond its own online realms to police what people and companies are saying about it all over the world. For years, China has exerted digital control with a system of internet filters known as the Great Firewall, which allows authorities to limit what people see online. To broaden its censorship efforts, Beijing is venturing outside the Great Firewall and paying more attention to what its citizens are saying on non-Chinese apps and services.

The Kremlin’s political warfare against democratic countries has evolved from overt to covert influence activities. But while Russia has pioneered the toolkit of asymmetric measures for the 21st century, including cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, these tools are already yesterday’s game. Technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and machine learning, combined with the growing availability of big data, have set the stage for a new era of sophisticated, inexpensive, and highly impactful political warfare.

At a time when the US Congress seems paralyzed by partisanship — and either too reluctant or distracted to take on Silicon Valley’s most powerful players — Maryland is among a growing roster of states trying to remedy some of the most pressing ills of the digital age. Along with Maryland, leaders from New York to Washington state have pitched new bills that would make more information about online political ads available to local voters.

Twitter has asked for help in tackling the rampant harassment, bots, misinformation and polarisation in a more strategic way so that it can improve the “health” of conversation on the platform, said the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey.

The social media landscape in early 2018 is defined by a mix of long-standing trends and newly emerging narratives. Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day.

Governments around the world are finding that the old ways of ensuring national security, conducting law enforcement operations, and protecting the privacy rights of their citizens are being challenged by a medium that does not conform to borders or existing legal regimes. Indeed, the Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network’s three workstreams hit at the heart of these challenges.

The Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement with PayPal over allegations that the company told users of its Venmo peer-to-peer payment service that money credited to their Venmo balances could be transferred to external bank accounts without adequately disclosing that the transactions were still subject to review and that funds could be frozen or removed. In its complaint, the FTC also charges that Venmo misled consumers about the extent to which they could control the privacy of their transactions.

Multisided platforms are ubiquitous in today’s economy. Although newspapers demonstrate that the platform business model is scarcely new, recent economic analysis has explored more deeply the manner of its operation. Drawing upon these insights, we conclude that enforcers and courts should use a multiple-markets approach in which different groups of users on different sides of a platform belong in different product markets. This approach appropriately accounts for cross-market network effects without collapsing all of a platform’s users into a single product market.

[Commentary] While the academic jury is still out on whether a person getting their news from social media makes them any more or less partisan than those who sought out right-wing talk radio or lefty political journals a generation ago, there exists another filter bubble that, while it’s received relatively little public attention, affects the majority of people reading this article: The average producer of online content is far more internet-savvy than the average consumer of online content.  While it’s always been expected that journalists and intellectuals be more knowledgeable about th

House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) launched an attack on the market power of large tech companies. "I’m not looking for a lot of regulation, I’m looking for responsibility," Chairman Walden said. "If responsibility doesn’t flow, then regulation will." Chairman Walden raised multiple areas for possible regulation: