Digital Content

Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook will now start showing users more local news stories in their feeds — the latest in a string of reforms the company has announced in 2018.  “Local news helps build community — both on and offline,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post. “It's an important part of making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is valuable.”

In November 2017, Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform. These fake accounts, known as bots, can help sway advertising audiences and reshape political debates. They can defraud businesses and ruin reputations. Yet their creation and sale fall into a legal gray zone. Despite rising criticism of social media companies and growing scrutiny by elected officials, the trade in fake followers has remained largely opaque.

Congress on Jan 25 published responses from Facebook, Twitter, and Google to questions about how Russian actors used their platforms to spread misinformation before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The responses address issues including whether there is any evidence of collusion between the Russian parties and the Trump campaign, and how Google, a unit of Alphabet, is handling its commercial transactions with a Russian broadcaster that federal intelligence agencies say is a propaganda outlet for the Kremlin.

[Commentary] President Donald Trump is an odd man, and he may turn out to be a one-of-a-kind celebrity president. But his symbiosis with Twitter carries weight as a portent. Compulsive, manipulative and effective, the president’s tweeting heralds a politics of increasing fractiousness, irrationality and risk. You could blame it on one needy, attention-seeking leader. Or you could call it a step into a very unsettling future.

[Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage.]

Google is testing a new tool for people to report and publish local news stories, called Bulletin. A website first spotted online Jan 25 describes Bulletin as “an app for contributing hyperlocal stories about your community, for your community, right from your phone.” It’s designed to make it “effortless” to tell “the stories that aren’t being told” via your smartphone. It’s not just for techie early adopters: “If you are comfortable taking photos or sending messages, you can create a Bulletin story!”, the site says.

Facebook, Twitter and Google outlined their efforts to keep state-sponsored groups from manipulating their platforms and interfering in the US political process. Here are six interesting revelations:

Facebook has won the backing of European Union courts after the European Court of Justice dismissed a potential class action lawsuit from Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems.  The EU’s highest court ruled that Schrems — a dogged campaigner against Facebook’s handling of users’ personal data — could not bring a consumer lawsuit on behalf of 25,000 Facebook users for alleged privacy breaches. Instead, the ECJ said Schrems could only file an individual case against Facebook for allegedly illegally handling data relating to his personal Facebook account in Austria.

Apple’s mobile-app marketplace has boundaries that Apple alone sets. A free network-diagnostic tool called Wehe is supposed to tell if your Internet provider is interfering with certain video apps' traffic, say on YouTube or Netflix, a question on the minds of people who argued for keeping the recently repealed net neutrality regulations designed to prevent providers from slowing or blocking legal content.  Northeastern University computer-science professor David Choffnes had shipped a version of this net-neutrality monitoring tool for Android app months ago without incident.

Tech policy officials from the Obama administration and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as prominent Democrats in Congress, are demanding changes from companies they had long viewed as too important and nimble for regulations.  “Democrats and progressives still strongly feel that there are shared values with Silicon Valley, but there is also a real concern over the industry’s increasingly concentrated wealth and power,” said Daniel Sepulveda, an ambassador and deputy assistant secretary at the State Department for the Obama administration.

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are calling on Twitter and Facebook to launch investigations of potential Russian-linked accounts pushing for the release of a controversial congressional memo. Rep Schiff and Sen Feinstein sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking that they “provide a public report to Congress and the American public by January 26” on the matter.