Digital Content

According to Facebook, during the 2016 election, President Donald Trump’s campaign actually paid higher rates to advertise on the platform overall than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. But, Facebook's chart does not show what the Clinton and Trump campaigns would have paid for an apples-to-apples ad buy.

Supreme Court justices wrestled with Microsoft’s dispute with the US Justice Department over whether prosecutors can force technology companies to hand over data stored overseas, with some signaling support for the government and others urging Congress to pass a law to resolve the issue. Microsoft argues that laws have not caught up to modern computing infrastructure and it should not hand over data stored internationally. The Justice Department argues that refusing to turn over easily accessible data impedes criminal investigations.

A businessman who has launched a legal bid to erase online articles about his criminal conviction in the first “right to be forgotten” case in the English courts should not be allowed to rewrite history, lawyers for Google have said.  The claimant, referred to only as NT1 for legal reasons, was convicted of conspiracy to account falsely in the late 1990s and wants the search engine to remove results that mention his case, including web pages published by a national newspaper.

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.