Digital Content

Tech industry critics spent a daylong event on Capitol Hill Feb 7 airing concerns that Facebook, Google, Apple and other major companies are peddling addictive products that damage young minds. Critics are seeking some sort of policy to address the problem. “Should there be some common sense regulation of the tech industry? Obviously,” said Jim Steyer, the head of Common Sense, the group that organized the conference. Franklin Foer, the author of a recent book critical of tech powerhouses, said that a “sense of shame” would shift norms in the industry.

YouTube is the new television, with more than 1.5 billion users, and videos the site recommends have the power to influence viewpoints around the world. Those recommendations often present divisive, misleading or false content despite changes the site has recently made to highlight more-neutral fare. People cumulatively watch more than a billion YouTube hours daily world-wide, a 10-fold increase from 2012, the site says. Behind that growth is an algorithm that creates personalized playlists.

If you’ve snapped up a smart TV, with built-in Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and other Web connections, heads up on this warning — your smart TV could make you vulnerable to hackers and is probably monitoring more of your viewing than you realize. Consumer Reports just analyzed smart TVs from five big U.S. TV brands — Samsung, LG, Sony, TCL and Vizio — and found several problems. All can track what consumers watch, and two of the brands failed a basic security test. 

The gap between haves and have-nots in American health care isn't just driven by insurance and access to doctors. It’s exacerbated by a deep structural problem: Many poor people suffer from long-term ailments that the system has little financial incentive to treat. But now a New York City start-up thinks it can use Google-level tech savvy to help make progress on that challenge—and save the government money.

Google’s Translate tool “learns” language from an existing corpus of writing, and the writing often includes cultural patterns regarding how men and women are described. Because the model is trained on data that already has biases of its own, the results that it spits out serve only to further replicate and even amplify them. It might seem strange that a seemingly objective piece of software would yield gender-biased results, but the problem is an increasing concern in the technology world.

[Commentary] There may be another way to save local news. The plan, for any would-be entrepreneur brave enough to try it, goes like this: Hire some very good journalists; just one or two are O.K. to start. Turn them loose on a large metropolitan area — try San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston or any other city going through waves of change, and whose local press has been gutted by digital disruption. Have your reporters cover stuff that no one else is covering, and let them ignore stuff that everyone else is covering.

[Commentary] China is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism.

US lawmakers examining the role of social media in elections plan to meet with counterparts from the UK the week of Feb 5. Apparently, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) would meet with British Members of Parliament Damian Collins and Paul Farrelly, who are on the committee looking into social media platforms across the Atlantic.

Low-quality, extremist, sensationalist and conspiratorial news published in the US was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by rightwing social network users, according to new study from the University of Oxford.

The practice of printing hard-copies of the “FCC Record” should be eliminated. To be crystal clear, I am not suggesting that we keep its contents or information from the public.  On the contrary, I suggest that it makes little sense to continue to publish paper copies when other mechanisms are more consumer friendly, cost-efficient, and easier to access.  Instead, the Commission should make its documents centrally located and easier to find for interested parties electronically, making paper copies of the Record unnecessary on a going forward basis.  If Encyclopedia Britannica coul