Digital Content

On a typical weekday, three-quarters of US Latinos get their news from internet sources, nearly equal to the share who do so from television. For years, TV was the most commonly used platform for news among U.S. Hispanics. In recent years, however, the share getting their news from TV has declined, from 92% in 2006 to 79% in 2016. Meanwhile, 74% of Hispanics said in 2016 that they used the internet – including social media or smartphone apps – as a source of news on a typical weekday, up from 37% in 2006.

One of the many buzzwords at this week's CES technology show is "blockchain" — the technology underpinning the bitcoin craze. While bitcoin is the flash of the moment, there's growing excitement about how this concept can move beyond digital currency and affect people's lives. Simply put, blockchain is like a ledger book that can be group-edited by people in the cloud. There's no central company or government that has to verify a transaction, which means thing can move more quickly. As changes are made, it keeps a public log of what changed, when and how.

Senate Commerce Committee Chiarman John Thune (R-SD) will convene a hearing titled “Terrorism and Social Media: #IsBigTechDoingEnough?” at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, January 17, 2018. The hearing will examine the steps social media platforms are taking to combat the spread of extremist propaganda over the Internet.  Representatives from major technology firms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will testify. 

Internet advertising firms are losing hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of a new privacy feature from Apple that prevents users from being tracked around the web. Advertising technology firm Criteo, one of the largest in the industry, says that the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature for Safari, which holds 15% of the global browser market, is likely to cut its 2018 revenue by more than a fifth compared to projections made before ITP was announced.

Chinese internet giants like Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba are ramping up investments in US tech and media companies. They're also building data servers and acquiring ad tech businesses in the US that can help them monetize media engagement from citizens living in America, like students or tourists. There's a misconception that the Chinese push into the Western media tech market is to target new American users or to compete directly with US tech companies.

[Commentary] Platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas. It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic...I realized that the problems I had been seeing couldn’t be solved simply by, say, Facebook hiring staff to monitor the content on the site. The problems were inherent in the attention-based, algorithm-driven business model. And what I suspected was Russia’s meddling in 2016 was only a prelude to what we’d see in 2018 and beyond.

Some Twitter users have called, repeatedly, for the social network to block President Donald Trump's account — but a new statement from Twitter essentially says that is not going to happen. Twitter has previously responded to complaints about President Trump's account by saying that certain users' tweets have a “newsworthiness” value that makes it important to stay online and inform the network's global conversation. Its Jan 5 statement expanded on that idea, though this latest explanation did not mention President Trump by name.

[Commentary] The so-called social media revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Sites like Twitter and Facebook exacerbate emotions like outrage and fear—and don’t help democracy flourish. Social media too easily bypasses the rational or at least reasonable parts of our minds, on which a democratic public sphere depends. It speaks instead to the emotional, reactive, quick-fix parts of us, that are satisfied by images and clicks that look pleasing, that feed our egos, and that make us think we are heroic.

In an effort to examine more deeply where people “draw the line” when it comes to online harassment, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey in which respondents were presented with fictional scenarios depicting different types of escalating online interactions. The survey then asked them to indicate which specific elements of the story they considered to be harassment. Their answers indicate that Americans broadly agree that certain behaviors are beyond the pale.

In recent months, Twitter has started to explain why it disagrees with calls for banning President Donald Trump’s account or deleting some of his tweets.