Digital Content

CEO's from Meta, Snap, X, TikTok, and Discord testified in a contentious and emotional Senate hearing on child online safety. Lawmakers invoked the stories of online child abuse victims—many of whom sat directly behind the tech leaders—to issue a stunning rebuke to Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and other executives.

There's one thing uniting big and small tech companies operating in Europe: they can't stand Apple's approach to complying with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA designates six big tech companies as online gatekeepers—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft—and obligates them to open their platforms to competition. Apple's DMA compliance plan allows developers to set up alternative app stores and avoid Apple's in-app payment system.

Social media platforms faced a range of controversies in recent years, including concerns over misinformation and data privacy. Even so, US adults use a wide range of sites and apps, especially YouTube and Facebook. And TikTok – which some Congress members previously called to ban – saw growth in its user base. According to a Pew Research Center survey of 5,733 U.S. adults conducted May 19-Sept. 5, 2023:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is exploring internal use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make its work for Congress and taxpayers more efficient, in-depth, and effective. By developing these tools, GAO is also gaining insight into the benefits and risks of AI, which will help GAO evaluate other agencies' use and better provide technical assistance to Congress. As of January 2024, GAO is exploring the following eight AI use cases:

Rural broadband is getting a big boost from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, but rural broadband could also get a boost from the AI-fueled data center boom — even if we don't usually think of AI and rural at the same time. Public cloud providers need fiber to connect a growing number of data centers in places like Council Bluffs, Iowa, Virginia’s Prince William County, and Midlothian, Texas. “Anywhere you build a new data center will drive incremental network construction by at least three providers,” said Frank Louthan, equity analyst and managing director at Ray

The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans’ domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter by the agency. The letter offered few details about the nature of the data other than to stress that it did not include the content of internet communications.

Since Apple introduced the App Store in 2008, it has tightly controlled the apps and services allowed on iPhones and iPads, giving the company an iron grip on one of the digital economy’s most valuable storefronts. Now Apple is weakening its hold on the store, in one of the most consequential signs to date of how new European regulations are changing consumer technology.

The US National Science Foundation and collaborating agencies launched the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot, a first step towards realizing the vision for a shared research infrastructure that will strengthen and democratize access to critical resources necessary to power responsible AI discovery and innovation. Partnering with 10 other federal agencies as well as 25 private sector, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, the NAIRR pilot will provide access to advanced computing, datasets, models, software, training and user support to U.S.-based researche

There's no such thing as an AI system without values — and that means this newest technology platform must navigate partisan rifts, culture-war chasms and international tensions from the very beginning. Every step in training, tuning and deploying AI models forces its creators to make choices about whose values the system will respect, whose point of view it will present and what limits it will observe. AI systems' points of view begins in the data with which they are trained — and the efforts their developers may take to mitigate the biases in the data. From there, most systems undergo an

US Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Peter Welch (D-VT) wrote to US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to call for a new independent federal agency to establish oversight over large technology firms.