Digital Content

Rep Maxine Waters (D-CA) is demanding Twitter provide information on Russia-linked accounts she says targeted her and her congressional district. In a statement released Oct 26, Rep Waters said she has never publicly discussed this before now but has suspected for a while that she was a target. "I have been aware for some time that I was targeted by Russian operatives whose interests were aligned with Donald Trump," Rep Waters said in the statement. "I have often noticed that every time I tweeted about Trump and Russia, dozens of strange accounts would immediately tweet various lies and falsehoods that fringe alt-right websites would subsequently use as a basis to write fake news stories." Rep Waters, a vocal critic of President Trump, said she wants the American people and Congress to understand they may also be "vulnerable to this type of foreign disruption."

Cambridge Analytica used its own database and voter information collected from Facebook and news publishers in its effort to help elect Donald Trump, despite a claim by a top campaign official who has downplayed the company’s role in the election. The data analysis company, which uses a massive database of consumer and demographic information to profile and target voters, has come under the scrutiny of congressional investigators who are examining the Trump campaign.

This week, the group became the focus of a new controversy after the Daily Beast reported that the company’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, had contacted Julian Assange in 2016. Nix allegedly asked the WikiLeaks founder whether he could assist in releasing thousands of e-mails that had gone missing on a private server that had been used by Hillary Clinton. Assange confirmed the contact but said the offer was rejected. The news prompted a top former campaign official, Michael Glassner, who was executive director of the Trump election campaign, to minimise the role Cambridge Analytica played in electing Trump, despite the fact that it paid Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars in fees. In a statement on Oct 25, Glassner said that the Trump campaign relied on voter data owned by the Republican National Committee to help elect the president. “Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false,” he said. But that claim is contradicted by a detailed description of the company’s role in the 2016 election given in May by a senior Cambridge Analytica executive.

[Commentary] Soon, a new law against hate speech will go into effect in Germany, fining Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies up to €50 million if they fail to take down illegal content from their sites within 24 hours of being notified. For more ambiguous content, companies will have seven days to decide whether to block the posts. The rule is Germany’s attempt to fight hate speech and fake news, both of which have risen online since the arrival of more than a million refugees in the last two years. Germany isn’t alone in its determination to crack down on these kinds of posts. For the past year, most of Europe has been in an intense and fascinating debate about how to regulate, who should regulate, and even whether to regulate illegal and defamatory online content.

Unlike the US, where we rely on corporate efforts to tackle the problems of fake news and disinformation online, the European Commission and some national governments are wading into the murky waters of free speech, working to come up with viable ways to stop election-meddling and the violence that has resulted from false news reports.

[Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media and Communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.]

Twitter said it overstated its number of users for the past three years and committed to take advertising off its site from two Russian media outlets, even as it reported modest user growth for the third quarter. Twitter said it will no longer accept advertising from all accounts owned by Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik. Federal intelligence officials say RT is “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.“ Twitter’s decision marks a stark change to its previous stance of accepting advertising from these groups. The RT editor in chief said in a tweet on Oct 26 that Twitter approached RT ahead of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to pitch ways RT could advertise on Twitter during this period.

Social media has become an integral part of everyday life for individuals around the world. In light of the growing role of online communication, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implemented a notable change to its collection and record-keeping of social media information and search results of non-US persons (naturalized citizens, green card holders, immigrant visa holders, asylees, special immigrant juveniles, and student visa holders) in the United States. Per a notice issued in September, the information will be stored in DHS’ visa and immigration history records for each individual, also known as “Alien Files” or “A-Files.” Given the serious threats to freedom of association and privacy posed by this practice, OTI has signed onto a coalition letter expressing concern regarding DHS practices around social media collection and retention.

A coalition of right-leaning groups is pressing Congress to act on legislation that would create a new legal framework that allows law enforcement to access US electronic communications held on servers abroad. The bipartisan bill, called the International Communications Privacy Act (ICPA), has been introduced by Reps Doug Collins (R-GA) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) in the House and Sens Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Dean Heller (R-NV) in the Senate.

The bill seeks to clarify the process by which law enforcement obtains electronic data on US citizens for investigations, regardless of the location of the communications. It would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant for all content. It would also allow law enforcement to, in certain circumstances, obtain electronic communications on foreign nationals. On Oct 25, right-leaning organizations including Americans for Tax Reform and the R Street Institute wrote to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees pressing them to swiftly consider the bill.

[Commentary] Kenyans go to the polls for the second time Oct 26 to stage a redo of the country’s presidential election in August. In the months leading up to the initial vote, Kenyans faced a barrage of misleading information through print, TV, radio, and social media. The atmosphere, fraught with memories of violence during 2007 presidential election, peaked with the torture and murder of an election official just days before the polls opened.

Days before the August election, Facebook rolled out an educational tool to help Kenyan users spot fake news: quick tips for spotting fake news, such as, “be skeptical of headlines” or “some stories are intentionally false.” Facebook is an important information channel in Kenya, reaching six million people, out of an estimated 37.7 million internet users, and Kenyans desperately needed the critical-thinking skills to better navigate misinformation. But the platform’s last-minute tool paled in comparison with the long and contentious election run-up.

[Bebe Santa-Wood is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in Human Rights and Communications. Tara Susman-Peña is senior technical advisor in the Center for Applied Learning & Impact (CALI) and the Information & Media practice at IREX.]

[Commentary] Handing the network neutrality problem over to a government agency with strong industry ties and poor mechanisms for public accountability poses a real danger of creating more problems than we’d solve. One alternative is to foster a genuinely competitive market for Internet access. If subscribers and customers had adequate information about their options and could vote with their feet, internet service providers (ISPs) would have strong incentives to treat all network traffic fairly. But the ISP market today is under oligopoly control. Nearly one in three American households have no choice when it comes to their Internet, and for all the other consumers choices are quite limited.

Another scenario would be for Congress to step in and pass net neutrality legislation that outlines what the ISPs are not allowed to do. But fighting giant ISP mega-corporations (and their army of lobbyists) in Congress promises to be a tough battle. Yet another option: empower subscribers to not just test their ISP, but challenge it in court if they detect harmful non-neutral practices. That gives all of us the chance to be watchdogs of the public interest, but it too, is likely to face powerful ISP opposition.

[John Ottman is Chairman and co-founder of Minds, Inc. a social media network.]

Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that he is talking with Google, Facebook, and Twitter about testifying before the Judiciary Committee about Russia's social media manipulation on Oct 31, a day before the tech giants arrive for long-anticipated intelligence committee hearings on both sides of the Capitol. "Google's all good [to appear, and] we're working with the others" to testify before the Judiciary subpanel on crime and terrorism next week, Sen Graham said. "It's really important. We need to do this."

The Content Creators Coalition (c3), which advocates on behalf of musicians, is launching an ad campaign against YouTube and its parent company Google, accusing them of exploiting artists. The group unveiled a pair of video ads on Oct 25 that call out YouTube for undermining musicians’ control over their content and cutting into their ad revenue streams.

“Google’s YouTube has shortchanged artists while earning billions of dollars off our music,” said Melvin Gibbs, an accomplished bassist and the president of c3. “Artists know YouTube can do better. So, rather than hiding behind outdated laws, YouTube and Google should work to give artists more control over our music and pay music creators fairly when our songs are played on their platform.” The group wants Congress to update the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which it believes places too much of a burden on content creators to police the internet for copyright infringements while letting internet platforms off the hook.