Digital Content

When Americans are asked what has brought the biggest improvement to their lives in the past five decades, they name technology more than any other advancement. And as Americans think about the next 50 years, they expect that technology, along with medical advances, will continue to have a major impact, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May to June of 2017. Technology was cited most (42%), while far fewer respondents mentioned medicine and health (14%), civil and equal rights (10%) or other advancements. Technology was identified as the biggest improvement by whites (47%) and Hispanics (35%), while blacks were about as likely to name technology (26%) as they were civil and equal rights (21%).

Rep Keith Ellison (D-MN) has asked Federal Trade Commission Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen for documentation of its long-running antitrust investigation of Google, which was closed in 2013 with no finding of antitrust violations. In 2013, the FTC concluded: "Google’s display of its own content could plausibly be viewed as an improvement in the overall quality of Google’s search product. Similarly, we have not found sufficient evidence that Google manipulates its search algorithms to unfairly disadvantage vertical websites that compete with Google-owned vertical properties."

That came despite complaints to Congress from some small online businesses that Google was disfavoring them in search. Rep Ellison points out that Google did volunteer to change some business practices in the wake of the investigation. "Given the impact Google has on small businesses, the flow of information, and that Google controls an outsize portion of the market for online search and online advertising, the public has a right to know what the Federal Trade Commission found in its investigation into Google," Ellison said in a letter to Ohlhausen.

The conversation about Facebook would benefit from more facts, and less speculation. So this week, I sent a list of some of my unanswered questions to Facebook. Two representatives — Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, and Joe Osborne, a company spokesman — responded to several questions in some detail. The company declined to answer several other questions, but I include those here as well, in hopes that they might one day be answered. Below are my questions, followed by Facebook’s responses, where applicable.

Image-bookmarking site Pinterest is known as a place where people go to get ideas about home décor, fashion, and recipes. Few would associate it with politics – let alone Russian trolls. But in the run-up to the 2016 election, the site became a repository for thousands of political posts created by Russian operatives seeking to shape public opinion and foment discord in US society, the company acknowledged Oct 11.

Russian operatives don’t appear to have posted directly on Pinterest, but their influence spread to the site through users who came across Russian content elsewhere and unwittingly “pinned” it onto their Pinterest scrap boards. “We believe the fake Facebook content was so sophisticated that it tricked real Americans into saving it to Pinterest,” said Pinterest head of public policy Charlie Hale. “We’ve removed the content brought to our attention and continue to investigate.”

On Oct 9, Twitter blocked a campaign video ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), calling the ad “inflammatory” and claiming that it violated the company’s ad guidelines. On Oct 10, Twitter changed its mind. Rep Blackburn can now promote the video, in which the self-described “hardcore, card carrying Tennessee conservative” talked about her efforts to stop “the sale of baby body parts,” in a reference to Planned Parenthood. “After further review, we have made the decision to allow the content in question from Rep. Blackburn's campaign ad to be promoted on our ads platform,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “While we initially determined that a small portion of the video used potentially inflammatory language, after reconsidering the ad in the context of the entire message, we believe that there is room to refine our policies around these issues. We have notified Rep. Blackburn's campaign of this decision."

It is becoming increasingly apparent that fundamental principles underlying democracy—trust, informed dialogue, a shared sense of reality, mutual consent, and participation—are being put to the test by certain features and attributes of social media. As technology companies increasingly achieve financial success by monetizing public attention, it is worth examining some of the key issues and unintended consequences arising as a result. The six key issues are:

• Echo chambers, polarization, and hyper-partisanship
• Spread of false and/or misleading information
• Conversion of popularity into legitimacy
• Manipulation by “populist” leaders, governments, and fringe actors
• Personal data capture and targeted messaging/advertising
• Disruption of the public square

[Commentary] Are social media platforms like Twitter subject to the First Amendment? Is there a right to free speech on social media owned by private corporations? The Knight First Amendment Institute thinks so. In July, the institute sued the president, his director of social media, and his press secretary to unblock the blocked. By banning these users based on views they expressed about tweets by the president, the Institute argues, Trump violated the users’ right to free speech because the blocks were based on disagreement with the users’ messages. Two weeks ago, as part of this litigation, lawyers for the president acknowledged that he personally blocked the Twitter users “because the Individual Plaintiffs posted tweets that criticized the president or his policies”—what free speech law calls “viewpoint discrimination.” In places where the First Amendment applies—such as public forums—it bars the government or its officials from such bias....

As it stands, the country’s libertarian conception of free speech is allowing, and even ferociously feeding, an erosion of the democracy it is supposed to be essential in making work—and some government regulation of speech on social media may be required to save it.

[Lincoln Caplan is the Truman Capote Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School ]

[Commentary] The tech giants are too big. Other than President Donald J. Trump, that’s the defining story of 2017, the meta-narrative lurking beneath every other headline. The companies I call the Frightful Five — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company — have experienced astounding growth over the last few years, making them the world’s five most valuable public companies. Because they own the technology that will dominate much of life for the foreseeable future, they are also gaining vast social and political power over much of the world beyond tech.

Now that world is scrambling to figure out what to do about them. And it is discovering that the changes they are unleashing — in the economy, in civic and political life, in arts and entertainment, and in our tech-addled psyches — are not simple to comprehend, let alone to limit. This is the first of several columns in which I’ll take measure of the Five. Here, I assess their efforts to infiltrate entertainment — their plans to push deeper into the business of movies, TV and music, and the fears of cultural domination those moves have provoked.

Cable operators have a simple answer to the Federal Communications Commission's burning question of whether the video marketplace is competitive—yes—and a suggestion for how the FCC should proceed armed with that conclusion, including by making sure new online video competitors don't do anything to hurt that flourishing competition.

That came in comments by NCTA-The Internet & Television Association on the FCC's latest call for input on its annual video competition report. The FCC under Republican Chairman Ajit Pai is likely to break with recent tradition and actually produce a report that comes to a conclusion about that competitiveness, rather than simply provide a snapshot of the marketplace as previous reports under Democratic chairs have done. NCTA says the whole point of the report is to come to a conclusion about whether it is time to "dismantle a regulatory framework premised on the lack of competition." The previous reports under Democrats did not conclude one way or another. NCTA also knows what the report should conclude: "Today's marketplace is characterized by vigorous competition" it says, among content providers of all stripes.

The Supreme Court on Oct 10 refused to review a ruling that Power Ventures, a defunct aggregation service, violated a federal hacking law by scraping Facebook's site. The court did not provide a reason for its move, which let stand a decision issued in 2016 by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The lower court said in its ruling that Power violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing Facebook after receiving a cease-and-desist letter.

The anti-hacking law, which provides for private lawsuits as well as criminal penalties, prohibits people from accessing computers without authorization. The battle between the companies dates to 2008, when Power was trying to grow a service that enabled people to use a single portal to log in to a variety of social networking companies -- including MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. To accomplish this, Power asked users to provide log-in information for their social networking sites and then imported people's information.