Digital Content

[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.

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) Senate campaign announcement ad has been blocked by Twitter over a statement the abortion rights opponent makes about the sale of fetal tissue for medical research. Chairman Blackburn, who is running for the seat being opened by the retirement of Sen Bob Corker (R-TN), boasts in the ad that she “stopped the sale of baby body parts.”

A Twitter representative told the candidate’s vendors on Oct 10 that the statement was “deemed an inflammatory statement that is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction." Twitter said the Blackburn campaign would be allowed to run the rest of the video if the flagged statement is omitted. While the decision keeps Chairman Blackburn from paying to promote the video on Twitter, it doesn’t keep it from being linked from YouTube and other platforms. Chairman Blackburn took to Twitter to urge supporters to re-post her video and join her in “standing up to Silicon Valley.”

[Commentary] We’re just digesting and analyzing the impact to the nation of being exposed to untruthful news stories. (Note: I’m following Dan Gillmor’s advice and not using “fake news,” because that term has been hijacked by Donald Trump to refer to news he disagrees with.) And while this may be the most severe example of being misled by the Internet, it’s certainly not the only. In fact, the internet is filled with cases whose sole purpose is to trick and deceive us under the guise of offering useful information.

[Phil Baker is a product development expert, author and journalist covering consumer technology. ]

The Trump presidential campaign spent most of its digital advertising budget on Facebook, testing more than 50,000 ad variations each day in an attempt to micro-target voters, President Donald Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview scheduled to air Oct 8. “Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won,” Parscale said. Facebook provided Trump 2016 with employees who embedded in the campaign’s digital office and helped educate staffers on how to use Facebook ads, he said. Because he “wanted people who supported Donald Trump”, Parscale said, the Facebook employees were questioned on their political views. “Campaigns aren’t able to hand-pick Facebook team members to work on their projects,” the statement read, in apparent reference to Parscale’s claim, as reported by CBS, that the Facebook employees that served as “embeds” in his office “had to be partisan and he questioned them to make sure”. Parscale said the Trump campaign used Facebook to reach clusters of rural voters, such as “15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for”. “I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling,” he said. “I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat.”

Russian trolls and others aligned with the Kremlin are injecting disinformation into streams of online content flowing to American military personnel and veterans on Twitter and Facebook, according to an Oxford University study released Oct 9. The researchers found fake or slanted news from Russian-controlled accounts are mixing with a wide range of legitimate content consumed by veterans and active-duty personnel in their Facebook and Twitter news feeds. These groups were found to be reading and sharing articles on conservative political thought, articles on right-wing politics in Europe and writing touting various conspiracy theories. In some cases, the disinformation reached the friends and families of military personnel and veterans as well, the researchers said. But it was not always clear who was creating the content.

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, took to Twitter to deliver an unusually raw tweetstorm defending the company’s software algorithms against critics who believe Facebook needs more oversight. Facebook uses algorithms to determine everything from what you see and don’t see in News Feed, to finding and removing other content like hate speech and violent threats. The company has been criticized in the past for using these algorithms — and not humans — to monitor its service for things like abuse, violent threats, and misinformation. The algorithms can be fooled or gamed, and part of the criticism is that Facebook and other tech companies don’t always seem to appreciate that algorithms have biases, too. Stamos says it’s hard to understand from the outside.

Would you say that people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions in public, even those that are deeply offensive to other people; or that government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public? That choice kicked off a lengthy survey on free speech and tolerance that will be released later in Oct by The Cato Institute, which collaborated with YouGov, the market research firm, to collect responses. The final data set was drawn from answers to scores of questions provided by 2,300 people.