Digital Content

[Commentary] The three of us investigated several of the most promising efforts to “re-decentralize” the web, to better understand their potential to shake up the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The projects we examined are pursuing deeply exciting new ideas. However, we doubt that decentralized systems alone will address the threats to free expression caused by today’s mega-platforms, for several key reasons. First, these tools will face challenges acquiring users and gaining the attention of developers. These platforms also pose new security threats. Social media platforms are curators, not just publishers. Finally, platforms benefit from economies of scale — it’s cheaper to acquire resources like storage and bandwidth in bulk. And with network effects, which make larger platforms more useful, you have a recipe for consolidation.

[Chelsea Barabas is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Neha Narula directs the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. Ethan Zuckerman is the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT.]

The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Hillary Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.

As of August 2017, two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media – with two-in-ten doing so often, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. This is a modest increase since early 2016, when (during the height of the presidential primaries) 62 percent of US adults reported getting news from social media. While a small increase overall, this growth is driven by more substantial increases among Americans who are older, less educated, and nonwhite. For the first time in the Center’s surveys, more than half (55 percent) of Americans ages 50 or older report getting news on social media sites. That is 10 percentage points higher than the 45 percent who said so in 2016. Those under 50, meanwhile, remain more likely than their elders to get news from these sites (78 percent do, unchanged from 2016).

The gap between the share of Americans who get news online and those who do so on television is narrowing.

As of August, 43 percent of Americans report often getting news online, just 7 percentage points lower than the 50 percent who often get news on television, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in August. This gap between the two news platforms was 19 points in early 2016, more than twice as large. The share of Americans who often get news from TV – whether from local TV news, nightly network TV news or cable news – is down from 57 percent in early 2016. At the same time, the portion of Americans often getting news online, either from news websites/apps or social media, grew from 38 percent in early 2016 to 43 percent today. What’s more, the decline in television news use occurs across all three types of TV news asked about in the survey – local, network and cable – but is greatest for local television news. As of August 2017, 37 percent of Americans said they often get local TV news, compared with 46% in early 2016.

Facebook promised to address the spread of misinformation on its platform, in part by working with outside fact-checking groups. But because the company has declined to share any internal data from the project, the fact-checkers say they have no way of determining whether the “disputed” tags they’re affixing to “fake news” articles slow — or perhaps even accelerate — the stories’ spread. They also say they’re lacking information that would allow them to prioritize the most important stories out of the hundreds possible to fact-check at any given moment. Some fact-checkers are growing frustrated, saying the lack of information is undermining Facebook’s efforts to combat false news reports.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has dismissed a libel lawsuit filed earlier in 2017 against tech news website Techdirt. The claim was brought by Shiva Ayyadurai, who has controversially claimed that he invented e-mail in the late 1970s. Techdirt (and its founder and CEO, Mike Masnick) has been a longtime critic of Ayyadurai and institutions that have bought into his claims. "How The Guy Who Didn't Invent Email Got Memorialized In The Press & The Smithsonian As The Inventor Of Email," reads one Techdirt headline from 2012. Numerous articles that dubbed Ayyadurai a "liar" and a "charlatan" followed. That, in turn, led to Ayyadurai's January 2017 libel lawsuit.

In the Sept 6 ruling, US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor found that because it is impossible to define precisely and specifically what e-mail is, Ayyadurai's "claim is incapable of being proved true or false." The judge continued: "One person may consider a claim to be 'fake' if any element of it is not true or if it involves a slight twisting of the facts, while another person may only consider a claim to be 'fake' only if no element of it is true."

An interview with Barry Lynn, former New America staffer who was let go, reportedly at the request of Alphabet's executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

Asked, "Why is it so important to talk about monopoly power, particularly regarding tech companies?" Lynn said, "It’s important to talk about monopoly power in general because monopolies are a threat to our democracy and to our basic liberties and to our communities. Monopolization, this concentration of wealth and power, is a threat to everything that is America — everything we established America to ensure. So Open Markets is built to fight the environment of law and regulation that currently promotes unrestrained monopoly. America today has a monopoly problem. We’re seeing basically a second wave of consolidation and monopolization because of the digital revolution. These companies are just as bad as Newscorp or Walmart or Citibank was in 2005. Google, Facebook, and Amazon: the danger they pose is on a vastly different level."

Computer companies are worried that a new bill meant to crack down on human trafficking could instead take a big bite out of the user-generated web traffic that makes up the majority of interactions on the web, from blogs to social media posts to picture-sharing. The bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, is sponsored by a group of bipartisan Sens, including House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Bill Nelson (D-FL). The bill, say its sponsors, is meant to ensure that web sites such as Backpage.com, which knowingly facilitate sex trafficking, can be held liable. It would do so by amending Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act to clarify that that section, which says internet services cannot be held liable for the actions of third parties, does not prevent enforcement against providers and users of federal and state laws against sex trafficking. Sec. 230 allows companies to moderate a network without being responsible for all the content posted on it, which, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) points out, prevents every post from being a potential lawsuit and has allowed for "literally every online platform that allows users to post information, content, and comments"—which covers everyone from Google and Facebook to Snapchat and Pinterest.

A new Verizon rewards program, Verizon Up, provides credits that wireless subscribers can use for concert tickets, movie premieres and phone upgrades. But it comes with a catch: Customers must give the carrier access to their web-browsing history, app usage and location data, which Verizon says it uses to personalize the rewards and deliver targeted advertising as its customers browse the web.

The trade-off is part of Verizon’s effort to build a digital advertising business to compete with web giants Facebook and Alphabet’s Google, which often already possess much of the same customer information. Even though Congress earlier this year dismantled tough privacy regulations on telecommunications providers, Verizon still wants customers to opt-in to its most comprehensive advertising program, called Verizon Selects. Data collected under the program is shared with Oath, the digital-media unit Verizon created when it bought AOL and Yahoo.

When the Obama administration was designing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), privacy was a chief concern for immigration advocates, who worried about having undocumented immigrants identify themselves to the government. So US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) vowed it would wall off that data, protecting it from other agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that wanted to use it for deportation purposes. But because DACA was merely a policy, not a law, even the framers of this process knew full well that that promise to Dreamers was not binding. Even if the Dreamer data remains confidential, however, immigration advocates fear that ICE already has all the information it needs to target Dreamers where they work.

One reason many Dreamers applied for the program, after all, is to receive a work permit. Many employers use a system called e-verify to keep tabs on their employees’ immigration statuses. If President Donald Trump reverses DACA protections and stops renewing those permits, there’s not much stopping ICE from showing up at an employer's office the day after an employee's DACA permit expires.