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Whether by whim or design, President Donald Trump keeps adding fuel to his incendiary Twitter battle against the media. The press is an easy target for the Republican president, and one his supporters love to hate. But the escalating conflict has diverted attention not just from Trump's failures but his claimed successes as well.

President Trump tweeted July 3 that "at some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy, success with ISIS, the border & so much else!" It's his own campaign against the press, though, that keeps changing the subject from that more substantive policy debate Trump claims to crave. And it has hindered Trump's ability to push his agenda through Congress, where Republicans complain about the president's lack of focus as his health-care plan is struggling, work on next year's budget is stuck and talk of a big infrastructure deal is fading.

The minds behind LinkedIn and Zynga have a new target for disruption: American politics. Co-founders Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman unveiled Win the Future — also known as WTF — a political network aimed at helping "Americans organize around a common platform," according to the project's website. "We need a modern people’s lobby that empowers all of us to choose our leaders and set our agenda," wrote Pincus in a post explaining WTF's philosophy. "Imagine voting for a President we're truly excited about. Imagine a government that promotes capitalism and civil rights." Other founders in WTF include former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and venture capitalist Fred Wilson. The pair have contributed $500,000 to the project. Pincus says he views WTF as a "new movement and force within the Democratic Party, which can act like its own virtual party."

A US judge has dismissed nationwide litigation accusing Facebook of tracking users' internet activity even after they logged out of the social media website. In a decision late on June 30, US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose (CA) said the plaintiffs failed to show they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, or that they suffered any "realistic" economic harm or loss.

The plaintiffs claimed that Facebook violated federal and California privacy and wiretapping laws by storing cookies on their browsers that tracked when they visited outside websites containing Facebook "like" buttons. But the judge said the plaintiffs could have taken steps to keep their browsing histories private, and failed to show that Facebook illegally "intercepted" or eavesdropped on their communications. "The fact that a user's web browser automatically sends the same information to both parties," meaning Facebook and an outside website, "does not establish that one party intercepted the user's communication with the other," Davila wrote.

A Q &A with UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon.

Ars editors Annalee Newitz and Joe Mullin talked to UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon about how the Trump administration has been removing scientific and environmental data from the Web. Lindsey is part of a group called Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), which is working on ways to rescue that data and make it available to the public. Lindsey told us how EDGI got started in November 2016, within days of the presidential election. Its founders are scientists and academics whose main goal was to make sure that researchers and citizens would continue to have access to data about the environment. They organized data rescue events around the country, where volunteers identified vulnerable climate information on websites for several government agencies, including the EPA, DOE, and even NASA. The Internet Archive helped by creating digital records of all the at-risk pages.

Social media used to be a place where people could go to post photos of cute animals, link to weird articles, and share mundane status updates with friends and relatives. But as events such as the 2016 US presidential election have shown, social media has tipped into feeling primarily like a breeding ground for messages of hate and a forum for bullying.

In response to the onslaught of crushingly negative content, a trend among younger users has emerged—highlighting and sharing only messages that are dripping with positivity. Suddenly, for almost every gloomy trend that has percolated on the internet, there now exists a positivity-promoting counter meme. WholesomeMemes, which has an Instagram account with over 22,000 followers, was among the first of these jolly promoters. They often feature animals, babies, and cartoons. The comment thread beneath them is filled with people tagging their friends and phrases like “reminds me of you” or just “us.”

A day after defending his use of social media as befitting a “modern day” president, President Donald Trump appeared to promote violence against CNN in a tweet. President Trump, who is on vacation at his Bedminster (NJ) golf resort, posted on Twitter an old video clip of him performing in a WWE professional wrestling match, but with a CNN logo superimposed on the head of his opponent. In the clip, Trump is shown slamming the CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with simulated punches and elbows to the head. Trump added the hashtags #FraudNewsCNN and #FNN, for “fraud news network.” The video clip apparently had been posted days earlier on Reddit, a popular social media message board. The president's tweet was the latest escalation in his beef with CNN over its coverage of him and his administration.

President Donald Trump, who has reveled in his confrontational style with the news media, sparked fierce debate July 2 over whether he is inciting violence against journalists by posting a doctored video clip showing him bashing the head of a figure representing CNN. President Trump’s latest provocation in his war with the media brought denunciations from Democrats, and some Republicans, who warned that the president’s conduct could endanger reporters as he seeks to undermine public trust in reporting about his administration.

“Violence & violent imagery to bully the press must be rejected,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wrote in one of the many comments from elected officials posted on Twitter. Presidential historians suggested that Trump’s social media attacks are lowering the bar on what constitutes appropriate presidential conduct in fighting perceived media enemies. HW Brands, a historian at the University of Texas, said Republican President Richard Nixon also felt mistreated, but “Nixon didn’t air his grievances as publicly as Trump does. We’ve never seen anything quite like the ongoing performance of President Trump.” Meanwhile, White House aides and supporters defended the president’s Twitter post as a pointed but harmless barb at what he sees as a hostile press corps. Some said the reaction demonstrated the inflated self-regard of reporters and their inability to take a joke.

As President Donald Trump faces growing backlash for tweeting a video attacking CNN, Twitter told the network that the president's tweet did not violate the social media platform’s terms and conditions. President Trump tweeted an old video clip on July 2 of him beating up an individual at a wrestling event, with a CNN logo superimposed over the man's face. Twitter told CNN it had reviewed the tweet. The video is the latest in a series of attacks on the media by the president made on Twitter. Earlier this week, Trump issued a highly personal and graphic attack on MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, in which he called her “crazy,” “low I.Q.” and referenced her allegedly bleeding from a facelift.

President Donald Trump's recent tweet about Amazon is putting the issue of online sales taxes back in the spotlight. In a tweet June 28 criticizing the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, President Trump called the publication "the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should)."

It's unclear exactly what Trump meant by "internet taxes." Amazon in April started collecting sales taxes on purchases in every state that levies a sales tax. But Congress has also banned states from taxing consumer's internet access. Asked about the tweet, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she had not discussed it with Trump. The White House also did not respond to an email from The Hill Friday about the tweet or the broader online sales tax issue. But lawmakers and others who want states to be able to force online retailers to collect sales tax were heartened by Trump's comment.

[Commentary] The problem with regulating technology companies is that, faced with tough new rules, they can eventually innovate their way out, often by switching to newer, unregulated technologies. The risk of targeted regulation informed by little other than economic doctrines might even be fuelling a corporate quest for eternal disruption: instead of surrendering to the regulators, technology firms prefer to abandon their old business model. It’s through this lens that we should interpret the likely fallout from the €2.4bn fine imposed on Alphabet, Google’s parent company, by the European commission. It arrives after a lengthy, seven-year investigation into whether the company abused its dominance to promote its own online shopping service above search results. The commission’s case seems sound; the sad fate of small online retailers, unable to compete with Alphabet over the past decade, suggests as much.

However, one should not mistake the factual correctness of the commission’s case for an informed strategic vision: if it has a clue about effective ways to limit the power of data platforms, it’s not showing it. The reality is that even though advertising-powered search still accounts for the bulk of Alphabet’s earnings, the company’s real focus these days is on finding lucrative and creative uses for the troves of data that it has already extracted, processed and turned into artificial intelligence. Alphabet’s future revolves around information-intensive services, not around running matchmaking platforms for advertising.

[Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation.]