Digital Content

[Commentary] The front-page story in The Wall Street Journal announced, “Walt Disney Co. just became the biggest cord-cutter Hollywood has ever seen.” The iconic company announced it was starting two online streaming services that will bypass its traditional cable television distribution. Thank you, Open Internet Rule!

The sine qua non that made it all possible was the Federal Communications Commission Open Internet Rule that the cable operators cannot deny, degrade or deprioritize Disney access to their broadband service, even when it is competitive to their cable service. This is the very same rule that the Trump FCC, at the request of the lobbyists for the big broadband companies, has announced an intention to eliminate. And the very same rule that Republican legislators are pushing content providers to help them scuttle. The Open Internet Rule – especially the General Conduct Rule portion – is like Disney’s famous character Jiminy Cricket, who acted as Pinocchio’s conscience. As the Jiminy Cricket of the Internet Age, the Open Internet Rule sits on the shoulder of broadband providers to make sure they do the right thing.

[Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow with the Governance Studies, Center for Technology Innovation, and former Chairman to the FCC.]

[Commentary] Say you're a white supremacist who happens to hate Jewish people—or black people, Muslim people, Latino people, take your pick. Today, you can communicate those views online any number of ways without setting off many tech companies' anti-hate-speech alarm bells. And that's a problem.

As the tech industry walks the narrow path between free speech and hate speech, it allows people with extremist ideologies to promote brands and beliefs on their platforms, as long as the violent rhetoric is swapped out for dog whistles and obfuscating language. All the while, social media platforms allow these groups to amass and recruit followers under the guise of peaceful protest. The deadly riots in Charlottesville (VA) last weekend reveal they're anything but. Now it's up to those same tech companies to adjust their approaches to online hate—as companies like GoDaddy and Discord did on Aug 14, by shutting down hate groups on their services—or risk enabling more offline violence in the future.

China announced Aug 11 that it's investigating its own tech companies, like Tencent and Baidu, for giving users an avenue to spread violence and terror. The announcement follows government campaigns earlier this year in the United Kingdom, France and Germany that intend to place legal liability on tech companies for failing to control the presence of terrorist-related content on their platforms.

U.S. regulators have largely remained silent when it comes to policing the role of tech giants in distributing terrorist content, leaving the companies to police themselves in accordance to their own standards. In the past, tech companies have reacted to crises in a uniform fashion, but the attack in Charlottesville shows a a split. Some sites, like Google and GoDaddy, announced Monday that they would cut ties to a white nationalist website, while others have yet to comment. Neither Facebook nor Twitter updated their policies in response to the attack, although both groups do already have policies about violence.

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.

“What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.” The request also covers emails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian.

The administration of President Donald Trump is scoffing at a federal lawsuit by Twitter users who claim that their constitutional rights are being violated because the president has blocked them from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle. "It would send the First Amendment deep into uncharted waters to hold that a president's choices about whom to follow, and whom to block, on Twitter—a privately run website that, as a central feature of its social-media platform, enables all users to block particular individuals from viewing posts—violate the Constitution." That's part of what Michael Baer, a Justice Department attorney, wrote to the New York federal judge overseeing the lawsuit.

In addition, the Justice Department said the courts are powerless to tell Trump how he can manage his private Twitter handle, which has 35.8 million followers. "To the extent that the President's management of his Twitter account constitutes state action, it is unquestionably action that lies within his discretion as Chief Executive; it is therefore outside the scope of judicial enforcement," Baer wrote. Baer added that an order telling Trump how to manage his Twitter feed "would raise profound separation-of-powers concerns by intruding directly into the president's chosen means of communicating to millions of Americans."

A federal district court judge on Aug 14 said that LinkedIn cannot block a startup company from accessing users' public profile data. Judge Edward Chen in the northern district of California granted hiQ labs, an employment startup, a preliminary injunction that forces LinkedIn to remove any barriers keeping hiQ from accessing public profile information within 24 hours. HiQ’s operations depend on its ability to access public LinkedIn data. The company sells analytics to clients including eBay, Capital One and GoDaddy that aim to help them with employee retention and recruitment. LinkedIn contends that hiQ’s services threaten its users’ privacy. Even though their information is already public, LinkedIn argued that users might not want to have employers tracking changes on their profiles, for example if they are seeking a new job. In his order, Chen argued that LinkedIn’s argument was flawed.

If the white nationalists and supremacists at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville (VA) were looking to be noticed, mission accomplished. A group of Twitter users — most notably the @YesYoureRacist account — have been publishing photos of the protestors on the social networking site and asking followers for help identifying them. One of the first to be identified on Aug 12 — a 20-year-old college student named Peter Cvjetanovic — told the Channel 2 news station in Reno (NV) that he “did not expect the photo to be shared as much as it was.” “I understand the photo has a very negative connotation,” he said. “But I hope that the people sharing the photo are willing to listen that I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo.” Cvjetanovic traveled to the “Unite the Right” march to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee, he said, because “the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland.”

Months before social-media company Snap publicly disclosed slowing user growth, rival Facebook already knew.

Late in 2016, Facebook employees used an internal database of a sampling of mobile users’ activity to observe that usage of Snap’s flagship app, Snapchat, wasn’t growing as quickly as before. They saw that the shift occurred after Facebook’s Instagram app launched Stories, a near-replica of a Snapchat feature of the same name. Facebook’s early insight came thanks to its 2013 acquisition of Israeli mobile-analytics company Onavo, which distributes a data-security app that has been downloaded by millions of users. Data from Onavo’s app has been crucial to helping Facebook track rivals and scope out new product categories.

Can a president be suspended from Twitter for threatening to attack another country? That's what some Twitter users, including actor and former Barack Obama aide Kal Penn, are demanding, after President Donald Trump tweeted Aug 11 that US “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.” Critics of the president's tweet say the rhetoric reflects a threat of violence against North Korea that violates Twitter's rules and terms of service.

Over and over again, America’s far-right has learned that the 1st Amendment doesn’t protect them from Silicon Valley tech companies. Over the last two years, a crop of start-ups has begun offering social media platforms and financial services catering to right-wing Internet users. “We’re getting banned from using payment-processing services, so we have no other choice,” said Tim Gionet, who goes by the name “Baked Alaska” and who is scheduled to speak at the Charlottesville (VA) rally. “If that’s the gamble they want to take, I guess they can, and we’ll make our own infrastructure.” The new companies are small, paling in audience size to their gargantuan, mainstream counterparts. But piece by piece, supporters of the far-right are assembling their own corporate tech world — a shadow Silicon Valley, one with fewer rules.