Digital Content

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.

Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has launched his own daily online news program, building on his “No Spin News” podcast. O'Reilly, once a conservative powerhouse at Fox News, was fired in April after The New York Times reported he sexually harassed at least seven women at the network. O'Reilly posted the first half-hour of the show on billoreilly.com on Aug 9, but only subscribers with premium membership — which cost $4.95 per month — could watch. On Aug 10, the show was made available to the public.

It was a crazy idea: Take the bulk of the world’s books, scan them, and create a monumental digital library for all to access. That’s what Google dreamed of doing when it embarked on its ambitious book-digitizing project in 2002. It got part of the way there, digitizing at least 25 million books from major university libraries. But the promised library of everything hasn’t come into being. An epic legal battle between authors and publishers and the Internet giant over alleged copyright violations dragged on for years. A settlement that would have created a Book Rights Registry and made it possible to access the Google Books corpus through public-library terminals ultimately died, rejected by a federal judge in 2011. And though the same judge ultimately dismissed the case in 2013, handing Google a victory that allowed it to keep on scanning, the dream of easy and full access to all those works remains just that.

An emerging debate about whether elected officials violate people's free speech rights by blocking them on social media is spreading across the US as groups sue or warn politicians to stop the practice.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Gov Paul LePage (R-ME) and sent warning letters to Utah's congressional delegation. It followed recent lawsuits against the governors of Maryland and Kentucky and President Donald Trump. Politicians at all levels increasingly embrace social media to discuss government business, sometimes at the expense of traditional town halls or in-person meetings. "People turn to social media because they see their elected officials as being available there and they're hungry for opportunities to express their opinions and share feedback," said Anna Thomas, spokeswoman for the ACLU of Utah. "That includes people who disagree with public officials." Most of the officials targeted so far — all Republicans — say they are not violating free speech but policing social media pages to get rid of people who post hateful, violent, obscene or abusive messages.

Palantir had been selling its data storage, analysis, and collaboration software to police departments nationwide on the basis of rock-solid security. “Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities,” its website reads. The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are willing to talk about it.

From that modest start, voice-based AI for the home has become a big business for Amazon and, increasingly, a strategic battleground with its technology rivals. Google, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft are each putting thousands of researchers and business specialists to work trying to create irresistible versions of easy-to-use devices that we can talk with. “Until now, all of us have bent to accommodate tech, in terms of typing, tapping, or swiping. Now the new user interfaces are bending to us,” observes Ahmed Bouzid, the chief executive officer of Witlingo, which builds voice-driven apps of all sorts for banks, universities, law firms, and others.

For Amazon, what started out as a platform for a better jukebox has become something bigger: an artificial intelligence system built upon, and constantly learning from, human data. Its Alexa-powered Echo cylinder and tinier Dot are omnipresent household helpers that can turn off the lights, tell jokes, or let you read the news hands-free. They also collect reams of data about their users, which is being used to improve Alexa and add to its uses. The ultimate payoff is the opportunity to control—or at least influence—three important markets: home automation, home entertainment, and shopping.

Disney unveiled plans on Aug 8 for Netflix-style streaming services for sports programming from ESPN and Disney movies. It is a striking, multibillion-dollar bid to reposition Disney, the world’s largest entertainment company, for growth and to address worries of cord-cutting in the traditional television business. Disney’s direct-to-consumer services will start in 2018. The first one will offer ESPN programming, including baseball, hockey, tennis and college sports — about 10,000 regional and national events in its first year. By 2019, Disney plans to start a separate entertainment service, which will include Pixar movies, Disney Channel television series and film library content.

For the last two years, Disney has not been to convince investors that ESPN, its longtime growth engine, will keep chugging away — albeit more slowly — even as the network deals with the subscriber erosion that is buffeting the broader cable television business. Its efforts have included paying $1 billion last year for a 33 percent stake in BamTech, which handles streaming for baseball teams and HBO. At the time, Disney said it was working on an ESPN-branded streaming service. On Aug 8, the company said it would pay $1.58 billion for an additional 42 percent stake in BamTech. Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said the acquisition would help his company compete with streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon by introducing a video home base for all things Disney. “The media landscape is increasingly defined by direct relationships between content creators and consumers,” Iger said. “This acquisition and the launch of our direct-to-consumer services mark an entirely new growth strategy for the company.”