Digital Content

[Commentary] Over the last month, the Federal Communications Commission received 2.6 million public comments critical of Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back President Obama’s "network neutrality" rules. This outpouring of public sentiment must be evidence of participatory democracy at it best, right? Not quite. A sizable percentage of these comments appear to be fake. What the net neutrality comment debacle underscores is that the Internet age may mean the collapse of the public comment process, at least for significant public policy issues.

Sophisticated bots and automated comment platforms can create thousands and thousands of comments from senders who may or may not be real. Most rulemaking pertains to subject matter that is less widely-watched than net neutrality, and usually concerns only a small sliver of the public. The public comment process has some virtues and should continue. It is time to recognize, however, that for rulemaking over issues on the scale of net neutrality, with entrenched and vocal participants on both sides of the aisle, the public comment process has become a farce.

[Peter Flaherty is president of the National Legal and Policy Center.]

The world’s 3.6 billion internet users depend on computer algorithms to sort through the vast ocean of information available online. Algorithms follow a set of programmed instructions to transform data into a form that humans can understand, deciding everything from the content of social media feeds to the creditworthiness of borrowers. Though algorithms handle digital data, their decisions also have consequences in the analog world.

In May, a homeowner in Illinois filed a lawsuit against the real estate data website Zillow, alleging that their home value estimator tool significantly undervalued her home and impeded its sale. To protect European citizens when their data is used in “automated decisionmaking”, the European Union enacted new data protection rules last year. This kind of scrutiny may increase with a greater reliance on algorithms to make sense of online data.

Consumers aren’t comfortable with their data being collected by smart TVs, according to a survey conducted by Videa, Cox Media’s automated ad platform. The survey found that 48 percent of consumers said they were somewhat, mostly or completely uncomfortable with advertisers collecting Smart TV data. Only 39 percent said they are somewhat, mostly or completely comfortable with their data being collected by advertisers. The answer most given, at 21 percent of respondents, was that they were completely uncomfortable with the data collection.

[Commentary] Prime Minister Theresa May’s political fortunes may be waning in Britain, but her push to make internet companies police their users’ speech is alive and well. In the aftermath of the recent London attacks, PM May called platforms like Google and Facebook breeding grounds for terrorism. She has demanded that they build tools to identify and remove extremist content. Leaders of the Group of 7 countries recently suggested the same thing. Germany wants to fine platforms up to 50 million euros if they don’t quickly take down illegal content. And a European Union draft law would make YouTube and other video hosts responsible for ensuring that users never share violent speech. The fears and frustrations behind these proposals are understandable. But making private companies curtail user expression in important public forums — which is what platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become — is dangerous. Outraged demands for “platform responsibility” are a muscular-sounding response to terrorism that shifts public attention from the governments’ duties. But we don’t want an internet where private platforms police every word at the behest of the state. Such power over public discourse would be Orwellian in the hands of any government, be it May’s, Donald Trump’s or Vladimir Putin’s.

[Keller is the director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and previously was associate general counsel to Google]

White House social-media director Dan Scavino Jr. violated a federal law that bars public officials from using their positions for political activity when he urged President Donald Trump's supporters to defeat a GOP congressman, the Office of Special Counsel has concluded. As a result, Scavino was issued a warning letter and advised that additional violations of the law could result in further action, according to a June 5 letter that the office sent to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which filed a complaint about Scavino's tweet.

Scavino's April 1 message called on the “#TrumpTrain” to take out Rep Justin Amash (R-MI) in an upcoming primary, referring to him as “a big liability.” Rep Amash is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group that President Trump had blamed at the time for derailing legislation that would have repealed parts of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even though Scavino was tweeting from his personal account, his page at the time listed his official White House position and featured a photo of him inside the Oval Office.

Multichannel video programming distributors (pay-TV providers) have a July 10 deadline for making their TV Everywhere programming more accessible to the blind and visually impaired everywhere. The Federal Communications Commission's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau was reminding those MVPDs this week that as of that date they are required to pass through a secondary audio stream of emergency information if they allow their subs to access linear (prescheduled) programming services via second-screen devices—laptops, phones—as part of their service, yet another step in the FCC's ongoing implementation of the Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) of 2010 requirement that emergency information in crawls and graphics that break into regular programming are accessible.

The definition of linear programming subject to the requirement is network programming that "can only be received via a connection provided by the MVPD using an MVPD-provided application or plug-in." So, it does not apply to programming that is only distributed via the internet (Netflix, Hulu) that is accessible by subs using either an MVPD-provided broadband connection or a third-party ISP connection.

[Commentary] Since assuming leadership of the Federal Communications Commission earlier in 2017, Ajit Pai has been working to roll back the stifling Obama-era rules to return the power of the internet back to consumers and the public. This will benefit everybody, but this is particularly personal for millennials and young consumers who have grown up online and are driving much of the innovation that we see in Silicon Valley. Tumblr, Mashable and Snapchat are just a handful of the many tech companies that millennials have helped start that are changing the way we live. But if bureaucrats and special interest groups have their way, the government will control the internet and pick winners and losers.

Younger consumers want a better, faster, cheaper internet – and a one-size-fits-all regulation that reflects the world of the 1930s is not the answer.

[David Barnes is the policy director of Generation Opportunity.]

As President Donald Trump faces criticism for blocking users on his Twitter account, people across the country say they, too, have been cut off by elected officials at all levels of government after voicing dissent on social media. In Arizona, a disabled Army veteran grew so angry when her congressman blocked her and others from posting dissenting views on his Facebook page that she began delivering actual blocks to his office. A central Texas congressman has barred so many constituents on Twitter that a local activist group has begun selling T-shirts complaining about it. And in Kentucky, the Democratic Party is using a hashtag, #BevinBlocked, to track those who’ve been blocked on social media by Gov Matt Bevin (R-KY).

The growing combat over social media is igniting a new-age legal debate over whether losing this form of access to public officials violates constituents’ First Amendment rights to free speech and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Those who’ve been blocked say it’s akin to being thrown out of a town hall meeting for holding up a protest sign.

A team of veteran Republican operatives is taking its talent for under-the-radar political muckraking to an unlikely place: The liberal-leaning, Democratic-donating, Donald Trump-hating tech epicenter of Silicon Valley. The newest startup setting up shop in the Bay Area is Definers Public Affairs, a Washington (DC)-based outfit that seeks to apply the dark science of political opposition research to the business world. Their mission: To arm companies with ammunition to attack their corporate rivals, sway their government overseers and shape the public’s opinion on controversial issues.

To the GOP-led political venture, Silicon Valley is a natural target for their so-called “oppo” efforts. The tech industry is characteristically hyper-competitive, with boardroom squabbles, takeover attempts, and legal wars over employees and patents and regulations. Definers hopes to supply some of its future tech clients with the gossip, dirt and intel to win those fights. But the firm’s new Oakland-based operative — Tim Miller, who previously served as communications director to GOP presidential contender Jeb Bush — plans to do it with a decidedly Republican bent. The region’s tech heavyweights have long struggled to form relationships with GOP candidates and causes, so Miller and crew are pitching a way for those companies to leverage the power — or outrage — of the country’s most influential, vocal conservative groups to defeat their political or corporate enemies.

Facebook released a new set of tools to help facilitate civic engagement and discourse between voters and their representatives. The new tools give both constituents and lawmakers more targeted means of interacting with another, and are a part of Facebook’s larger push to introduce civically focused features to the platform. Facebook’s three new targeted tools now give users the options to show lawmakers that they are a constituent from their district, show lawmakers what topics are trending among their own constituents and allow lawmakers to share posts targeted specifically to their voters. The “Constituent Badge,” feature will allow users to opt in to displaying a badge that they are a part of a lawmaker’s district, so that they lawmakers can know that they’re engaging with those they represent.