Digital Content

45 civil-rights, media-democracy and consumer-advocacy groups called on Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan to initiate a rulemaking to safeguard privacy, promote civil rights and set guardrails against the abuse of data online. Discriminatory and abusive data practices are prevalent across the digital economy, the groups wrote

Sens Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, announced that their subcommittee would take additional steps to look into Facebook’s knowledge of its platforms’ negative impact on teenagers and young users. “It is clear that Facebook is incapable of holding itself accountable," the senators stated.

A special signal known as global privacy control tells every website you visit not to pass around your personal data behind your back. Global privacy control is already tucked away in Web browser Brave and browser add-on DuckDuckGo. Soon, the Firefox browser will be adding it. Firefox says it’s rolling out the global privacy control signal to its main product in the next two or three months, according to Chief Technology Officer Eric Rescorla. Chrome users, however, must continue to wait.

Sen Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) tore into Facebook, calling the company’s stated attitudes on regulation a sham. “What we are hearing from Facebook is platitudes and bromides," Blumenthal stated. "When it says it wants regulation, at the same time it is fighting that regulation tooth and nail, day and night, with armies of lawyers, millions of dollars in lobbying.

Facebook says it does not take the political winds of Washington (DC) into account when deciding what posts to take down or products to launch. But a trove of internal documents shows that Facebook’s own employees are concerned that the company does just that — and that its DC-based policy office is deeply involved in these calls at a level not previously reported.

Many Republicans say Facebook discriminates against conservatives. But internal communications at the company show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more-senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank and file. The documents, which don’t capture all of the employee messaging, didn’t mention equivalent debates over left-wing publications.

Twitter has admitted it amplifies more tweets from rightwing politicians and news outlets than content from leftwing sources. The company examined tweets from elected officials in seven countries – the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan. It also studied whether political content from news organisations was amplified on Twitter, focusing primarily on US news sources such as Fox News, the New York Times and BuzzFeed.

Facebook is struggling to detect and deal with users’ creating multiple accounts on its flagship platform, according to internal documents that raise new questions about how the social-media giant measures its audience. An internal Facebook presentation in spring 2021 called the phenomenon of single users with multiple accounts “very prevalent” among new accounts. The finding came after an examination of roughly 5,000 recent sign-ups on the service indicated that at least 32 percent and as many as 56 percent were opened by existing users.

France has hailed a victory in its long-running quest for fairer action from tech companies after Facebook reached an agreement with a group of national and regional newspapers to pay for content shared by its users. Facebook announced a licensing agreement with the APIG alliance of French national and regional newspapers, which includes Le Parisien and Ouest-France as well as smaller titles.