Digital Content

After the Senate’s session with Facebook global head of safety Antigone Davis on September 30, close observers think bipartisan outrage may finally be strong enough for Congress to crack down on Facebook and its peers. “Facebook has given lawmakers and regulators an invaluable political opening to begin restructuring how it can do business, in terms of research, advertising and data use,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy.

Sens Edward Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep Kathy Castor (D-FL) reintroduced the Kids Internet Design and Safety (KIDS) Act (S.2918) to stop online practices such as manipulative marketing, amplification of harmful content, and damaging design features, which threaten young people online.

South Korean Internet service provider SK Broadband (SK) has sued Netflix to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work because of a surge of viewers.

The China World Internet Conference, also known as the Wuzhen Summit, is a state-run conference where bigwigs in China's tech industry used to gather, party and tout their grand ideas and growth strategies. The conference, in its eighth year, has reliably offered a look at Beijing's particular vision of global internet governance and digital sovereignty.

Online issues such as personal privacy, marketplace competition, and misinformation only become greater challenges in the metaverse. Rather than being distracted by the shiny new bauble, policymakers need to focus on the underlying problems of the digital revolution, which won’t go away with new technological developments.

To Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, people are tired of how today’s Internet operates. He says the social media era of the Internet, a charge led by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, has separated commerce from the general audience, herding users together and directing them to targets of the company’s choosing rather than allowing free exploration. “Now we’re in a closed platform wave, and Apple and Google are surfing that wave too,” Sweeney said.

Facebook has come under increasing fire for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. The company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users.

The way that Facebook controls its News Feed is often controversial and largely opaque to the outside world. Now the company is attempting to shine more light on the content it surpresses but doesn't remove entirely. Facebook published its “Content Distribution Guidelines” detailing the roughly three-dozen types of posts it demotes for various reasons in the News Feed, like clickbait and posts by repeat policy offenders.

Global internet freedom declined for the 11th consecutive year. The greatest deteriorations were documented in Myanmar, Belarus, and Uganda, where state forces cracked down amid electoral and constitutional crises.