Digital Content

Twitter's move to label two tweets by President Donald Trump as misinformation highlights a widening divide among big tech platforms on how they handle political speech, an increasingly contentious issue as the U.S. presidential election approaches.

Tensions between President Donald Trump and Twitter escalated as he threatened to "strongly regulate" or shut down social media platforms, which he accused of silencing conservative viewpoints. President Trump's threat came the day after Twitter added a fact-check warning to his tweets claiming that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices," President Trump tweeted the morning of May 27. "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.

The US Court of Appeals in Washington rejected claims that social media giants conspired to suppress conservative views online. The court affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit by the nonprofit group Freedom Watch and the right-wing YouTube personality Laura Loomer, who accused the companies of violating antitrust laws and the First Amendment. The organization didn’t provide enough evidence of an antitrust violation, and the companies aren’t state entities that can violate free speech rights, a three-judge panel held in a decision only four pages long.

Twitter for the first time applied a fact-checking notice to a tweet from President Donald Trump, hours after the company denied a widower’s request to delete the president’s posts circulating conspiracy theories about his wife’s death. Twitter applied the fact-checking notices to two tweets from the president about the potential for fraud involving mail-in ballots. With a small label—“Get the facts about mail-in ballots”—and a link to more information, Twitter alerted its users that those claims were unsubstantiated.

Apparently, President Donald Trump is considering establishing a panel to review complaints of anticonservative bias on social media, in a move that would likely draw pushback from technology companies and others. The plans are still under discussion but could include the establishment of a White House-created commission that would examine allegations of online bias and censorship. The administration could also encourage similar reviews by federal regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission, apparently.

The recently passed Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act added $1.5 billion to an existing grant program of the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA). This is a significant opportunity, both because of the size of the allocation and its breadth of eligibility. The grants are available to local and state governments, non-profits, and other non-commercial entities that have a compelling case for using infrastructure projects (including broadband initiatives) to ameliorate the economic effects of the coronavirus crisis.

The Association of National Advertisers says that the new browser obligations in the proposed implementing regulations of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are "a regulatory hammer blow against the anvil of the pandemic-driven pullback in the broader ad market." That came in a letter to Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA) in response to a letter from the congressman on a related subject, keyword filtering.

It took less than a week at the end of February for the top 10 Amazon search terms in multiple countries to fill up with products related to COVID-19. You can track the spread of the pandemic by what we shopped for: the items peaked first in Italy, followed by Spain, France, Canada, and the US. The UK and Germany lag slightly behind. “It’s an incredible transition in the space of five days,” says Rael Cline, Nozzle’s CEO. The ripple effects have been seen across retail supply chains.

The latest Verizon Network Report shows Americans slowly falling back into old habits. On May 13, slightly over 760 million calls were made, falling well below the peak daily call volume during the COVID pandemic at over 860 million calls. Text messaging continues its week over week decline falling another 5% to just under 6 billion texts sent on May 13. That is compared to over 9 billion texts sent at the peak of the COVID pandemic. As call and text volumes fall back towards pre-COVID levels, working and schooling from home continues.

Almost two months ago, Netflix said it would reduce video bit rates for 30 days in Europe, aiming to reduce bandwidth consumed by customers by 25% during the COVID-19 crisis. It has now been 55 days since that announcement — and Netflix customers in Europe and the UK say the streamer is still delivering throttled HD and Ultra HD video, in some cases with bit rates at less than 50% usual.