Elections and Media

Nobel laureate and journalist Maria Ressa wants to scare some sense into American voters. The U.S. election is just a month away, and she considers the outcome to be a “tipping point” in the fight for democracy over autocracy. Ressa founded the news site Rappler in the Philippines in 2012 and faced relentless persecution for her journalism under former President Rodrigo Duterte. Her fight for press freedom earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 alongside Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.

Although a great deal of attention is on the 2024 elections at the national level, state elections could play a major role in how high-speed networks are rolled out, particularly in regards to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. The need for reliable communications is very apparent in the state this week. Since Friday, September 27, Western North Carolina has been experiencing catastrophic flooding as a result of Hurricane Helene.

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California will now require social media companies to moderate the spread of election-related impersonations powered by artificial intelligence, known as “deepfakes,” after Gov Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed three new laws on the subject on September 17. The three laws, including a first-of-its-kind law that imposes a new requirement on social media platforms, largely deal with banning or labeling deepfakes. Only one of the laws will

Top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, the National Economic Council, and private industry all dropped by downtown Washington for the POLITICO AI & Tech Summit on September 17. And with the first presidential election of the generative AI era a mere seven weeks away, much of their attention was turned to ensuring its security and trustworthiness. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) described how artificial intelligence demands a response from each sector of government.

We don’t need any more delays in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant process, but there are potential delays on the horizon due to the political calendar. What do I mean by political calendar? There is going to be a new president in the White House, and that means a change in many of the people who run various cabinets and agencies. It could mean a new head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is run by an Assistant Secretary of Commerce.

How will the elections determine how the stock markets react? Traditional wisdom says internet service providers (ISPs) will do better in policy terms under Republicans than under Democrats as Democrats are more likely to take regulatory action that hurts ISPs. This may have been true in the past, but it’s now wrong, according to NewStreet Research Policy Advisor Blair Levin. “There are discrete issues on which ISPs favor the Republican approach.

On the surface, the apologetic letter Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent to congressional Republicans on Monday looks like a capitulation in the long-simmering political wars

When Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” at the Democratic National Convention this week, the audience went wild, and the internet made the moment go viral. But on Trump’s end, something else was also going on when he made his (false) assertions that Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to inflate the crowd sizes in images of her rallies. AI might not have blown up politics the way some people worried it was going to.

The Federal Communications Commission reached a settlement to resolve its enforcement action against Lingo Telecom, a voice service provider that transmitted spoofed robocalls that used generative AI voice cloning technology to spread disinformation in connection with a presidential primary election in New Hampshire.  The calls were directed by a political consultant named Steve Kramer in an attempt to interfere in the 2024 New Hampshire primary election.