Labor

As the tech industry has grown in power and influence, its politics have moved to the left. When people want to understand Silicon Valley’s political leanings, they often look to CA’s 17th Congressional District. Apple and Intel are headquartered there, as is Tesla’s manufacturing plant. In 2016, the voters of the 17th elected Ro Khanna, a former deputy assistant secretary in Obama’s Commerce Department, to represent them. Based on his 2017 legislative record, GovTrack ranked Rep Khanna the 14th-most-liberal representative in the House.

Newspaper layoffs have far from abated in the past year, and digital-native news outlets are also suffering losses.  At least 36 percent of the largest newspapers across the United States – as well as at least 23 percent of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets – experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to the Pew study. Among newspapers, those with the highest circulation were most likely to be affected.

The Communications Workers of America said DC Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh should not be allowed to join the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, a judicial conservative who has participated in numerous cases involving communications issues, was tapped by President Donald Trump on July 9 to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is exiting at the end of July.

Clothing design is only the leading edge of the way algorithms are transforming the fashion and retail industries. Companies now routinely use artificial intelligence to decide which clothes to stock and what to recommend to customers. And fashion, which has long shed blue-collar jobs in the United States, is in turn a leading example of how artificial intelligence is affecting a range of white-collar work as well.

The Communications Workers of America has joined the Freedom from Facebook coalition and is backing the effort to get the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook. “We should all be deeply concerned by Facebook’s power over our lives and democracy," said CWA strategist Brian Thorn in a statement. "It’s time for the FTC to hold Facebook accountable, impose strong privacy rules on the platform, and break up the monopoly.

Google, YouTube and Facebook could escape having to make billions in payouts to press publishers, record labels and artists after European Union lawmakers voted to reject proposed changes to copyright rules that aimed to make the tech companies share more of their revenues.

Facebook is hiring more engineers in Washington (DC) as it tackles problems, like countering online extremism and foreign election meddling, that have received attention from policymakers.  The plan to “quintuple” the social network’s DC engineering force underscores how the company’s future is more intertwined than ever with decisions made in the nation’s capital. The expansion comes after Facebook moved into a new 75,000 square foot Washington office that can accommodate the new workforce, with features that include a cafe serving multiple free meals a day similar to those in its Californ

On July 3, 1968, the Federal Communications Commission first concluded that equal opportunity in employment was essential to the public interest, and committed to ensuring that the national policy against discrimination in hiring applied to broadcast licensees. To mark the 50th anniversary of this decision and to improve the Commission’s enforcement of its equal employment opportunity (EEO) rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai shared with his colleagues a proposal to shift agency staff responsible for enforcing the FCC’s EEO rules from the Media Bureau to the Enforcement Bureau.

Technology experts and scholars have never been at a loss for concerns about the current and future impact of the internet. Over the years of canvassings by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, many experts have been anxious about the way people’s online activities can undermine truth, foment distrust, jeopardize individuals’ well-being when it comes to physical and emotional health, enable trolls to weaken democracy and community, compromise human agency as algorithms become embedded in more activities, kill privacy, make institutions less secure, open u

The percentage of women and people of color in TV newsrooms and in TV news management are at the highest levels ever measured by the RTDNA/Hofstra University Newsroom Survey. About a quarter (24.8%) of newsroom staffers are people of color--11.&% African American, 10.8% Hispanic or Latino, 2% Asian and .3% Native American. That is still well below minority representation in the population as a whole, which is about 38%. Highlights: