Ownership

Facebook will release an early report on an audit of civil rights on its platform by the end of 2018, according to Color of Change, an advocacy organization that demanded the move in a meeting with COO Sheryl Sandberg. The social network hasn’t yet fulfilled any of the other requests made by the group, called Color Of Change, which has asked Facebook to: fire its top policy executive, a former Republican staffer, release data on voter suppression attempts on Facebook products, and release opposition research that a right-leaning consulting firm produced trying to link the civil rights group

Remember when futurists told us that the internet would result in the “death of distance”? That prophecy has fallen short, as cities remain hubs for commerce and community. The growing geographic consequences of digital technologies puts new demands on decision makers at all levels of government. Bolstering their levels of expertise on these issues is clearly needed and each of the local policy issues raised above would benefit from additional analytical scrutiny.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has called an upcoming House Judiciary Committee hearing with Google CEO Sundar Pichai an important “step to restoring public trust in Google & all the companies that shape the Internet.” But the prospect of Republican lawmakers using the appearance to air allegations of bias against tech companies is giving Democratic leaders pause.

In the face of that toxic content’s intractability and the futility of the tech giants’ attempts to deal with it, it’s become a mainstream belief in Washington, DC–and a growing realization in Silicon Valley–that it’s no longer a question of whether to, but how to, regulate companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook to hold them accountable for the content on their platforms. One of the most likely ways for Congress to do that would be to revise Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) and Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) have joined with Consumer Reports, Common Cause and others to call for House hearings on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint merger in the next Congress. In letters to likely new House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and likely new House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the groups said that hearings in their respective committees would be an "excellent" first step toward the incoming Democratic Reps vision of stronger antitrust enforcement (something Rep Nadler has pushed for),

Over the last few years, Luarene Powell Jobs, an activist, investor and entrepreneur, has been investing in media companies through her social impact firm, Emerson Collective. Buying up a range of unusual properties, she seems to be making an effort to turbocharge storytelling in this fractured digital age. It’s an interesting experiment to watch, because the investments include a panoply of the cool, hip and fresh in a mostly glum content industry.

Officials from nine countries examining Facebook’s business practices have spent weeks trying to get the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to face questions at a hearing. Instead, Zuckerberg was represented by an empty chair. He skipped the session, which was organized by a British committee investigating Facebook and the spread of misinformation.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons told the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee at an FTC oversight hearing that the FTC needs three things to protect consumer privacy: 1) rulemaking authority; 2) civil penalty authority—currently it can only try and make consumers whole for losses, not penalize the conduct responsible; and 3) jurisdiction over nonprofits and common carriers. Currently, the FTC has to sue or settle with alleged violators, then monitor enforcement of the settlements it secures.

Through a series of interviews with Native media practitioners and experts, Jodi Rave of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance reports on the major trends and challenges for American Indian media today: