Ownership

[Commentary] I worry that as we focus on Russian bots on Twitter influencing elections, we’re ignoring a bigger threat to democracy and the political process right here at home: the proposed merger of Sinclair Broadcast Group with Tribune Media Company. Imagine what could happen to politics if Sinclair becomes the dominant local news gatekeeper.

With their time tested tactic of depopulating local news of trusted anchors, “disappearing” reliable “gatekeepers” the way Pol Pot eliminated dissenters, there wouldn’t even be news voices in key markets with the stature to help primary and caucus voters distinguish between truth and tall tales. Just think of the election eve surprises that a Sinclair broadcast could offer before the Iowa caucuses. There’s no shortage today of people and platforms aiming to divide Americans. They don’t just reside in the Kremlin. Think twice before greenlighting a merger that would enable even more “trumpization” of American politics.

[David Wade was national press secretary for the 2004 John Kerry campaign and served as spokesman for vice presidential nominee Joseph Biden for the 2008 Barack Obama campaign. He is founder of the strategic communications firm Green Light Strategies.]

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sent a clear message to Washington in an interview with Axios' Mike Allen: Facebook will help investigators looking into Russian election meddling on the platform, but it isn't changing the core values and business plan that have powered the company's growth.

Sandberg held firm to the company's longstanding hard line on free speech, saying the company would not remove the Russian-linked ads if they were posted by "legitimate people" and not fake accounts. "The thing about free expression is that when you you allow free expression, you allow free expression." Facebook, she said, would have run an ad purchased by House Communications Subcommittee Chair Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that was blocked on Twitter because of anti-abortion language the platform called inflammatory. "When you cut off speech for one person, you cut off speech for other people." Asked about whether the Trump campaign's ad targeting overlapped with the targeting used by Russian pages, Sandberg dodged the question multiple times. Instead she offered a defense of the sprawling targeted ad operation that has made Facebook billions.

Technology companies are on the defensive, battling waves of criticism. Facebook is overrun by fake news and sold political ads to the Russians. Rivals accuse Google of skewing its search results, and women have sued the company for alleged discrimination in pay and promotions. Liberals complain the platforms are enabling hate speech; conservatives say they are suppressing free speech. Some policy makers want to curb companies they say have grown too powerful. You’d never know it by asking the American people.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google have all held steady in daily favorability polls conducted by research firm Morning Consult over the past year. The ratings wiggle a bit from week to week, but the companies haven't seen any decline. As of Oct 12, 88 percent of respondents view Google favorably, compared with only 6 percent who hold a negative view. Morning Consult calls this a "net favorability" of 82 percent. By the same measure, Amazon is at 77 percent, and Facebook sits at 60 percent.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai still hasn't publicly responded to President Trump's call for NBC and other networks to have their FCC licenses challenged, and Democratic lawmakers are stepping up the pressure.

Reps. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) called for a Congressional hearing in which Chairman Pai and the other FCC commissioners "can publicly disavow President Donald Trump's repeated threats to revoke NBC's broadcaster license due to its reporting." They said, “Over the past few days, the President has repeatedly attacked news outlets and their FCC licenses. This threat alone may already be chilling free speech across the country. That is why we and others have called on the FCC chairman to immediately condemn this intimidation and promise to the American public that he will not follow through on the directions he has received from the president. Despite our calls, the chairman has refused to say if he agrees with the president. We therefore ask for a hearing as soon as possible with all five FCC commissioners so that they can publicly and under oath commit that they will not threaten broadcasters or their licenses because of the content of their reporting.”

At the start of this decade, the Arab Spring blossomed with the help of social media. That is the sort of story the tech industry loves to tell about itself: It is bringing freedom, enlightenment and a better future for all mankind. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, proclaimed that this was exactly why his social network existed. In a 2012 manifesto for investors, he said Facebook was a tool to create “a more honest and transparent dialogue around government.” The result, he said, would be “better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.”

Now tech companies are under fire for creating problems instead of solving them. At the top of the list is Russian interference in last year’s presidential election. Social media might have originally promised liberation, but it proved an even more useful tool for stoking anger. The manipulation was so efficient and so lacking in transparency that the companies themselves barely noticed it was happening. The election is far from the only area of concern. Tech companies have accrued a tremendous amount of power and influence. Amazon determines how people shop, Google how they acquire knowledge, Facebook how they communicate. All of them are making decisions about who gets a digital megaphone and who should be unplugged from the web. Their amount of concentrated authority resembles the divine right of kings, and is sparking a backlash that is still gathering force.

The story was explosive if true: Google planned to buy Apple for $9 billion, according to a Dow Jones Newswire headline earlier this week. Dow Jones deleted the story after just a few minutes, explaining that it was accidentally published as part of a technology test. And sophisticated stock traders likely didn’t even have enough time to digest the news before it was corrected, much less take any action. Yet that brief bit of fake news was blamed for a minor jump in Apple’s stock price to about $158 a share before falling back to around $155.

But if the headline was too absurd to be believed who was likely momentarily tricked? Bots. An increasing portion of stock trades every day are controlled by computer algorithms, many of which scan Twitter feeds, news headlines and other social media looking for tidbits that can move markets. And much of that trading it taking place in a blink of an eye with high-speed traders who measure time in microseconds. In a recent research report, JPMorgan Chase estimated that just 10 percent of daily trading is done by human stock pickers. The growing reliance on technology rather than humans to make stock trades has made identifying disreputable news a bigger challenge, market industry veterans have said.

Masayoshi Son is taking another run at his dream to create a US mobile phone heavyweight, but a revived deal would be scrutinized by many of the same officials who batted down his last attempt. Staff attorneys inside the Justice Department’s antitrust division are likely to view any plans to merge his Sprint with T-Mobile US as a threat to competition in the mobile market, according to three people familiar with the staff’s thinking.

If they recommend to sue to block the deal, that would leave it to President Donald Trump’s new antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, to decide whether to fight the tie-up, or overrule them and approve it. If he decides to oppose a deal, the Justice Department would file a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block the proposed tie-up and would need to persuade a judge that the combination is anticompetitive. The antitrust chief isn’t obligated to follow the staff’s position, but typically has. Delrahim, who was confirmed to his post at the antitrust division Sept. 27, hasn’t commented publicly on how he views the mobile market.

I am concerned the Federal Communications Commission is gearing up to approve a transaction that will hand a single broadcast company the unprecedented ability to reach more than 70 percent of American households. It hasn’t happened yet. But there are disconcerting signs.

Before I returned to the Commission, the agency inexplicably resurrected an outdated and scientifically inaccurate system for tallying station ownership, known as the UHF discount. It also reversed an effort to investigate joint sales agreements. Both steps helped speed the way for this transaction—which would combine two broadcasting giants: Tribune and Sinclair The bottom line is we are not going to remedy what ails our media with a rush of new consolidation. We are not going to fix our inability to ferret fact from fiction by doubling down on a single company owning ever more of our public airwaves.

Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research recently showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.

Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible. Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier. “This is public interest data,” Albright said Oct 11, expressing frustration that such a rich trove of information had disappeared — or at least moved somewhere the public can’t see it. “This data allowed us to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle. Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing.”

[Commentary] The actions that Facebook and Twitter take to police speech don't follow any kind of moral compass, are disproportionately applied, and—at least outwardly—seem completely arbitrary. For all of Silicon Valley's pretensions of being arbiters of free speech, these companies are fundamentally incapable of shaping a healthy public discourse. Making tough decisions, unfortunately, isn't always good for business.