Ownership

In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville (VA) ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that "there's no room in American society" for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK. But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, e-mails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company. During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.

YouTube recently surfaced videos peddling misinformation, hateful messages and conspiracy theories to users searching about mainstream news events—problems that caused the site to change its search results to promote more authoritative sources. In response to criticism of some search results on social media this week, YouTube is accelerating the rollout of planned changes to its search engine, apparently. On Oct 3 night, the company began promoting more authoritative sources in search results, especially for those about major news events. YouTube doesn’t disclose how it determines which sources are authoritative.

Public Knowledge, Consumer Federation of America, and New Networks Institute filed an amicus brief in the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit requesting the Court to overturn and remand the Federal Communications Commission’s recent Business Data Services deregulation Order. Public Knowledge argues that the agency’s competition analysis, which found that duopoly competition -- real or potential -- is “sufficient” to discipline market power and high prices in the BDS market, is ludicrous. The Commission’s analysis is inconsistent with competition law and unsupported by the record, and the Order will lead to higher prices in the BDS market, which consumers will ultimately pay.

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the panel will develop a "stronger partnership" with social media companies in order identify foreign entities trying to sow division within the country. "We're going to have to have a much stronger partnership where the intelligence committee identifies Russian troll farms like the one here, they share that information with the social media companies so they can identify those accounts and take them down," Schiff said. rep Schiff said these companies have to be "good corporate citizens" and dedicate more time and resources to properly monitor the threat of outside agents taking advantage of the platforms to influence attitudes or events in the US.

Digiday published a story last week suggesting that many major publishers are shifting away from Facebook toward other social platforms to distribute their work. “Facebook loses attention as publishers shift focus to other platforms,” the headline announced. But if publishers are really going cold on Facebook, they have a funny way of showing it. Let’s take CNN, which Digiday reported was “de-emphasizing Facebook” in favor of other platforms.

Far from showing signs of de-emphasizing Facebook, this was the sixth month out of the last seven where the number of Facebook posts surpassed the number made in the previous month. Data collected from CrowdTangle (which is now owned by Facebook) indicates that CNN posted more in September to Facebook than any month in the last two years. If the newsroom resources being dedicated to Facebook are being reeled in, it isn’t reflected in the number of raw posts.

A sufficiently successful social platform is experienced, much like Uber, as a piece of infrastructure. Except, instead of wrapping its marketplace around a city’s roads, Facebook makes a new market around communication, media and civil society. This, from a founder’s perspective, is an electrifying outcome. But this cultural metastasis has led to a swift and less-than-discriminate backlash. Already, calls for regulating the largest internet platforms are growing louder while remaining tellingly vague. After all, what can a government realistically do about a problem like Facebook?

Facebook and Twitter have each agreed to appear before US lawmakers and testify publicly as part of a congressional probe into Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election. Google has also been invited to testify at that hearing, scheduled before the Senate Intelligence Committee on November 1, but the search giant did not immediately comment on its plans Oct 4.

The rare appearance in front of one of the most powerful panels on Capitol Hill could prove to be a uniquely uncomfortable one for the country’s top technology companies. Facebook and Twitter, at least, are set to face tough questions -- for the first time, in the open — about the Russian-backed accounts and advertisers that took advantage of their platforms to spread misinformation ahead of Election Day. For now, though, Facebook and Twitter have not yet shared whether their chief executives — Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, respectively — would testify in front of Senate investigators.

Newsroom employees at The Los Angeles Times are trying to form a union, setting up a potential clash with the newspaper’s parent company, Tronc. After months of organizing, the committee behind the push for a union drafted a one-page letter laying out its reasoning and left printouts on employees’ desks the night of Oct 3.The unsigned letter calls for improved working conditions, higher pay, more generous benefits and protections for staff members against “unilateral change by Tronc.” The letter also says “a majority of the newsroom” had signed union cards supporting representation by the NewsGuild, which represents 25,000 reporters, editors, photojournalists and other media workers at news organizations across the United States.

We’re trying something new in our next two Fiber cities. When we begin serving customers in Louisville (KY) and San Antonio (TX), we’ll focus on providing superfast Internet - and the endless content possibilities that creates - without the traditional TV add on.

If you’ve been reading the business news lately, you know that more and more people are moving away from traditional methods of viewing television content. Customers today want to control what, where, when, and how they get content. They want to do it their way, and we want to help them. For our existing markets with TV as a part of their product offerings, nothing is changing -- although more and more of you are choosing Internet-only options from Google Fiber. We’ve seen this over and over again in our Fiber cities. Louisville and San Antonio -- our superfast Internet service will be there soon. We’re excited to see what you do with Google Fiber in your own way.