Ownership

Facebook is fighting misinformation with more information.

When Facebook’s US users come across popular links—including made-up news articles—in their feeds, they may also see a cluster of other articles on the same topic. The “related articles” feature, which will roll out widely in the US after months of testing, is part of Facebook’s strategy to limit the damage of false news without censoring those posts. The tweaks show Facebook’s efforts to reduce the presence of misinformation on its platform, without going so far as censoring it, a role it says it doesn’t want.

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department recently agreed to tell lawmakers if the White House tries to improperly influence any decision he makes on whether to allow AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The commitment came in a meeting between the nominee, Makan Delrahim, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who wrote a July 24 letter memorializing the discussion.

“I particularly appreciated your commitment that you will brief me, in an appropriate setting, any time the White House initiates an inappropriate communication with you or anybody in the Antitrust Division,” the senator wrote to Delrahim after the meeting. People familiar with the meeting, which also included Senate and Justice Department staffers, confirmed the exchange and said the men also generally discussed the importance of the department’s independence. They said Delrahim additionally provided assurances that officials at the White House have not sought to lobby him on AT&T. The White House and the Justice Department communicate with one another, but protocols governing those discussions seek to assure that the department can operate free from improper political intervention.

Facebook wants you to read more articles on its mobile app. The company announced it will prioritize stories that load faster on a user's mobile News Feed. Stories that take longer to load could appear less. Up to 40% of website visitors leave a site after just a three-second delay, according to research from the Aberdeen Group. Facebook says the change is meant to improve the user experience, but there may be another motive here: Instant Articles. Facebook wants to host publisher stories on its own website, and one of the major benefits of hosting your content on Facebook is that it’s supposed to load faster. If load time will soon impact how many people see your post, publishers might be more inclined to use Instant Articles for fear that not doing so could hurt their distribution.

A class-action complaint against Comcast can move forward after a federal judge rejected a Comcast motion to dismiss it. The lawsuit, filed in October 2016 in US District Court in Northern California, accuses Comcast of falsely advertising low prices and then using poorly disclosed fees to increase the amount paid by cable TV customers. Those fees are the "Broadcast TV Fee," which had increased from $1.50 a month to $6.50 since 2014, and the "Regional Sports Fee" that rose from $1 to $4.50 since 2015. These fees are not included in the advertised prices, so customers end up paying higher prices than the ones they are led to believe they will pay, the lawsuit said.

When customers question Comcast reps about the fees, "Comcast staff and agents explicitly lie by stating that the Broadcast TV Fee and the Regional Sports Fee are government-related fees or taxes over which Comcast has no control," the complaint said. Comcast filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that its order submission process could not have created a contract and that customers agreed to pay the fees in the "Subscriber Agreement" and "Minimum Term Agreement." But US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria disputed Comcast's reasoning and wrote that the class-action plaintiffs have made plausible claims.

In making decisions about the limits of free speech, Facebook often fails the racial, religious and sexual minorities CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to protect. The 13-year-old social network is wrestling with the hardest questions it has ever faced as the de facto arbiter of speech for the third of the world’s population that now logs on each month. In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebook’s role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to “mitigate the bad” effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era. In June, he officially changed Facebook’s mission from connecting the world to community-building. The company says it now ­deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month. But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.

The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the ­social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues. “Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”

Apparently, President Donald Trump's administration is considering using rarely invoked US trade laws to fend off China's demands that foreign companies share their technology in return for access to the country's vast market.

The administration is discussing the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers Washington to launch an investigation into China's trade practices and, within months, raise tariffs on imports from China or impose other sanctions, apparently. The investigation would be focused on China's alleged "forced technology transfer policies and practices," the person said, adding that the Trump administration could move to launch such a probe this week.

Cable providers are among the most despised businesses in the country, regularly coming in below airlines, banks, and drug companies in public-opinion polls. "Cable is essentially a monopoly now in urban areas,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former policy adviser to President Barack Obama on science, technology, and innovation.

Internet service was deregulated during the George W. Bush Administration, with the theory that fewer rules would foster greater competition. For a time, as AT&T and Verizon started building fibre-optic networks to compete with cable Internet, there seemed to be truth to the idea. Over the past few years, however, the companies have largely abandoned those projects; according to Crawford, the capital investments required were too high. Rather than fuel vigorous competition and lower prices, the rise of these giant companies has meant that Americans are paying inflated costs for poor service.

If Sinclair Broadcast Group has its way, the local broadcast industry would boil down to two, maybe three, station groups, with one or two of them churning out local content in each market. “Right now there are three to five local players, and to us that doesn’t make sense,” CEO Chris Ripley said Aug 2 during the group’s Q2 2017 earnings call. Consolidating news operations would lead to “significant savings.” In addition, “after that you have stronger local content producers which will be able to spread their content and resources across multiple platforms." “The strategic output would also be great for the industry,” he said.

Although such consolidation is dependent on the Federal Communications Commission relaxing regulations, Ripley said he and his fellow Sinclair executives believe that is where the industry is heading. Ripley's comments come as Sinclair’s acquisition of Tribune Media – which would create a station group of unprecedented size – move through the regulatory approval process.

Discovery Communications' CEO, David Zaslav, has a plan. Perhaps, when you look beyond the headlines, you may think he has the clearest vision of how historic media properties can evolve and reinvent themselves in the new digital world. Yes, this is about the company’s $14.6 billion-dollar acquisition of Scripps — but it’s so much more than that. It comes down to this: Zaslav needs to be focused on both shoring up the current business and making meaningful inroads into the mobile/millennial media marketplace. Finding revenues and synergies between the old and new won’t be easy, but he’s been buying with clear-eyed focus, and the assets are performing.

A group of former Obama staffers, Higher Ground Labs, is taking a note from Sand Hill Road and applying venture-capital tactics to progressive politics. On Aug 2, Higher Ground is disclosing investments totaling nearly $1.5 million in 10 startups and enrolling them in a five-month accelerator program, during which they’ll work with mentors from the political-tech space to build their businesses. Higher Ground, whose founders also include former Obama-administration staffers Shomik Dutta and Andrew McLaughlin, debuted in May. Since then, some 150 groups have applied to participate in the accelerator program and a related fellowship program.

Higher Ground has raised $2.5 million from investors spanning politics and the tech industry. The companies receiving funding include Qriously, which uses programmatic online ads instead of phone calls to gauge public opinion, Victory Guide, a so-called “digital campaign manager” that gives local candidates a day-by-day agenda of campaign goals, and Tuesday Strategies, which helps volunteers send personalized text and social media messages to friends the campaign wants to reach.