Platforms

President Donald Trump announced the nomination of Nathan Simington, who is currently a senior advisor in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, to replace Michel O'Rielly on the Federal Communications Commission.

The Trump Administration is considering an unconventional pick for the next commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission: Nathan Simington, a senior adviser at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) who has played a significant role in the agency’s social media regulation agenda. The choice is still tentative, but if confirmed, the nomination would represent a significant blow to Republicans who favor a light-touch approach to telecom policy.

Apparently, a European Union privacy regulator has sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers to the US about its EU users, an operational and legal challenge for the company that could set a precedent for other tech giants. The preliminary order was sent by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission to Facebook late in Aug, asking for the company’s response. It is the first significant step EU regulators have taken to enforce a July ruling about data transfers from the bloc’s top court.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, (R-MS), Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Sen Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced the Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The legislation would clarify the original intent of the law and increase accountability for content moderation practices.

The Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act would:

Facebook will prohibit new political advertisements in the week before the US presidential election in Nov and seek to flag premature claims of victory by candidates, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said.

In a joint filing Sept. 2 to the Federal Communications Commission, six diversity groups said "no" to the question of whether the FCC should accede to the Trump Administration's desire to regulate social media content to prevent what the President has called censorship of conservative speech. The groups said they were not against finding a way to weed out racial and gender discrimination voter suppression and other internet inequities — which they suggest should be Congress' job — but that Sec. 230 should not be unilaterally reinterpreted to suit the President's internet agenda.

In the aftermath of the Kenosha (WI) shooting, an activist group called Change the Terms is calling on Facebook to institute new policies around potentially dangerous content, including a blanket ban on “event pages that encourage people to bring weapons to events.” In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Sept 3, groups called for a broad enhancement of Facebook’s moderation against extremism, including more automated tools for proactive enforcement and better systems for detecting event pages that promote violence.

Facebook moved to clamp down on any confusion about the November 2020 election on its service, rolling out a series of changes to limit voter misinformation and to prevent interference from President Donald Trump and other politicians. The social network, in one of its most sweeping sets of election actions, said it planned to bar any new political ads on its site in the week before Election Day. It said it would also strengthen measures against posts that try to dissuade people from voting.

On Sept 2, the Federal Communications Commission will take comments on NTIA’s petition on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision enacted in 1996 to address a narrow set of concerns involving nascent internet platforms that then played only a marginal role in American life.  The purpose of the provision made sense at that moment in internet history:  Section 230 sought to insulate the newly emerging tech

Listen, liberals. If you don’t think Donald Trump can get re-elected in November, you need to spend more time on Facebook. Since the 2016 election, I’ve been obsessively tracking how partisan political content is performing on Facebook, the world’s largest and arguably most influential media platform. Every morning, one of the first browser tabs I open is CrowdTangle — a handy Facebook-owned data tool that offers a bird’s-eye view of what’s popular on the platform. I check which politicians and pundits are going viral. I geek out on trending topics.