Platforms

Here’s the bad news: We can’t trust Silicon Valley to police itself. Here’s the other bad news: We can’t trust Washington politicians to police it, either. Our policymakers are ill prepared to protect the public from those who wish us harm — or even from companies willing to profit off that harm. Case in point ... 

In Sept, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will kick off its planned Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.  The timing is auspicious.  Now that the FTC once again oversees the entire internet ecosystem, including broadband internet service providers (ISPs), it should pursue two overarching objectives.

The European Commission is drafting new rules designed to rid social media platforms of terrorist content after concluding that a voluntary program wasn't working. It had previously asked tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google, to remove terrorist propaganda within an hour. "With regards to terrorist content, the results have been positive but progress is not sufficient," said a spokesperson for the Commission.

President Trump said that conservative voices were being unfairly censored on social media, hinting that he might intervene if his allies’ accounts continued to be shut down. “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,” President Trump wrote on Twitter, saying that “censorship is a very dangerous thing.” “Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen,” he added.

Once silent on InfoWars, the controversial media outlet that publishes viral conspiracy theories, consumer-facing media companies like YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Apple, and Twitter have pulled an about-face in recent weeks, cutting ties with the website and its owner Alex Jones. The result: The ability for Jones and InfoWars to reach viewers with videos, listeners with podcasts, and followers with posts appears to have been severely curtailed. But Jones doesn’t need these companies to reach the InfoWars audience.

Housing Sec Ben Carson accused Facebook of enabling illegal housing discrimination by giving landlords and developers advertising tools that made it easy to exclude people based on race, gender, zip code or religion -- or whether a potential renter has young children at home or a personal disability. The action, which comes after nearly two years of preliminary investigation, amounts to a formal legal complaint against the company and starts a process that could culminate in a federal lawsuit against Facebook.

[Commentary] Millions of Americans use social media to get their news, and that number is growing rapidly by the year. But when they log on, they don’t always get the full story. Powerful social media companies are filtering the information that users receive on their platforms. As a result, the picture we get of politics is partial and distorted, like a carnival mirror. Twitter’s subtle censorship targeted conservatives, and seemingly only conservatives.

[Commentary] “Operation Golden Gate” was the name of a 1948 plan among the followers of a political movement known as Technocracy Inc. to converge on the San Francisco Bay area. These self-described Technocrats gathered from around the country to educate the public in their central belief: that politicians lacked the ability to effectively manage the complexities of the modern world and that the public should delegate decision-making instead to a small group of technological experts.

Facebook has made a mint by enabling advertisers to identify and reach the very people most likely to react to their messages. Ad buyers can select audiences based on details like a user’s location, political leanings and interests. And they can aim their ads at as few as 20 of the 1.5 billion daily users of the social network. Brands love it. So do political campaigns. But microtargeting, as the technique is called, is coming under increased scrutiny in the United States and Europe.

Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company’s decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.