Platforms

During an Oct 17 debate in his campaign for re-election, Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), when asked about whether Congress should regulate online social media, referenced Section 230 of the1996 Communications Decency Act. He began first by explaining that he took Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to task for Facebook privileging content from certain political viewpoints. He then went on to say that if tech companies are not acting impartial to content, then they shouldn’t be held to the rules that say they are.

For two years, Alex Stamos was the Facebook executive tasked with defending the company’s systems against Russian interference and other critical threats. Now the former chief security officer, who left the social network in Aug, says Facebook — and the entire technology industry — needs a systems of checks and balances to help it weigh the complex decisions Silicon Valley companies are making in areas including security and democratic expression.

Federal Trade Commissioner Rohit Chopra set the stage for the agency’s look at tech platforms by focusing on how digital marketplaces harvest data, and how operators set the rules for buying and selling in the marketplaces.

Facebook is going to begin banning false information involving voting ahead of the US’s Nov 2018 midterm elections. Before the 2016 elections, Facebook banned posts that provided misinformation as to where people could go to vote and at what time polls opened or closed.

Days after revelations of sweeping security vulnerabilities at Facebook and Google, former CIA director John Brennan offered no confidence that we’ve discovered all of yesterday’s bad news about social-network security and can move on to preventing tomorrow’s. “I don’t think we’ve turned a corner yet, from the standpoint of remediation or prevention,” he said.

Since the 2016 US presidential election, many Americans have expressed concern about the presence of misinformation online, particularly on social media. This topic has drawn the attention of much of the public: About two-thirds of Americans (66%) have heard about social media bots, though far fewer (16%) have heard a lot about these accounts. Among those aware of the phenomenon, a large majority are concerned that bot accounts are being used maliciously, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

A Q&A with Sen Mark Warner (D-VA). 

Facebook said that it has purged more than 800 US publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically oriented content that violated the company’s spam policies, a move that could reignite accusations of political censorship. The accounts and pages, with names such as Reasonable People Unite and Reverb Press, were probably domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spammy tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads, the company said.

In the US and European Union, a series of two-decade-old legal provisions dating to the web’s early days allow internet companies to host content posted by users without being legally responsible for it. Thanks to that immunity, US companies have built massive profit engines around material such as Facebook posts, Instagram photos and YouTube videos, without having to screen them ahead of time. But now lawmakers and regulators in the US and European Union are starting to chip away at those protections, driven by growing concern about hoaxes, hate speech and other online bad behavior.