Platforms

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject of whether Russian election interference affected the outcome of the 2016 election, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016.

Google’s top privacy staffer will defend the company’s business model at an upcoming Senate hearing, while backing the broad idea of new privacy rules. Google will face tough questions at the Sept 26 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on privacy, where chief privacy officer Keith Enright will appear alongside representatives from other tech companies as well as internet service providers. Enright said he plans to stand by the company’s ad-supported business model.

The White House sought to dis­tance it­self from re­ports that President Donald Trump is con­sid­er­ing an ex­ec­u­tive ord­er that would sub­ject tech giants like Facebook, Goo­gle and Twitter to federal in­ves­ti­gat­ions into al­leged po­lit­i­cal bias. For weeks, top tech com­panies have been on edge, fear­ing that the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion could seek to regu­late the in­dus­try in re­sponse to the president’s tweets at­tack­ing so­cial media sites for si­len­cing con­ser­va­tives online.

With a $20 million gift from the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, investigative journalist Julia Angwin and her partner at ProPublica, data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting The Markup, a news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society. Sue Gardner, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, will be The Markup’s executive director. Angwin and Larson said that they would hire two dozen journalists for its New York office and that stories would start going up on the website in early 2019. The group has also raised $2 million from the John S.

Conservatives who celebrate constitutional originalism should remember that the First Amendment protects against censorship by government.

Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial Muslim travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company’s search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.

Although it is not much to look at now, as of the week of Sept 24 the "War Room" will be Facebook’s headquarters for safeguarding elections.

Two days after saying an “invite will be on its way” to Google to respond to allegations of bias against conservatives, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said the plan is still in progress. “Well, I gotta sit down and talk to them about it, but there’s a number of committees that have jurisdiction, there’s three off the top of my head, and they could come and we could make it three committees, or one committee, but they need to come and testify,” he said. According to Rep McCarthy, his office has been “in communications” with Google.

The Justice Department has received “an increased level of interest from state attorneys general” for its Sept. 25 meeting on “tech companies, competition, and free exchange of ideas.” The DOJ said it invited a bipartisan group of 24 state AGs to the meeting, which comes amid an avalanche of conservative allegations of tech company bias (which the companies firmly deny). According to a Justice Department official, that group includes Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson (R), California’s Xavier Becerra (D), Washington’s Bob Ferguson (D) and Texas’ Ken Paxton (R).

The Trump Administration appears to be following through on the president’s threats to online freedom of speech. The attorney general of the United States is convening a meeting with state attorneys general  “to discuss a growing concern that these companies may be…intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.” Five Republican state attorneys general have been invited to attend so far.