Platforms

Elon Musk has lined up the funding he needs for his proposed takeover of Twitter. In a new filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on April 21, Musk laid out his plan for the $46.5 billion worth of loans that will allow him to finance the buyout offer made on April 14th.

Social media companies are often accused of anti-conservative bias, particularly in terms of which users they suspend. Here, we evaluate this possibility empirically. We begin with a survey of 4,900 Americans, which showed strong bipartisan support for social media companies taking actions against online misinformation. We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election.

For platform companies, endorsing the concept of a new digital regulatory authority should be an act of enlightened self-interest. The idea that a handful of platforms can continue to make their own behavioral rules even when those decisions harm the public interest is no longer sustainable. The absence of a uniform federal policy is not only not in the interest of the public, but also it is creating problems for these companies. The ultimate uncertainty is a set of unknown decisions from multiple regulators.

Elon Musk doesn't seem to have much of a vision for how to actually run Twitter, if his takeover bid succeeds. He's not alone. A small group of tech moguls believe America is in the midst of what they call a "free speech" crisis, and they're investing time and money to change the terms of public discourse. But so far, they've made more headlines than progress.

Crime might seem like a fake issue to the promoters of the metaverse — the kind of thing waved around by skeptics who “don’t get it.” But consumers are already thinking about it, and so is the industry.

Email services use spam filtering algorithms (SFAs) to filter emails that are unwanted by the user. However, at times, the emails perceived by an SFA as unwanted may be important to the user. Such incorrect decisions can have significant implications if SFAs treat emails of user interest as spam on a large scale. This is particularly important during national elections.

New investments flooding partisan media platforms are starting to restructure the US internet business around the nation's

Senate Democrats used a parliamentary maneuver to advance President Biden’s nomination of Georgetown University law professor Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission, setting the stage for Democrats to gain a 3-2 majority on the panel.

As Russia makes preparations to possibly disconnect from the global internet in a bid to control the narrative around the invasion of Ukraine, Lantern is rushing to lay the final pieces of an unbreakable network that the Kremlin won’t be able to take down. The company has seen staggering growth inside Russia in the last four weeks for its app that allows users to bypass restrictions the Kremlin has put in place on platforms like Facebook, Twitter