Research

Newspaper layoffs have far from abated in the past year, and digital-native news outlets are also suffering losses.  At least 36 percent of the largest newspapers across the United States – as well as at least 23 percent of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets – experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to the Pew study. Among newspapers, those with the highest circulation were most likely to be affected.

The Precision Agriculture Connectivity Act of 2018 (HR 4881) would direct the Federal Communications Commission to establish the Task Force for Reviewing the Connectivity and Technology Needs of Precision Agriculture in the United States and select 15 members to serve two-year terms. The task force would be required to recommend rules and steps the FCC should take to expand broadband Internet access to unserved agricultural land and to report annually to the FCC. The task force would terminate on January 1, 2025.

The 2016 presidential election coincided with substantial shifts in the ways that members of Congress communicated with their constituents online. Democrats expressed political opposition nearly five times as much under President Donald Trump as they did during the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) commissioned an independent market research survey to determine the preferences of consumers and identify the types of activities consumers engage in when they go online. A leading independent polling and market research firm, Civic Science, designed and conducted a comprehensive, statistically-valid survey of at least 10,0000 consumers in the United States in June 2018. The results of the Civic Science Consumer Preference Survey show that:

Mobile devices have become one of the most common ways Americans get news, outpacing desktop or laptop computers. Roughly six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) often get news on a mobile device, 19 percentage points higher than the 39% who often get news on a desktop or laptop computer, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition,  a broad-based membership organization that includes anchor institutions, broadband providers and public interest groups, filed comments with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) suggesting that the agency use new broadband availability funding to collect and publish data about anchor institution broadband. Congress appropriated $7.5 million to the NTIA  to improve broadband mapping.

Congress is finally turning its attention to Silicon Valley, but to tackle these issues, congressfolk will first have to understand them. Which means it’s time to reboot the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA was staffed with several hundred nonpartisan propellerheads who studied emerging science and tech. Every year they’d write numerous clear, detailed reports and they were on call to help any congressperson. It worked admirably. Its reports helped save money and lives. With a budget of only $20 million a year, the little agency had an outsize impact.

According to some of the nation’s top Wall Street analysts, wireless network operators are positioned to reap the financial benefits of a relatively quiet first half of 2018.

Russia's information attack against the United States during the 2016 election cycle sought to take advantage of the greater trust that Americans tend to place in local news.The information operatives who worked out of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg not only sought to pose as American social media users or spread false information from purported news sources, according to new details. They also created a number of Twitter accounts that posed as sources for Americans' hometown headlines. 

July 2018 marks the fifth anniversary of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which was first coined following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. In the course of those five years, #BlackLivesMatter has become an archetypal example of modern protests and political engagement on social media: A new Pew Research Center analysis of public tweets finds the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter – an average of 17,002 times per day – as of May 1, 2018.