Stories from Abroad

It is easier to spread misinformation on social media than to correct it, and easier to inflame social divisions than to mend them. The very nature of how we engage with Facebook and the rest now helps far-right, authoritarian factions weaken the foundations of democratic systems — and even give themselves an easier pathway to seizing power. It seems we have to admit a somewhat uncomfortable truth: Social media, in the way that it’s used now, is an authoritarian medium.

A group of investors has endorsed the Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) Corporate Accountability Index as an important tool for helping tech companies meet their human rights responsibilities and for helping investors identify digital rights risks.

Parts of the world will be excluded from the internet for decades to come without major efforts to boost education, online literacy and broadband infrastructure, experts have warned. While half the world’s population now uses the internet, a desperate lack of skills and stagnant investment mean the United Nation’s goal of universal access, defined as 90% of people being online, may not be reached until 2050 or later, they said.

Google and other search engines shouldn’t be forced to apply the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” beyond the bloc’s borders, an adviser to the EU’s top court argued. The recommendation—if followed by the EU’s Court of Justice—would be a major victory for Google, which has for three years been fighting an order from France’s privacy regulator to apply the EU principle globally.  Maciej Szpunar, an advocate general for the court, argued in a nonbinding opin

The newly-released 2018 Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS) Community Report shows a strong correlation between Indigenous connectivity and the well-being and sustainability of rural and remote Indigenous communities, especially when solutions are local. The report summarizes outcomes of the 2018 Indigenous Connectivity Summit that brought nearly 140 Indigenous leaders, policy makers, network operators, and community members to the Arctic community of Inuvik, Nrthwest Territories last Oct. Like most New Year’s resolutions, connectivity solutions are neither quick nor cheap.

In a year-end report, the Committee to Protect Journalists counted 53 journalists killed between Jan 1 and Dec 14, including 34 targeted in reprisal for their work — nearly double the 18 such murders it recorded in 2017. The growing number of journalists jailed or attacked on that pretext [of dissemintating "false" or "fake" news] is one illustration of the deleterious influence that President Donald Trump has had on press freedom globally. His labeling of the US media as the “enemy of the people” and charges of “fake news” have been imitated by regimes around the world.

In a glass conference room at its California headquarters, Facebook is taking on the bonfires of hate and misinformation it has helped fuel across the world, one post at a time. The social network has drawn criticism for undermining democracy and for provoking bloodshed in societies small and large. But for Facebook, it’s also a business problem. The company, which makes about $5 billion in profit per quarter, has to show that it is serious about removing dangerous content.

Two years after a congressional report labeled Huawei Technologies Co a national-security threat, the Chinese firm unexpectedly scored a big-name ally in Washington. It was the Redskins, the capital’s National Football League franchise. Huawei reached an agreement in 2014 to beam Wi-Fi through the suites at the team’s FedEx Field, in exchange for advertising in the stadium and during broadcasts. It was a marketing coup for a company hankering to beef up its meager US business and boost its image inside the Beltway. But the deal didn’t last long.

Our two nations are connected by shared values and shared interests, and that is certainly true in the field of communications. Each of our governments is committed to connecting all of our citizens with what I like to call digital opportunity. And on Dec 17, the US Federal Communications Commission and the Israeli Ministry of Communications put this commitment into practice. We convened the first meeting of a new Joint Working Group to exchange information and learn from each other’s experiences.

While broadband is widely believed to augment productivity, there is little firm-level evidence of a generalised causal effect. In this paper we examine whether the introduction of digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband services increased firms' productivity in nine sub-sectors within the services and distribution sector in Ireland from 2006 to 2012. Firm-level panel data on firms' characteristics are linked to spatial information on the rollout of DSL.