Upcoming event

Digital platforms are today’s marketplace, library, and public square, and they are difficult for modern-day consumers to avoid. As people have moved so much of their lives online during the pandemic, digital platforms have grown more powerful than ever.

A virtual, fully remote legislative hearing on the bills including:

• H.R. 2611 (Rep. Jared Huffman), To support the establishment and improvement of communications sites on or adjacent to Federal lands under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture through the retention and use of rental fees associated with such sites, and for other purposes. “Public Lands Telecommunications Act.” 

The Federal Trade Commission announced that the fifth annual PrivacyCon event, scheduled for July 21, 2020, will now take place online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

PrivacyCon 2020 will bring together a diverse group of stakeholders, including researchers, academics, industry representatives, consumer advocates, and government officials, to discuss the latest research and trends related to consumer privacy and data security.

The economic crisis caused by COVID-19 will further strengthen big tech’s hold over the economy and society, without intervention. Already, small businesses and retail outlets across the country are in a free fall as the result of social distancing measures, leaving Amazon to gain an even larger share of the marketplace. Meanwhile, local restaurants struggling to stay in business are now turning to online ordering and delivery apps, like Grubhub, that charge excessive fees and face little to no regulation.

The inaugural episode of Informed & Engaged, a new weekly Knight show on the ideas and solutions impacting the media landscape, kicks off with a conversation that meets the moment but remains long overdue.

How do Americans weigh a core value like free expression against the downsides that come with harmful content and misinformation online? A new report by Gallup and Knight Foundation, being released June 16, explores attitudes toward key issues in tech policy, including content moderation, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and approaches to industry self-governance like Facebook’s Oversight Board. This new study provides a springboard for tech companies, government and citizens like to advance a conversation about free expression online. 

Speakers

Join Knight Foundation and the Esserman family to celebrate the first winners of this annual prize for accountability reporting in South Florida, and get a behind-the-scenes look at how their groundbreaking stories came to be.

The event will feature conversations with:

Closing the digital divide is key to improving the country’s resiliency in times of crisis. Yet, accelerating spectrum allocation and deployment is crucial to closing the digital gap and preventing the further deepening of the divide. As the crisis continues to unfold and the demand for increased Internet access and 5G deployment keeps surging, it raises urgency around spectrum allocation. The webinar will address questions such as:

This training will provide an overview of the National Verifier system to users who may receive State-NV access.

COVID-19 has forced schools to quickly transition to distance learning models of education, and use technology to provide other school services like meal access and mental health services. Although privacy is not a new issue in education, these changes have created new risks to student privacy, often exacerbating existing inequities of access to education. Many of these concerns have been captured by alarming headlines across the country.