Technology, People and Policy.
A doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went viral last week, Facebook de-ranked it as false, but refused to remove it. Platform politics have rubbed raw the public’s nerves, so that each new incident like this – whether Facebook de-platforms a hateful speaker or refuses to – makes tech look bad and creates new […]
The FCC’s Personal Attack Rule- struck down in 2000- should be resurrected. By Justin Hendrix and Bryan Jones. Another day and yet another incident that illustrates the role of social media platforms in facilitating and accelerating toxicity into the public discourse. “Distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), altered to make her sound as […]
Twitter is exploring ways to add a disclaimer or other context around Tweets from world leaders that break their terms of service but the company has chosen to leave up because of their supposed newsworthiness. Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde explained: “One of the things we’re working really closely on with […]
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has filed a lawsuit against Facebook on several charges alleging that Facebook violated the Fair Housing Act in its sale of housing advertisements. HUD claims that Facebook allowed housing advertisers to pick and choose which race, gender, or age group could see their ads while excluding other […]
It’s no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg has called for “updating the rules for the Internet” – he signaled as much last April in his testimony before the U.S. Senate, inclining his head towards the yoke of regulation. But things have changed significantly since then and Zuckerberg has missed his moment to lead on the design […]
This post is published in collaboration with Just Security. On Wednesday, Facebook released new information about how the video of the recent terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, circulated online. A Facebook blog post says: “The video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast. No users reported the video during the live broadcast. Including the views […]
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking”. “I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform,” he writes, “because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services.” The reactions to his post were mixed, with some […]
Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren published a Medium post on her desire to apply antitrust regulation to big tech. Following that post, Sen. Warren ran several anti-Facebook messages as ads on Facebook. Those ads were blocked, resulting in the rare time when Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Warren are aligned on bashing Facebook. But is […]
A new report argues for social media platforms to take action Now that the goals and tactics of foreign manipulators such as the Kremlin are better understood, experts in media and disinformation are turning their attention to the problems of domestic disinformation, homegrown in the United States. A new report authored by Paul Barrett, Deputy […]
by Renee DiResta and Bryan Jones “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland With news […]