Digital Content

Sens Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced the Open App Markets Act, which would set fair, clear, and enforceable rules to protect competition and strengthen consumer protections within the app market.

Facebook's leaders know they have to demonstrate accountability to the world, but they're determined to do so on their own terms and timetable. Since the 2018 Cambridge Analytica affair, the company has moved to provide more transparency and oversight, but its limited programs often leave journalists and scholars as the de facto whistleblowers for problems on its platform. In August 2021 Facebook shut down the accounts of New York University researchers whose tools for studying political advertising on the social network, the company said, violated its rules. Facebook has become a sort of g

This paper describes the challenge of four rural broadband providers operating fiber to the home networks to recover the middle mile network costs of streaming video entertainment and quantifies the amount of the current and future shortfall. It describes the components of the rural broadband networks, policy background for their evolution, an overview of providers, and the financial calculations of cost recovery. The preliminary results show that current broadband prices are approximately $50 per month per subscriber.

A new policy paper from the German Marshall Fund p

Tech companies' calls for or against “regulating technology” do not mean much in and of themselves. The irony is that for years, lobbyists have had a field day with the opposite framing, that “regulation stifles innovation.” After the idea caught on, it effectively paralyzed democratic lawmakers who did not want to be seen as old-fashioned or getting in the way of exciting technologies and digital opportunities. Looking at what companies do in practice, beyond touting support for “regulation,” is revealing.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced a bill that would strip online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter of liability protections if their technology spreads misinformation about coronavirus vaccines or other public-health emergencies. Sen Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) joins Klobuchar as a co-sponsor.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse. The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision. The metaverse is having a moment; coined in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, the term refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space.

At the start of the pandemic, a group of data scientists at Facebook held a meeting with executives to ask for resources to help measure the prevalence of misinformation about Covid-19 on the social network. The data scientists said figuring out how many Facebook users saw false or misleading information would be complex, perhaps taking a year a more, according to two people who participated in the meeting.

President Biden’s attack on Facebook followed months of mounting private frustration inside his administration over the social-media giant’s handling of vaccine misinformation, according to US officials, bringing into public view tensions that could complicate efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19. The false narratives that Covid-19 vaccines result in widespread death and that the U.S.