Elections and Media

 Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-SD) says the average American is not likely to be swayed in the 2018 midterms by Senate Democrats forcing a vote on reinstating the net neutrality rules. “I think they see it as a really hot political issue [that] gets their base kind of energized.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has systematically attacked democratic institutions across Europe and in his own country for two decades in efforts to undermine elections and other governments, Senate Democrats charged. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a 206-page report that said President Trump’s failure to recognize the danger or to challenge Putin means Russia is likely to interfere in the next US presidential race in a repeat of the 2016 campaign.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is still waiting on Twitter to answer questions in the committee’s Russia investigation, Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) said.  “I’m disappointed. I’ve been disappointed throughout this” by Twitter Inc.’s failure to be more cooperative Vice Chairman Warner said. “The other companies met the deadline." Facebook and Alphabet's Google have delivered answers to detailed questions Senators posed after a public hearing with the three technology giants in 2017 on disclosures that Russians had exploited their networks.

[Commentary] Platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas. It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic...I realized that the problems I had been seeing couldn’t be solved simply by, say, Facebook hiring staff to monitor the content on the site. The problems were inherent in the attention-based, algorithm-driven business model. And what I suspected was Russia’s meddling in 2016 was only a prelude to what we’d see in 2018 and beyond.

Generally speaking, pollsters are ill advised to ignore cellphone users, if only because they’d be missing half of the country. But there’s another reason that pollsters need to include cell users: The demographics of those with and without access to landlines is stark. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic adults in the United States live in households that are wireless-only. More than half of black adults and Asian adults do, as well.

[Commentary] The so-called social media revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Sites like Twitter and Facebook exacerbate emotions like outrage and fear—and don’t help democracy flourish. Social media too easily bypasses the rational or at least reasonable parts of our minds, on which a democratic public sphere depends. It speaks instead to the emotional, reactive, quick-fix parts of us, that are satisfied by images and clicks that look pleasing, that feed our egos, and that make us think we are heroic.

The first hard data on fake-news consumption has arrived. Researchers posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thousands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories, and what real news those people were seeing at the same time. The reach of fake news was wide indeed, the study found, yet also shallow.

Here are five fights the tech world will be watching closely in 2018:

1. Net neutrality
2. Election transparency
3. AT&T-Time Warner merger
4. Cryptocurrency
5. Sex-trafficking

The events surrounding the FBI’s NorthernNight investigation follow a pattern that repeated for years as the Russian threat was building: US intelligence and law enforcement agencies saw some warning signs of Russian meddling in Europe and later in the United States but never fully grasped the breadth of the Kremlin’s ambitions. Top US policymakers didn’t appreciate the dangers, then scrambled to draw up options to fight back.

Democrats see an opportunity to capitalize on the massive backlash to the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to repeal its network neutrality rules. The question is whether the outrage on Reddit forums can translate into votes for Democratic candidates next fall given the fact that younger people engaged on the issue are often the least reliable voters — particularly in midterm elections.