December 2017

In August, ProPublica filed public-records requests with every governor and 22 federal agencies, asking for lists of everyone blocked on their official Facebook and Twitter accounts. The responses we’ve received so far show that governors and agencies across the country are blocking at least 1,298 accounts. More than half of those — 652 accounts — are blocked by Gov Matt Bevin (R-KY). Four other Republican governors and four Democrats, as well as five federal agencies, block hundreds of others, according to their responses to our requests.

[Commentary]  The idea of network neutrality may be intuitively simple, but the regulations that codify it are complex. One point of comparison is the position countries take on “zero rating,” a phrase used to describe telecom service plans that offer discounted or free access to a select group of apps or services. In fact, this image from the website of a Portuguese telecom provider MEO, that uses zero rating, recently went viral because it represents the dystopia of what a fragmented internet might look like.