January 2019

Spring 2018, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, a top enforcement official at the Federal Trade Commission drafted a memo about the prospect of disciplining the social network. Lawmakers, consumer advocates and even former commission officials were clamoring for tough action against Facebook, arguing that it had violated an earlier Federal Trade Commission consent decree barring it from misleading users about how their information was shared.

When 2018 began, the President Donald Trump had made 1,989 false and misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database, which tracks every suspect statement uttered by the President. By the end of the year, President Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths during his presidency — averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018, almost triple the rate from the year before. President Trump began 2018 on a similar pace as last year. Through May, he generally averaged about 200 to 250 false claims a month.

Here are 10 questions about broadband we hope to find answers to in 2019: