Issie Lapowsky

In December 2014, John Rust wrote to the head of the legal department at the University of Cambridge, where he is a professor, warning them that a storm was brewing. Rust informed the university that one of the school’s psychology professors, Aleksandr Kogan, was using an app he created to collect data on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. Not only did the app collect data on people who opted into it, it also collected data on those users’ Facebook friends.

Under the Trump administration, rural schools requesting funding for broadband expansion have faced record delays and denials, according to the non-profit EducationSuperHighway, which works to get schools connected to the internet. By their count, more than 60 eligible fiber projects have been unfairly denied since 2017, a rate that EducationSuperHighway CEO Evan Marwell says has spiked dramatically from years prior. Meanwhile, more than 30 schools have been waiting about a year for approval. On average, they currently wait an average of 240 days for an answer.

According to Facebook, during the 2016 election, President Donald Trump’s campaign actually paid higher rates to advertise on the platform overall than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. But, Facebook's chart does not show what the Clinton and Trump campaigns would have paid for an apples-to-apples ad buy.

The former digital director of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Brad Parscale, has been named campaign manager for the 2020 re-election campaign. A political novice prior to the 2016 race, Parscale oversaw the campaign’s digital operations from the San Antonio (TX) offices of his web design and strategy firm Giles-Parscale.

After billionaire Joe Ricketts announced the shuttering of local news organizations Gothamist and DNAInfo last fall, readers across the country mourned the loss of the beloved sites, and worried about the vulnerability of journalism in the digital age. Now, a consortium of public radio stations, including WNYC in New York, WAMU in Washington DC, and KPCC in Southern California, has banded together to bring some of those sites back from the dead.The three stations are acquiring the assets of Gothamist and some of its associated sites, including LAist, DCist, and DNAInfo.

Apparently, the Department of Justice's special counsel Robert Mueller and his office have interviewed at least one member of Facebook's team that was associated with President Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The interview was part of Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and what role, if any, the Trump campaign played in that interference. Mueller's team speaking with a Facebook employee does not necessarily implicate Facebook in any wrongdoing.

[Commentary] If there was one bright spot in all this darkness—one series of moments when the web actually did live up to the most optimistic expectations—it was that in the year 2017, women took back the very platforms that have been used to torment and troll them for so long, and built a new-wave women’s movement on top of them. The fundamental issues with social media—the divisiveness, the echo chambers, the lack of nuance, the bots—still plague it, in many cases more than ever. But in 2017, women also reminded us all of the upside of connecting online.

The Federal Communications Commissions' public comment period on its plans to repeal net neutrality protections was bombarded with bots, memes, and input from people who don't actually exist. So, with the FCC declining to investigate its own comments, we decided to undertake an analysis of our own. We confirmed six bots and 11 form letters.

President Donald Trump's overhauled campaign website looks a lot like the original: the resident in a suit and red tie, embedded tweets pillorying #FakeNews, and “Make America Great Again” hats for sale in every color (plus camo, of course). But what really stands out is what’s missing: the entire archive of content published on the site prior to January.

The purge began May 8, after one White House reporter asked press secretary Sean Spicer why the campaign website still included references to the Muslim ban. That same day, during oral arguments in the federal appeals case over the Trump administration’s executive order barring travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert King also pressed Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Wall about the site. Wall argued that the current ban doesn’t discriminate against people on religious grounds, but King insisted the press release contradicts that claim. “He has never repudiated what he said about the Muslim ban,” Judge King said of the president. “It is still on his website.” Within hours it was gone. Within a day, so was every other pesky press release that might someday prove incriminating.

Silicon Valley’s newest congressional representative is bringing the idea of basic income to Washington, to the tune of $1 trillion. Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA) - who's district is home to companies like Apple and Intel—would seem to have little chance of persuading the most conservative Congress in memory to blithely give away so much money. But there’s a wrinkle: The biggest beneficiaries wouldn’t be Rep Khanna’s well-heeled constituents in Cupertino or Santa Clara. It’s President Donald Trump’s core supporters in rural America who would have the most to gain.

Rep Khanna is preparing to introduce a bill that he calls “the biggest move in orders of magnitude” toward providing a basic income in the US. Specifically, it proposes a $1 trillion expansion of the earned income tax credit, which would roughly double the amount of money going into low-income families’ pockets. The main difference between Rep Khanna’s plan and the Silicon Valley utopianists’ version of basic income is that for now recipients would still have to have a job to qualify. Think of it more as a basic income warm-up.