Daily Digest 5/29/2018 (Reboot Your Router)

Progress is being made and more is coming on rural broadband issues, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said while attending a forum in Dahlonega (GA). Chairman Pai and Rep Doug Collins (R-GA) talked to a packed room of telecommunications industry leaders and local and state elected officials at the University of North Georgia’s new convocation center. From updates to federal grant funding for telecommunications providers to regulations of internet service providers, Chairman Pai told the group of more than 50 people that bipartisan changes are being made to help bring internet access to rural Georgians and rural residents nationwide.

Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr will visit the Great Plains from May 29 to June 1, with events in Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota. The trip will focus on rural broadband deployment, including the opportunities it creates in smart agriculture, telehealth, job creation, and workforce development. The trip will include events with Sen Deb Fischer (R-NE), Sen John Thune (R-SD), and Gov Dennis Daugaard (R-SD).

Sens Tom Udall (D-NM) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) introduced a bill to put wireless internet on school buses in order to help students without broadband access at home get online to study and do homework. The legislation would allow the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) E-Rate program to reimburse schools that place Wi-Fi technology on school buses carrying students to school or school related extracurricular activities. The legislation has received widespread support from stakeholders, including the School Superintendents Association, a professional organization representing thousands of educational leaders through America and the world, the Competitive Carriers Association, an advocacy organization for rural, regional and nationwide wireless telecommunications, and NTUA Wireless, a Navajo owned communications company. Tribal communities in New Mexico are particularly disadvantaged by the digital divide, with nearly 80 percent of Tribal members living in rural New Mexico unable to access the internet at home.

In June 2013, halfway through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) negotiations, a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden leaked documents on America’s global surveillance. The documents showed that the National Security Agency had backdoor deals with major Silicon Valley companies, allowing them to use consumer data as the basis of their counterintelligence operations. The leaks catapulted the GDPR into the public spotlight. What had once been a complicated and boring seeming policy about data security and privacy became a story about US spying that members of the EU and their national publics paid attention to. In political science jargon, it gained issue salience. Pro-consumer members of the European Parliament, like Jan Albrecht, capitalized on public attention by condemning the influence of foreign firms in the lobbying process. It’s a problem for European institutions to be captured by European business, but it’s a disaster to be seen as controlled by foreign corporations. Even European corporations were tainted by association – they were seen as having become allies, or even tools of big U.S. tech companies.

[Nikhil Kalyanpur is a PhD candidate in the department of government at Georgetown University. Abraham Newman is a professor in the department of government and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.]

Facebook introduced new disclosure rules for political advertisements this week designed to block bad actors from meddling in elections. But in the meantime, the rules are blocking legitimate candidates from buying Facebook ads — and at least one congressional candidate in Mississippi says it could tip the election toward his opponent. The rules that Facebook implemented in the United States this week require anyone wishing to buy a political ad to verify their identity. To do so, Facebook mails a card to their physical location containing an authorization code. Only after the candidate or advocacy group enters that authorization code on Facebook can they purchase political ads. Facebook began allowing political advertisers to start the verification process on April 23rd. The company promoted the new process with a blog post and messages inside Facebook directed at administrators of political pages. In May, it also sent emails to page administrators advising them of the changes. But not everyone got the message — and now some are scrambling to come up with a Plan B ahead of June 5th primary elections.

Type “Russia collusion” into a Google search, and the search engine will try to guess the next word you’ll type. The first of those is “delusion.” For Francesca Tripodi, a postdoctoral scholar at Data & Society and assistant professor in sociology at James Madison University, the search results are a powerful tell of a phenomenon she set out to document. The “collusion delusion” results are seeking a conservative audience — which is exactly the demographic that would be more likely to search for the phrase in the first place. “No one in the mainstream media has said ‘collusion delusion,'” she said, “but that phrase has been used [by] Tucker Carlson.”  “Googling it” has become the news equivalent of “do your own research.” But neither Google, nor search terms, are purely neutral. “Even in the face of research and due diligence,” Tripodi wrote in her study, “voters can walk away from Google armed with alternative news and alternative facts.” And, her research indicates, conservative media — along with bad actors and extreme groups looking to amplify their message to the mainstream right — have gotten really, really good at anticipating what their audience will search for and seeding their information to show up, prominently, as a result. The very searches meant to fact-check one’s own beliefs can end up simply enforcing them — particularly for the audience Tripodi studied, who were unified with their distrust of the mainstream media.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has held briefings less frequently than her two predecessors, her briefings have been shorter, and she has been more likely to fill up time with guests who can’t speak to what the White House is doing. Between January 2016 and Jan. 20, 2017, President Barack Obama's press secretary Josh Earnest spent 11,800 minutes briefing the media, with his deputies adding another 906 minutes. Since late last July, about 10 months, Sanders has spent 2,800 minutes briefing the media, only about four more hours than Sean Spicer spent during his tenure in the White House. Spicer worked there for four fewer months.

President Donald Trump promoted new, unconfirmed accusations to suit his political narrative: that a “criminal deep state” element within Obama’s government planted a spy deep inside his presidential campaign to help his rival, Hillary Clinton, win — a scheme he branded “Spygate.” It was the latest indication that a president who has for decades trafficked in conspiracy theories has brought them from the fringes of public discourse to the Oval Office. Now that he is president, Trump’s baseless stories of secret plots by powerful interests appear to be having a distinct effect. Among critics, they have fanned fears that he is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media that mirror his own. “The effect on the life of the nation of a president inventing conspiracy theories in order to distract attention from legitimate investigations or other things he dislikes is corrosive,” said Jon Meacham, a presidential historian and biographer. “The diabolical brilliance of the Trump strategy of disinformation is that many people are simply going to hear the charges and countercharges, and decide that there must be something to them because the president of the United States is saying them.”