Free Press

[Commentary] One of President-elect Donald Trump’s top tech-policy advisers has a plan: Do away with the main agency that protects the rights of Internet users and media consumers in America. You heard that right. Mark Jamison, who President-elect Trump chose to help oversee the tech-policy transition team, thinks that getting rid of the Federal Communications Commission would be a good thing for this country. “Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away,” Jamison wrote in Oct, claiming that a heavily consolidated media marketplace would discipline itself to benefit ordinary people. He’s dead wrong.

If President-elect Trump were the least bit sincere about his claims to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special-interest operatives, he couldn’t have done much worse than selecting Jamison and Jeffrey Eisenach. If he wants to make good on his pledge to block AT&T’s $107-billion acquisition of Time Warner — which he called “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few” — he’ll have to lock horns with these two big-media boosters.

The American mainstream media spent the last year normalizing and propping up a racist, xenophobic, misogynist candidate whose closest advisers include white nationalists and politicians with a track record of oppressing women, people of color, and the LGBTQI community. In the days since the election, hundreds of hate crimes have been reported. We’ve seen our friends and families living in fear. And yet the media continues to treat President-elect Donald Trump like he’s nothing out of the ordinary. It’s never been more apparent that the corporate media have failed the people of this nation. But the march toward centralized, consolidated media and communications platforms pushes on.

Look no further than AT&T, which just before the election announced its plan to buy Time Warner, the owner of CNN, HBO and TNT. If approved, it would be one of the biggest media mergers ever. Whether President-elect Trump will remain opposed is an open question. But one thing is clear: The last thing we need right now is a more powerful media gatekeeper. We must block this deal.

[Commentary] Donald Trump’s victory poses a serious and immediate threat to our friends and families, our loved ones and neighbors. We started Free Press to fight for your rights to connect and communicate — and that’s exactly what we intend to do. Here’s what we will do next:

Resist. We intend to be vigilant watchdogs in our corner of the world, exposing and disrupting any attempts to take away your freedoms or silence dissenting voices.
Rethink. We’re living with the results of the corporate media’s utter failure in 2016. Instead of accepting the status quo, we must reimagine and recreate a media that is more focused on serving communities than cozying up to power.
Rebuild. We’re committed to strengthening our organization to meet the challenges in front of us. That means bringing on more organizers and advocates, redoubling our commitment to racial equity, and networking with allied groups dedicated to transforming our democracy and society.

Recently, Internet users won a huge victory for online privacy at the Federal Communications Commission. At its October meeting, the Commission took a tremendous stride forward and voted 3–2 to adopt broadband-privacy rules. As we’ve written, these rules stand on the same legal foundation as Net Neutrality, built on the reclassification of broadband Internet access providers as telecommunications carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Properly treating these providers as carriers means restoring people’s rights, under the law, to service that’s affordable, nondiscriminatory — and protected from the carriers’ prying eyes.

On Nov 2 the FCC released the full text of its new broadband-privacy rules and here’s what we know so far: ISPs must now get their customers’ permission before they surveil, sell or share any of their sensitive information for marketing purposes. The FCC reported almost a quarter-million filings in the docket — with the vast majority of them in favor. The decision isn’t perfect, and the details will continue to be tweaked over the next year. We’ll be there to ensure that these privacy safeguards stay strong and reflect the will of the people who demanded them.

Facebook talks a good game when it comes to fighting for racial justice and protecting human rights. Mark Zuckerberg has made important symbolic statements in support of the Movement for Black Lives, including putting up a giant Black Lives Matter sign at Facebook headquarters. But Facebook often fails to live up to this kind of rhetoric — and that has dangerous consequences for people of color.

The company has a habit of removing documentation of human-rights abuses at the request of law enforcement and government agencies. This came up most recently in the case of Korryn Gaines: At law enforcement’s request, Facebook deactivated Gaines’ livestream of an encounter with Baltimore police that left her dead and her young son wounded. There have also been numerous other reports of Facebook censoring content from Black and indigenous activists; it’s also disabled the accounts of Palestinian journalists. By removing these kinds of recordings and documentation, Facebook is stifling activism and allowing law enforcement and government agencies to control the narrative on a platform that plays an increasingly important role in breaking news. It’s time for Facebook to make a conscious choice to change its policies and live up to the values it espouses.

Oct 27 marks the one-year anniversary of the “We the People” petition calling on the Obama Administration to publicly affirm its support for strong encryption. The petition platform, which is run by the White House itself, promises a substantive response within 60 days if petitioners can garner 100,000 signatures within 30 days. This is no easy lift, but with the support of nearly 50 organizations, the petition reached its goal last October.

Disappointingly, the White House has stayed silent and failed to hold up its end of the deal. Today Free Press joined a broad coalition of organizations calling on the administration to fulfill its promise, and explaining that while the president has remained silent over the past 365 days, misguided and dangerous efforts to undermine encryption have escalated.

AT&T is an enormous media, telecom and Internet gatekeeper with a horrible track record of overcharging you, limiting your choices and spying on you. It’s still fighting Net Neutrality. It helps the government spy on people by turning over its customer records to the National Security Agency. It tries to stop communities from building their own broadband networks. It’s a member of ALEC, the corporate-backed lobbying group that's pushed legislation like pro-fracking, voter-suppression and “stand your ground” bills that disproportionately harm people of color. And now AT&T wants to get even bigger.

This merger would create a media powerhouse unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. AT&T would control mobile and wired Internet access, cable channels, movie franchises, a film studio and more. That means AT&T would control Internet access for hundreds of millions of people and the content they view, enabling it to prioritize its own offerings and use sneaky tricks to undermine Net Neutrality. This merger would give one bad company way too much power. Massive mergers like this — and the billions of dollars they waste — never work out for the rest of us. Urge policymakers to block this deal.

Color Of Change and Free Press joined a group of civil rights and racial justice advocacy organizations supporting the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to adopt strong privacy safeguards for Internet users. “Throughout our nation’s history, the privacy rights of communities of color have too often gone unprotected,” reads the coalition letter. “Information about our communities has been used to target, exploit and harm the people who live in them.”

In the digital age, these harms are amplified by the speed and stealth with which the collection of information takes place. Internet service providers have a nearly unencumbered view of what people do online. They can track the websites we visit, the messages we send, even our physical location if we’re using mobile devices. Such a detailed view reveals such sensitive information as a person’s race and ethnicity, religious and political views — even address and income level. While privacy is important to everyone in the United States, it’s vital to those communities who are most often exploited via predatory marketing schemes. The FCC should move forward with its proposal and adopt the strongest online safeguards for these communities.

[Commentary] “Predictive policing” sounds good on paper. After all, what could go wrong with a data-based approach to law enforcement? It turns out: plenty. That’s why Free Press joined a broad coalition of civil rights, privacy and technology groups in sounding the alarm about how predictive policing reinforces racial bias. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights mobilized the coalition, which counts the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, Color Of Change and the NAACP among the 17 signers. The statement released last Wednesday notes that “the data driving predictive enforcement activities — such as the location and timing of previously reported crimes, or patterns of community- and officer-initiated 911 calls — is profoundly limited and biased.” Indeed, a damning report from the tech consulting group Upturn, which surveyed the nation’s 50 largest police forces, confirms this view. Upturn found “little evidence” that predictive policing works — and “significant reason to fear that [it] may reinforce disproportionate and discriminatory policing practices.”

While the idea of using data to direct police resources sounds like an effort to remove human bias from the equation, that isn’t how it works in practice. In fact, predictive policing embeds police bias in an algorithm that then has the appearance of being neutral. The police response to low-income communities — in particular communities of color — is completely different from the response to wealthy white communities.

[Commentary] A key takeaway from the Alliance for Community Media’s recent conference in Boston (MA): Community media can and must help fill the gaps in local news coverage that are growing across the country thanks to rampant consolidation and newsroom cutbacks. Community media is an umbrella term that refers to noncommercial media that isn’t part of NPR or PBS. ACM is an organization composed primarily of public access, education and government (PEG) TV channels available on cable television, along with the digital media centers and training programs such stations offer. There are more than 3,000 community media outlets in the US, and they’re diverse in terms of the resources they have, the programming they produce, the way they’re organized, and the scale at which they operate. What they have in common is that we need them more than ever.