Vox

Facebook releases 500 pages of damage control in response to Senators’ questions

The Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees rleased nearly 500 pages of information Facebook provided concerning more than 2,000 questions from lawmakers on topics including its policies on user data, privacy and security. Yet much of the information that Facebook included was not new and the social network sidestepped providing detailed answers, in a move that may embolden some of its critics.

Here’s how companies have flouted net neutrality before and what made them stop

No matter what happens June 11, network neutrality repeal opens the door to some real abuses of internet service providers’ power — not hypothetical scenarios, but real predatory practices we’ve already seen in the past. These incidents show how complicated the issue of net neutrality is: all of these transgressions happened after the 2005 Internet Policy Statement, which laid out four “open internet” principles that would guide the agency’s decisions.

Congress is less than 50 votes from passing a motion to save net neutrality

Congress is less than 50 votes from passing a measure that would restore network neutrality rules to the internet. The motion, which passed the Senate on May 16th, would use the Congressional Review Act (or CRA) to undo Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s December order, effectively restoring the net neutrality protections passed in 2015. In May, House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Doyle (D-PA) filed a discharge petition that would force the House to vote on the CRA motion, and has been steadily collecting signatures ever since.

In 2019, people will spend more time online than they will watching TV. That’s a first.

It’s finally happening: In 2019, people around the world will spend more time online than they do watching TV, according to new data from measurement company Zenith. In 2019, people are expected to spend an average of 170.6 minutes each day on online activities like watching videos on YouTube, sharing photos on Facebook and shopping on Amazon. They’ll spend slightly less time — 170.3 minutes —watching TV. The global transition from TV to internet as the main entertainment medium was a long time coming, but it also happened faster than expected.

Congress roasted Facebook on TV, but won’t hear any bills to regulate it

On October 19th of 2017, a just-barely bipartisan group of senators held a press conference to announce a new piece of legislation. The Honest Ads Act, as the bill is called, would require Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms to retain copies of the political ads they host and make them available for public inspection. Platforms would have to release information about who bought the ads, how much they cost, and to whom the ads were targeted. Anyone who spent more than $500 on political ads would be subject to public scrutiny.

Facebook says millions of users who thought they were sharing privately with their friends may have shared with everyone because of a software bug

As many as 14 million Facebook users who thought they were posting items that only their friends or smaller groups could see may have been posting that content publicly, the company said. According to Facebook, a software bug, which was live for 10 days in May, updated the audience for some user’s posts to “public” without any warning. Facebook typically lets users set the audiences who get to see posts; that setting is “sticky,” which means it remains the default setting until manually updated.

President Trump, Fox News, and Twitter have created a dangerous conspiracy theory loop

On June 5, President Donald Trump tweeted an unfounded conspiracy theory that originated in some of the internet’s worst “fake news” corners. “Strzok-Page, the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers, have texts referring to a counter-intelligence operation into the Trump Campaign dating way back to December, 2015,” the president wrote. “SPYGATE is in full force!” The supposed source for this claim is text messages between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair during the 2016 campaign.

Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram was the greatest regulatory failure of the past decade, says Stratechery’s Ben Thompson

For years, Facebook has argued that it’s a platform: An unbiased technology service for all ideas, brands, media companies and people to distribute their work. That’s not really the case, argues Ben Thompson, the founder of the influential tech newsletter Stratechery. Thompson argued that Facebook and Google, two well-known “platforms,” are actually more like aggregators, an important distinction.

Sen Warner: Beware of regulating US tech companies in a way that gives Chinese tech companies an advantage

If politicians in the US make the mistake of over-regulating big tech, Chinese competitors could easily take over the market, according to Sen Mark Warner (D-VA). When asked if tech giants should be broken up under antitrust laws, Sen Warner said regulators need to be careful not to be too “heavy-handed” because breaking up those companies could create an opening for Chinese competitors.