Civic Engagement

If there’s ever a moment to capture the existential crisis at Facebook, it was these past couple of weeks. But while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was confronted by members of Congress with his company’s failures, more than 30,000 Oklahoma teachers were rallying at the state Capitol to demand better pay and funding for their state’s struggling schools. It was the teachers’ eighth day on strike.

[Commentary] While online rights are coming into question, it’s worth considering how those will overlap with offline rights and civic engagement. We need a conversation about data protections, empowering users with their own information, and transparency — ultimately, data rights are now civic rights.While the US still lacks such data standards, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), scheduled to take effect in May, demonstrates a path toward reliable online privacy balanced with transparency. 

The past two years have taught us that the United States needs a better handle on what social networks are doing to manipulate and prioritize information. If there’s one thing that Washington could do, it would be to provide better safeguards to ensure that these powerful tools are not used to mislead the public again. That’s part of the message from Martha Minow, longtime Harvard Law school dean and expert on the shifting media and technological landscape. Minow also casts a skeptical eye on the concentration of local media ownership by companies such as Sinclair Broadcasting.

Reddit is made up of more than a million individual communities, or subreddits, some of which have three subscribers, some twenty million. But, no matter how neutral a platform may seem, there’s always a person behind the curtain. Is it possible to facilitate a space for open dialogue without also facilitating hoaxes, harassment, and threats of violence? Where is the line between authenticity and toxicity? What if, after technology allows us to reveal our inner voices, what we learn is that many of us are authentically toxic?

[Commentary] In the course of its deliberations on the future of Internet openness, the Federal Communications Commission logged about half a million comments sent from Russian e-mail addresses. It received nearly 8 million comments from e-mail domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com with almost identical wording. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case.

[Commentary] In February of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders issued the Kerner Report—which detailed an extensive and daunting list of inequalities and inequities that led to civil unrest in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Newark. Among its findings, the commission highlighted how the lack of adequate representation among the people assigning, reporting, and editing media coverage might drive “the underlying problems of race relations.” 

Every week, a motley crew of tech wonks and legal experts meet in Washington to discuss the problem they've been grappling with for almost a year now: how to save the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. Of the 70 to 80 regulars in the gathering, a few hail from industry groups such as the Internet Association — one of Silicon Valley's biggest lobbying operations — or the small-telco trade association INCOMPAS, according to people familiar with the matter.

[Commentary] Senate Democrats are proposing to undo the FCC’s wrongheaded rule through a process set up by the Congressional Review Act. [O]ne more vote [is needed] to ensure the internet remains free and accessible to all. That vote must come from the ranks of the Republicans, who so far have sided with internet service providers, the only group that is clamoring to remove the important consumer protections enshrined in net neutrality.

Along with organizations Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, and Free Press Action Fund, companies including Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy, and Medium are participating in a day of online and offline protests on February 27th. The protest — called Operation: #OneMoreVote — will call upon businesses, web users, and more to “flood lawmakers with phone calls and emails from constituents.” 

The aftermath of the 2016 election has been dominated by two questions. How did Donald Trump win? And did the Democratic Party tilt too much toward Hillary Clinton, choking Bernie Sanders’s candidacy and condemning America to a Trump presidency? Lurking in these questions is a very modern vision of electoral politics. Today, we see elections, and even party primaries, as open platforms; to imagine anything else is unnatural. But primary elections didn’t exist in American politics until the beginning of the 20th century, and they did not decide presidential nominees until the 1970s.