Digital Content

In Dec 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration.

The biggest risk to Facebook — and the digital-ad business overall — would be a wide-ranging privacy-protection law on the order of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in the banking sector. That established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, designed to keep predatory lenders in check, along with a host of new regulations.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has boasted often that it made better use of Facebook’s advertising tools than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. An internal Facebook white paper, published days after the election, shows the company’s data scientists agree. "Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes," the author of the internal paper wrote, citing revenue of $44 million for Trump and $28 million for Clinton in that period.

Facebook's users in the US will see a news publisher’s Wikipedia page and how frequently an article has been shared on Facebook as part of the updates the company tries to fight the spread of false and sensational information through its platform. Users will see an “about this article” button with additional information, including related articles on the same topic, other recent stories posted by the publisher and a link to the publisher’s Wikipedia page.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network had no immediate plans to apply a strict new European Union law on data privacy in its entirety to the rest of the world, as the company reels from a scandal over its handling of personal information of millions of its users. Zuckerberg sadi that Facebook already complies with many parts of the law ahead of its implementation in May. He said the company wanted to extend privacy guarantees worldwide in spirit, but would make exceptions, which he declined to describe.

Gov Larry Hogan (R-MD) allegedly had a habit of blocking Facebook users and deleting comments when people criticized him, but a lawsuit has forced him to adopt a more open social media policy. Four Maryland residents sued the governor in a US District Court in August 2017, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland. The ACLU announced that a settlement has been finalized, requiring Gov Hogan to implement a new social media policy within two weeks.

Researchers at Ohio State University find that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day.

No federal law spells out what companies trading in personal information can do with user data. No federal agency has clear jurisdiction over writing rules for internet companies. And public concern about personal data falling into the wrong hands has only recently swelled. Now lawmakers are feeling the heat.

A Q&A with Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University and coiner of the term "net neutrality."

[Commentary]  The headlines about the trade wars being touched off by President Donald Trump’s new tariffs may telegraph plenty of bombast and shots fired, but the most consequential war being waged today is a quieter sort of conflict: It’s the new Cold War over data protection. While the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica crisis currently burns as the latest, hottest flare-up in this simmering conflict, tensions may increase even more on May 25, 2018, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect. Combatants in the new Cold War are fighting over the currency of t