Government & Communications

President Donald Trump lashed out at the news media for what he said was demeaning coverage of Republicans' tax code overhaul. "The Tax Cuts are so large and so meaningful, and yet the Fake News is working overtime to follow the lead of their friends, the defeated Dems, and only demean," he said. "This is truly a case where the results will speak for themselves, starting very soon."

The Environmental Protection Agency is canceling a $120,000 “media tracking” contract it recently signed with a Republican public affairs and opposition-research firm amid questions about the firm’s political work and outrage from lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The EPA had defended the contract with Definers Public Affairs, saying it hired the firm merely to act as a sophisticated news clipping service. An agency spokesman confirmed Dec 19 that the EPA and the company had agreed to terminate the contract.

Governments should promote news literacy and strong professional journalism in their societies. The news industry must provide high-quality journalism in order to build public trust and correct fake news and disinformation without legitimizing them. Technology companies should invest in tools that identify fake news, reduce financial incentives for those who profit from disinformation, and improve online accountability. Educational institutions should make informing people about news literacy a high priority.

Even if the Federal Communications Commission wins in court, large Internet serivce providers still need to find a way to prevent any future FCCs from simply reinstating the network neutrality rules. That’s why the same giant ISPs that backed the FCC’s assault on net neutrality are now pushing for a “legislative solution” in Congress. The goal: they want a law that contains so many loopholes as to be effectively meaningless, yet prevents the FCC from crafting any real, tough laws down the road.

 As cities have begun to collect and release unprecedented amounts of data, questions about citizen privacy have become increasingly relevant.

Health and Human Services Department officials confirmed that they had singled out a handful of words that should be avoided in the upcoming budget process, but said they had not blocked employees from using them outright. A department spokesman further said that the guidance came from within HHS, not from the Office of Management and Budget. HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd said that employees had misinterpreted the guidance. “HHS and its agencies have not banned, prohibited or forbidden employees from using certain words,” said Lloyd.

The White House is temporarily removing We The People, a petition tool, from its website after 11 months of silence, promising to respond to public concerns in 2018. The Trump administration said the platform, used extensively by critics and less frequently by allies, will be removed Dec 19 and return in late January as a new site.

Twitter announced new and stricter rules banning bigoted content and hate groups from its platform. It also said it would begin enforcing its anti-hate and violence rules more stringently than it has in the past. But “context matters when evaluating for abusive behavior,” warns Twitter, and they have included two big exceptions in the new policy.

A core Republican talking point during the network neutrality battle was that, in 2015, President Barack Obama led a government takeover of the internet, and President Obama illegally bullied the independent Federal Communications Commission into adopting the rules. But, internal FCC documents, revealed using a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General—acting on orders from Congressional Republicans—investigated the claim that President Obama interfered with the FCC’s net neutrality process and found it was nonsense.

Political divides in the American news landscape do not end with Americans’ preferences for different news sources; rather, they extend to how members of the U.S. Congress communicate with constituents in the digital age. Between January 2015 and July 2017, nearly half (48%) of the links to national news outlets that members of Congress shared on Facebook were to outlets predominantly linked to by members of just one party, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.