Platforms

All five Federal Communications Commissioners testified at a Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing. Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) said the hearing was an opportunity for Commissioners to discuss what more can be done to expand broadband access and digital opportunity for all Americans.

Building a consensus to change Section 230 will be harder than it looks. The law’s critics have vastly different and sometimes incompatible ideas about how the law should work. Republican and Democratic policymakers alike have called for sites to bear more legal liability if users post illegal content.

President Donald Trump’s crackdown on Twitter may have an unintended effect — hampering the marketing of some of his administration’s signature efforts, from Army recruiting to anti-vaping campaigns.

The paper stems from a platform competition research project led by Public Knowledge and supported by Omidyar Network. The paper explores the challenge of balancing the significant gatekeeper control that dominant platforms like Apple and Google have over both their operating systems and app stores, with the benefits that app stores create for both developers and users.

In a decision that could further embolden European governments to take on large tech platforms, Germany’s top court, the Federal Court of Justice, ruled that Facebook had abused its dominance in social media to illegally harvest data about its users. The authorities said Facebook broke competition laws by combining data it collected about users across its different platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as from outside websites and third-party apps. In Germany, Facebook now must alter how it processes data about its users.

Today, transparency reporting on issues such as government requests for user data is considered an industry-wide best practice for technology and telecommunications companies. Over the past few years, internet platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube have also begun publishing transparency reports that outline how they are enforcing their own content policies and rules. This reporting has been expanded to include a number of metrics and categories of content that are unique to these types of platforms.

Facebook took down campaign posts and ads for President Donald Trump, citing violations of the company’s policy against what it called “organized hate,” as the social-media company grapples with what content to allow on its platforms. The ads, featuring a downward-pointing triangle, targeted antifa, describing the movement as “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups.” The ads asked Trump supporters to back President Trump’s calls to designate antifa as a terrorist organization.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) encouraged companies that advertise on social media to use their “tremendous leverage” to push platforms to crack down on disinformation. “Know your power,” Speaker Pelosi said. “Advertisers are in a position, they have power to discourage platforms from amplifying dangerous and even life-threatening disinformation. Some major advertisers and some not so major have begun to express objections to platform policies that promote voter fraud and violence ...

Contact tracing done wrong threatens privacy and invites mission creep into adjacent fields, including policing. Government actors might (and do) distort and corrupt public-health messaging to serve their own interests. Automated policing and content control raise the prospect of a slide into authoritarianism. But most critics have focused narrowly on classic privacy concerns about data leakage and mission creep—especially the risk of improper government access to and use of sensitive data.

The Department of Justice released a set of reform proposals to update the outdated immunity for online platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.  Responding to bipartisan concerns about the scope of 230 immunity, the department identified a set of concrete reform proposals to provide stronger incentives for online platforms to address illicit material on their services while continuing to foster innovation and free speech.