Stories from Abroad

The Web Foundation is working on an analysis of United Nations data that shows the growth of internet access around the world has slowed dramatically. The striking trend shows the rate at which the world is getting online has fallen sharply since 2015, with women and the rural poor substantially excluded from education, business, and other opportunities the internet can provide. The data shows that growth in global internet access dropped from 19% in 2007 to less than 6% in 2017.

Twitter accounts originating in Iran masqueraded as foreign journalists and concerned US citizens in their attempt to push political messages on the social media site until they were suspended earlier in 2018.

The received wisdom was once that a unified, unbounded web promoted democracy through the free flow of information. Things don’t seem quite so simple anymore. All signs point to a future with three internets: one internet led by China, one internet led by the United States, and one internet led by the European Union. All three regions are generating sets of rules, regulations and norms that are beginning to rub up against one another.

Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced dramatic gains in internet use in recent years. With this rapid growth in connectivity have come a host of potential problems, including fake news, political targeting and manipulation and financial scams, among others. Yet according to a new Pew Research Center analysis, most sub-Saharan Africans feel positively about the role the internet plays in their country.

A major US telecommunications company discovered manipulated hardware from Super Micro Computer Inc. in its network and removed it in Aug, fresh evidence of tampering in China of critical technology components bound for the US, according to Yossi Appleboum, a security expert working for the telecom company.

In the US and European Union, a series of two-decade-old legal provisions dating to the web’s early days allow internet companies to host content posted by users without being legally responsible for it. Thanks to that immunity, US companies have built massive profit engines around material such as Facebook posts, Instagram photos and YouTube videos, without having to screen them ahead of time. But now lawmakers and regulators in the US and European Union are starting to chip away at those protections, driven by growing concern about hoaxes, hate speech and other online bad behavior.

Facebook, Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel Ltd.’s Ugandan unit, and Mauritius-based Bandwidth & Cloud Services Group laid nearly 500 miles of fiber-optic cable across the isolated northwest of Uganda. The project, begun in early 2017 and completed at the end of 2017, has expanded the region’s network capacity, providing faster internet access to an area with some three million people, many of whom live in towns still haunted by memories of the three-decade insurgency led by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. The Ugandan cable is the largest terrestrial network Facebook has helped c

A new battle for cellular airwaves is under way as governments around the world start to auction off spectrum for mobile coverage that could power near-instant video downloads and help run factories, control gadgets and navigate driverless cars.

Public health officials say that using text messages, social media platforms, and other digital tools can be key in both tracking the health care behavior of people and disseminating lifesaving information during emergency situations. During public health emergencies — such as the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — it's difficult for public health officials to monitor people's health care behavior.

House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) wrote to the CEOs of Alphabet, Facebook and Twitter following concerning reports of Russia-linked efforts to influence the national debate over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. In his letters, Ranking Member Pallone requests answers on the companies’ efforts to safeguard the American political system and to combat foreign interference campaigns on their platforms.