Former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Saturday that if social media companies don’t moderate content on their various platforms, “we lose total control.”
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Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike said Friday a major technology outage is not a cyberattack but is due to a defect in a single content update.
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The Federal Communications Commission has revived regulations for “net neutrality.” According to FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, “the action we take here is good for consumers, public safety, national security and network investment.” The people have room for doubt and the “neutrality” concept requires some explanation.
The internet developed in fine style long before any such regulation appeared, but in 2015, the FCC reclassified Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from “information services,” to “common carrier services.” The government treated an innovative new technology like a public utility monopoly, in effect turning back the clock to the Communications Act of 1934.
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Anyone who lived through 2020 observed that some messages received treatment online that stood in stark contrast to other messages. Conservative voices and messages were censored and banned, while progressive voices and messages flowed freely. If a person spoke against COVID-19 lockdowns—and later vaccines—there was a good chance that a social media platform would take down the post. If one were to suggest that suspicious activities occurred surrounding the 2020 election, the label “misinformation” might appear.
The primary vehicle to censor internet speech is to label disfavored messages as dis-, mis-, or mal-information. While the category of malinformation is seemingly the most offensive – true information that government censors believe lacks sufficient “context” – the other categories can be just as malignant. Mis- and disinformation require someone to determine what is true and what is not.
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In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” – beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser – “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
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President Joe Biden’s administration has recently taken unprecedented action to exert influence over Americans’ digital lives, including broadband internet, net neutrality, social media and artificial intelligence (AI).
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A provision tucked away in Congress’ annual defense bill would allow federal judges and their household members to request content containing personal information be removed from websites, but some free speech advocates worry the rule could enable government censorship of online speech.
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Louisiana U.S. Sen. John Kennedy has introduced a bill to limit protections for social media companies that secretly leverage user data to promote divisive content.
Kennedy, a Republican, blasted Silicon Valley behemoths such as Facebook and Twitter for “provoking” platform users and blamed the “manipulative” business practice for causing unnecessary social conflict.
“Social media giants are using people’s data to manipulate them into spending more time on their sites, but the price is a more polarized America,” Kennedy said in a statement. “It’s time to stop rewarding platforms that use their algorithms to target users with content that plays on individuals’ emotions without their consent.”
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Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the Internet, says he is fed up with what it has become and he’s taking action to fix it.
He has expressed frustration for years with how major corporations have taken what was supposed to a free environment and restricted in a variety of ways. He doesn’t like the way Facebook, Google and Amazon have centralized it and he especially doesn’t like how they control the data of almost all Americans.
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The Pentagon plans to free up a big chunk of its military airwaves in the U.S. for high-speed internet service, part of a broader push to get ahead of China in the deployment of 5G wireless technology.
The Trump administration announced Monday that it has identified radio spectrum used for radar defense systems that can be shared with commercial telecommunications providers without compromising national security.
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by Siwei Lyu Deepfake videos are hard for untrained eyes to detect because they can be quite realistic. Whether used as personal weapons of revenge, to manipulate financial markets or to destabilize international relations, videos depicting people doing and saying things they never did or said are a fundamental threat…
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by Johnny Kampis A U.S. District Court ruling that said the Wire Act only applies to sports betting not only staves off a Department of Justice effort to end interstate online poker efforts, it will also help facilitate the growth of poker gaming across the country. Earlier this month, U.S.…
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by Brittany Hunter “If it moves, tax it.” That’s government’s eternal motto, as Ronald Reagan quipped. To this, the city government of Chicago has added, “If it amuses, tax it.” A few weeks ago, PlayStation 4 users in Chicago were shocked when they turned on their consoles and saw a…
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by Sam Bocetta From an early age, the adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” has been drilled into our psyches and ingrained in our culture. Diversification, in all of its many forms, has become a cornerstone of American economic philosophy and a guiding principle we follow…
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