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News on Regulation and Policy
Concerned about growing momentum behind efforts to regulate the commercial use of personal data, Big Tech has begun seeding watered-down “privacy” legislation in states with the goal of preempting greater protections, experts say. The swift passage in March of a consumer data privacy law in Virginia, which Protocol reported was originally authored by Amazon with […]
By Todd FeathersAny day now the Facebook Oversight Board, the social media company’s review mechanism for decisions on deletion of content and users, will tell the world whether Donald Trump should remain banned from Facebook indefinitely. Before that, Facebook also announced the expansion of the Oversight Board’s remit: initially users could only appeal to have content restored […]
By Emily BellReimagine the Internet is a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over […]
The conference of Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) will take place virtually during the week of August 19-13, 2021. Panels will take place between 11 am-3 pm ET. We invite submissions from all fields and industries. Please email politics.css@gmail.com with any questions. **Submissions are due by Friday, May 21** For the full call, see: […]
By Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS)As denazification and reconstruction efforts ramped up across Germany in the wake of World War II, Germans and occupying Allied forces found themselves struggling with difficult questions around censorship and preservation, among them what to do with decades worth of Nazi writings. While books including Mein Kampf were banned for a period of years after […]
By John Bowers, Elaine Sedenberg, and Jonathan ZittrainShortly before Sophie Zhang lost access to Facebook’s systems, she published one final message on the company’s internal forum, a farewell tradition at Facebook known as a “badge post”. “Officially, I’m a low-level [data scientist] who’s being fired today for poor performance,” the post began. “In practice, in the 2.5 years I’ve spent at Facebook, […]
By Julia Carrie WongLiberals on Facebook are given one picture of ExxonMobil. To them, the multibillion-dollar oil giant sells itself as turning over a new leaf, exploring “carbon capture” techniques that put carbon back into the ground. If you’re a conservative, Exxon has a very different message: “The oil and gas industry is THE engine that powers America’s […]
By Jeremy B. MerrillJournalism today is facing two overlapping challenges: one is technological and the other one is political. The technological change is pushing the boundaries about how we disclose and propagate news. Social media has shortened the time spans of information. Facebook, Google and Twitter allow us to publish stories and promote them globally, reaching increasing audiences […]
By Reuters Institute for the Study of JournalismI was in a cavernous college auditorium on the frigid winter afternoon in New Delhi in 2015 when Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, was selling the promise of India, his home country and the company’s largest market, to 2,000 high school and college students. “Part of the reason we’re all very interested in India […]
By Pranav DixitIn the midst of the heated U.S. presidential race last summer, with hypercharged scrutiny of partisan propaganda on social media, Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg received a letterfrom a group of U.S. senators led by Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren that had nothing to do with elections. They were angry about a year-old piece of […]
By Kurt WagnerTwitch is finally coming to terms with its responsibility as a king-making microcelebrity machine, not just a service or a platform. Today, the Amazon-owned company announced a formal and public policy for investigating streamers’ serious indiscretions in real life, or on services like Discord or Twitter. Last June, dozens of women came forward with allegations […]
By Cecilia D'Anastasio