Reporting

Homeschooling students amid the coronavirus pandemic significantly amplifies economic inequities between households. Income also significantly affects access to broadband and data plans, the foundations of keeping up with schoolwork when classes are cancelled. With web-based learning as the new norm, students are dependent on access to the internet and computers to obtain their education. Internet hotspots are in-demand, but supply is lagging.

Pew’s “After the Fact” podcast host, Dan LeDuc, spoke with Kathryn de Wit, manager of Pew’s broadband research initiative, to hear about the challenges that communities face in bridging the digital divide.

Facebook removed two networks of accounts linked to white supremacy groups, but hasn’t seen any attempted foreign interference on its platforms related to the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the US targeting police brutality. Attorney General William Barr said that the US government has seen evidence of “foreign actors playing all sides to exacerbate the violence.” But Facebook officials said  they haven’t detected foreign influence on the social network.

The existential question that every big tech platform from Twitter to Google to Facebook has to wrestle with is the same: How responsible should it act for the content that people post? The answer that Silicon Valley has come up with for decades is: Less is more. But now, as protests of police brutality continue across the country, many in the tech industry are questioning the wisdom of letting all flowers bloom online.

For the last few months, some people who bought a new smartphone in Europe with Google’s Android software were presented with an extra option while setting up the device: choosing a search engine other than Google. This so-called choice menu started appearing on new smartphones and tablet computers running Google software after March, part of an effort by the internet giant to address a 2018 ruling from European authorities that the company had abused its dominance in smartphone software to unfairly give an advantage to its search engine.

The Senate confirmed Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker who President Donald Trump has said he hopes will dictate more favorable news coverage of his administration, to lead the United States Agency for Global Media, the independent agency in charge of state-funded media outlets.

The coronavirus pandemic caused big Internet service providers to put data caps on hold for a few months, but one small ISP is going a big step further and canceling the arbitrary monthly limits permanently. Antietam Broadband, which serves Washington County in Maryland, announced that it "has permanently removed broadband data usage caps for all customers," retroactive to mid-March when the company first temporarily suspended data-cap overage fees.

Social media companies are finally beginning to take action on posts from world leaders that violate their policies, after years of letting them mostly say whatever they wanted unfiltered to millions of people. Government officials are among the users most likely to abuse the wide reach and minimal regulation of tech platforms. Mounting pressure to stop harmful content from spreading amid the coronavirus pandemic, racial protests and a looming U.S.

Today the United States crumbles under the weight of two pandemics: coronavirus and police brutality. Both wreak physical and psychological violence. Both disproportionately kill and debilitate black and brown people. And both are animated by technology that we design, repurpose, and deploy—whether it’s contact tracing, facial recognition, or social media. We often call on technology to help solve problems.

The massive, systemwide move to remote learning over the past few months created huge frustrations for educators. Those sentiments showed up in the results from surveys conducted by the EdWeek Research Center and in Education Week’s reporting. Teacher morale dropped, student engagement was down, and budget cutting plans were already starting. But, at the same time, by necessity, K-12 educators across the country upgraded their tech skills faster than ever before. What impact will those newfound technology and virtual teaching skills have on K-12 education when school buildings reopen?