Guardian, The

British homes and businesses will have a legal right to high-speed broadband by 2020, the government has announced, dismissing calls from the network provider BT that it should be a voluntary rather than legal obligation on providers. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said only a universal service obligation (USO) would offer certainty that broadband speeds of at least 10Mbps would reach the whole of the UK by 2020. Broadband providers will now have a legal requirement to provide high-speed broadband to anyone who requests it, no matter where they are in the country.

[Commentary] The Republican majority at the Federal Communications Commission will soon repeal net neutrality. What does this mean in practice? In a sentence: slower and more expensive internet service. To democratize the internet, we need to do more than force private ISPs to abide by certain rules. We need to turn those ISPs into publicly owned utilities. We need to take internet service off the market, and transform it from a consumer good into a social right. Access to the internet is a necessity.

Facebook’s secret rules and guidelines for deciding what its 2 billion users can post on the site are revealed for the first time in a Guardian investigation that will fuel the global debate about the role and ethics of the social media giant. The Guardian has seen more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that give unprecedented insight into the blueprints Facebook has used to moderate issues such as violence, hate speech, terrorism, pornography, racism and self-harm. The Facebook Files give the first view of the codes and rules formulated by the site, which is under huge political pressure in Europe and the US. They illustrate difficulties faced by executives scrabbling to react to new challenges such as “revenge porn” – and the challenges for moderators, who say they are overwhelmed by the volume of work, which means they often have “just 10 seconds” to make a decision. “Facebook cannot keep control of its content,” said one source. “It has grown too big, too quickly.” Many moderators are said to have concerns about the inconsistency and peculiar nature of some of the policies. Those on sexual content, for example, are said to be the most complex and confusing.

One of the most powerful players in the British election is also one of the most opaque. With just over two weeks to go until voters go to the polls, there are two things every election expert agrees on: what happens on social media, and Facebook in particular, will have an enormous effect on how the country votes; and no one has any clue how to measure what’s actually happening there.

“Many of us wish we could study Facebook,” said Prof Philip Howard, of the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, “but we can’t, because they really don’t share anything.” Howard is leading a team of researchers studying “computational propaganda” at the university, attempting to shine a light on the ways automated accounts are used to alter debate online.

Sexual harassment, bullying and racist stereotyping are common in the technology industry, creating a culture that drives underrepresented employees out of their jobs, new research has found. One in 10 women in tech experience unwanted sexual attention, and nearly one in four people of color face stereotyping, according to the Kapor Center for Social Impact and Harris Poll, which surveyed more than 2,000 people who left tech jobs in the last three years. The findings – which suggest that sexual harassment and complaints about unfairness are disproportionately high in the tech sector compared to other industries – come at a time of heightened debates around diversity and discrimination in Silicon Valley. The Tech Leavers Study is the first report of its kind to analyze the reasons why tech workers voluntarily leave their jobs and paints a picture of turnover driven by hostile work environments.

The European Union is launching an unprecedented public consultation to find out what Europeans fear most about the future of the internet. A succession of surveys over the coming weeks will ask people for their views on everything from privacy and security to artificial intelligence, network neutrality, big data and the impact of the digital world on jobs, health, government and democracy. A dozen leading European publications, including the Guardian, are to publicise the surveys over the coming three weeks. Results will be compiled in early June.

“Science should be open and freed from its traditional ivory tower; to be discussed, submitted to critique and fed with new perspectives,” said Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, adding that the consultation would “inspire fresh ideas about how to solve some of our society’s most pressing problems”. The project is being led by REIsearch, a non-profit initiative co-funded by the European commission. The aim is to give policymakers a better sense of public priorities in their decision-making.

The Trump Administration sought to unmask the identity of an anonymous Twitter account criticizing its policies, according to a lawsuit filed by the social media platform April 6. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a division of homeland security, issued a summons to Twitter on March 14 seeking records including the phone number, mailing addresses, and IP addresses associated with @ALT_USCIS, an account that purports to convey the views of dissenters within the government.

The account @ALT_USCIS, whose handle refers to the US citizenship and immigration services, is one of dozens of “alternative” Twitter accounts established following the inauguration of Donald Trump. These alternative accounts claim to provide the uncensored view of civil servants dissenting from Trump’s policies, but they are generally anonymous and unverifiable. The government’s attempt to break that anonymity was revealed when Twitter filed suit in federal court seeking to block the summons, citing the first amendment.