Vox

[Of Note: The journalist responsible for this article was not present at the meeting]
At the top of the gathering between Silicon Valley executive and President-elect Donald Trump, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella brought up perhaps the most thorny issue: Immigration and how the government can help tech with things like H-1B visas to keep and bring in more talent. Nadella pointed out that much of the company’s spending on research and development was in the U.S., even if 50 percent of the sales were elsewhere, so that immigration would benefit those here. Surprisingly to the group, Trump apparently responded favorably, “Let’s fix that,” he said, without a specific promise, and then asked, “What can I do to make it better?” Apple CEO Cook brought up a related issue, that of science, technology engineering and math education, which has been a big initiative of President Barack Obama, and also was pushed by Trump’s campaign rival Hillary Clinton.

The STEM issue was also pushed hard by Facebook COO Sandberg, who focused Trump on that kind of education for women and underrepresented minorities. She then brought up the issue of paid maternity leave. In the campaign, Trump unveiled a plan for six weeks of leave for women, while Clinton was advocating for 12 weeks for parents of either sex. One of the most interesting exchanges was with Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who briefly noted that he pondered what he would do if he were president, and then made the point that governmental information-technology programs were antiquated and unsafe, and needed to be upgraded. Schmidt then suggested to Trump that he be the “software president,” a phrase Trump misheard as “soft” president. Trump was not going to be soft! Laughs all around!

It was real news from establishment outlets that made the difference in this campaign. The sum total of this media coverage — real stories based on editorial decisions about how to weight and present real facts — was to give the public the impression that two similarly ethically flawed candidates were running against each other in an election with low policy stakes. The reporters and editors responsible for that coverage can reasonably (if a bit absurdly) consider themselves proud of the work that led the public to that conclusion, or they can consider themselves ashamed of it. But the idea that voters were moved by fake stories about the pope rather than all-too-real ones about email servers is a preposterous evasion.

If the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger goes through, it would, in my view, represent an unhealthy concentration of power between a distributor and a maker of content. And it could be a threat to small players on the mobile web, if AT&T extends to its Time Warner content a technique called “zero-rating,” in which selected content and services don’t count against users’ data plan caps. That makes favored content much more attractive to users than similar content from other sources, which uses up your scarce data allotment.

For media companies, for consumers, for advertisers, the best solution is to keep distribution and content separate, so consumers and creators meet on a level playing field. AT&T, which seems more excited right now about owning media than running a network, should be forced to choose whether it wants to be in one business or the other.

Every time you “like” something on Facebook or search something on Google, these companies learn a little bit more about you — and provide a slightly more personalized experience based on that. And people of different races and classes have different needs and constraints, so we all use the Internet differently. In turn, we get an even more personalized experience. Those personalized experiences impact whether or not we get real-world opportunities — like the chance to move to a better neighborhood.

This story could very well have been about job listings or college advertisements, but it seems apt to talk about how algorithms have sorted us online and, in turn, real life. “When the nature of the discrimination comes about through personalization, it's hard to know you're being discriminated against,” said Michael Tschantz, a Carnegie Mellon researcher. This could affect a wide swath of marginalized people, but the group that is especially vulnerable to housing discrimination is black Americans. Racist policies of our past created two divergent Americas: largely middle-class neighborhoods for white people and lower-class neighborhoods for black people. And the civil rights movement did little to help black families overcome this discrimination and get out of poor neighborhoods.

It quickly became undeniable that the alt-right was no longer a small-time fringe group that lived on Twitter and 4chan — it had evolved into a formidable movement with political clout in the White House, all while openly spouting messages of white supremacy, xenophobia, misogyny, and other extreme ideas. News organizations know their decisions about how to describe a modern group with an age-old racist message will shape how Americans understood it.

[Commentary] Beginning eight years ago, the Obama Administration embraced a fresh approach to leveraging technology platforms and improved the experience of interacting with government. While leading the White House’s digital technology team, I witnessed the impact of private-sector principles and ideas becoming embedded in government. It was a push to close the digital experience gap between the private and public sectors, embracing the philosophies of open government: Transparency, participation and collaboration.

[Tom Cochran is the chief digital strategist and VP for public sector at Acquia. he was most recently a deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of State.]

A Q&A with Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes.com.

Brooke Binkowski is the managing editor of Snopes.com, a website dedicated to debunking bogus stories, Internet rumors, and malignant falsehoods. Snopes has done the thankless work of online fact-checking since 1995. Unsurprisingly, the site has seen its traffic spike by 85 percent over the past year. The conventional view is that social media is the main culprit in terms of spreading misinformation online. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg was compelled recently to address Facebook’s role in disseminating “fake news.” Binkowski, who worked for many years as a reporter for CNN, has a slightly different take. For her part, social media is the low-hanging fruit in this discussion. The real problem is the collapse of faith in media as a trusted and credible institution.

While the president-elect railed against companies like NBCUniversal and Amazon for being too big and threatened antitrust action during his campaign, the advisers President-elect Trump named to help oversee his Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department transitions have a history of being very pro-industry and anti-regulation, particularly when it comes to mergers.

That’s good news for AT&T’s $85 billion bid for Time Warner, despite what President-elect Trump said on the campaign trail. The merger is currently under review by antitrust regulators at the Justice Department, where a decision will probably not be reached until President Trump is in office. Jeff Eisenach, who President-elect Trump officially named to help transition the FCC, has supported major media mergers proposed in recent years. When Comcast was considering a Time Warner takeover in 2013, Eisenach wrote, “The best thing that could happen for U.S. consumers would be substantial consolidation in the cable business.” And when AT&T wanted to purchase T-Mobile in 2011, Eisenach likewise argued in favor of the merger, pointing out, "The wireless market is extremely competitive.” Mark Jamison, the person Trump named to help with the FCC transition, also argued in favor of the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. Of Trump’s three new advisers for the transition of the Justice Department — J. Patrick Rowan, Jessie Liu and Ronald Tenpas — none specialize in mergers and acquisitions, but all three have extensive experience in helping large, private companies navigate the US regulatory landscape. Rowan has helped counsel at least one sale of a US telecom company to a foreign buyer.

[Commentary] Verizon has topped itself by playing Russian roulette with consumer trust in an attempt to compete with the advertising businesses of Google and Facebook. In an e-mail announcement recently to select subscribers, Verizon signaled how it intends to compete with those two powerhouses, outlining its plan to combine offline information, such as postal address, e-mail address and device type, with AOL browser cookies, Apple and Google advertising IDs, and their own unique identifier header. Coupled with all of their customers’ browsing history and app usage, this mass of customer data will make for a rich competitive product to Facebook and Google.

There’s just one problem: This practice requires explicit opt-in consent from consumers under the new Federal Communications Commission privacy rules. Although the rules are not yet required to be adopted (and notably on the chopping block in a Trump presidency), it's hard to argue that Verizon’s plan doesn't violate the spirit of the rulemaking.

[Jason Kint is the CEO of Digital Content Next]

[Commentary] The legacies of a right-wing broadcasting bubble have profoundly shaped our current political moment, and Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm is only one small piece of the puzzle. Even before Facebook became a primary source for political news, liberals and conservatives were getting their news from vastly different sources. as opponents of President-elect Donald Trump’s candidacy and eventual presidency rally to avoid “normalizing” his ideas and approach, the mainstreaming of conservative fake news is a clear case of the dangers of such normalization. As we increasingly accept inaccurate peddlers of politicized misinformation as “news,” we allow our citizenry to be horrifically misinformed as part of this new normal.

[Jason Mittell is a professor of film and media culture and American studies at Middlebury College. Chuck Tryon is an associate professor of English at Fayetteville State University.]