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With five months to go until a presidential election that promises to be a major test of American democratic institutions, American laws are in desperate need of update to address digital forms of voter suppression and how political debate and campaigning has moved online. Several ideas for rules that government could enact to provide the necessary transparency to help ensure that voter suppression does not run unchecked online include:

President Donald Trump’s crackdown on Twitter may have an unintended effect — hampering the marketing of some of his administration’s signature efforts, from Army recruiting to anti-vaping campaigns.

In a decision that could further embolden European governments to take on large tech platforms, Germany’s top court, the Federal Court of Justice, ruled that Facebook had abused its dominance in social media to illegally harvest data about its users. The authorities said Facebook broke competition laws by combining data it collected about users across its different platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as from outside websites and third-party apps. In Germany, Facebook now must alter how it processes data about its users.

The Network Advertising Initiative, a national trade group representing the digital advertising industry, has advised member companies to put stricter controls on consumer mobile-phone location data they provide to government units such as public health authorities and law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Facebook took down campaign posts and ads for President Donald Trump, citing violations of the company’s policy against what it called “organized hate,” as the social-media company grapples with what content to allow on its platforms. The ads, featuring a downward-pointing triangle, targeted antifa, describing the movement as “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups.” The ads asked Trump supporters to back President Trump’s calls to designate antifa as a terrorist organization.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) encouraged companies that advertise on social media to use their “tremendous leverage” to push platforms to crack down on disinformation. “Know your power,” Speaker Pelosi said. “Advertisers are in a position, they have power to discourage platforms from amplifying dangerous and even life-threatening disinformation. Some major advertisers and some not so major have begun to express objections to platform policies that promote voter fraud and violence ...

Several leading experts and groups announced support for the Banning Microtargeted Political Ads Act (HR 7014), legislation introduced by Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) to strengthen our democracy by prohibiting microtargeted political ads. Leading privacy and campaign reform scholars Woodrow Hartzog, Shoshana Zuboff, Ashkan Soltani, and G.

This memo briefly explains how Facebook and Google have come to dominate modern communications networks, what that means for American democracy, and how to fix it.

This report argues that Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s targeted advertising business models, and the opaque algorithmic systems that support them, are the root cause of their failure to staunch the flow of misinformation. This report reinforces the need to adopt a human rights framework for platform accountability.

The Association of National Advertisers says that the new browser obligations in the proposed implementing regulations of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are "a regulatory hammer blow against the anvil of the pandemic-driven pullback in the broader ad market." That came in a letter to Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA) in response to a letter from the congressman on a related subject, keyword filtering.