Digital Content

Cyberspace is ruled today by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—a small handful of the biggest companies on earth. But  it is clear that a desire for revolution is brewing. “We’re taking the internet back to a time when it provided this open environment for creativity and economic growth, a free market where services could connect on equal terms,” says Dominic Williams, Dfinity’s founder and chief scientist.

Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, he called Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told President Donald Trump. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign demanded that Facebook prevent misuse of its platform by President Donald Trump to spread “hateful content” and misleading claims about mail-in voting ahead of the November election. The letter, signed by Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, raised particular concern about revelations in a 

Facebook will be updating the way news stories are ranked in its News Feed to prioritize original reporting and demoting stories that aren't transparent about who has written them. Facebook says that in order to identify which original stories to promote, it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of articles on a particular story topic and identify the ones most often cited as the original source. It's a minor but concrete tweak that Facebook can point to as doing something to minimize misinformation.

They say it is best not to talk politics among friends. But in trying to avoid the conversation, Facebook has stepped right into the thick of it. Now, some of its most valuable relationships are at risk. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Facebook has been no stranger to controversies ranging from election misinformation, security breaches, violent content and more.

Facebook is changing a number of policies relating to hate speech and voter suppression on the platform, said Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. The announcements were made in a hurried appearance by the executive on his personal Facebook page shortly after Unilever announced that it was pulling advertisements for the next six months – which sent Facebook stock tumbling more than 7%.

After years of criticism about how it keeps a record of what people do online, Google said it would start automatically deleting location history and records of web and app activity as well as voice recordings on new accounts after 18 months. The limited change comes after Google introduced an option last year to allow users to automatically delete data related to their web searches, requests made with the company’s virtual assistant and their location history.

Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) and Ranking Member Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act, an update to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The PACT Act will strengthen transparency in the process online platforms use to moderate content and hold those companies accountable for content that violates their own policies or is illegal.

The Schatz-Thune PACT Act creates more transparency by:

All five Federal Communications Commissioners testified at a Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing. Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) said the hearing was an opportunity for Commissioners to discuss what more can be done to expand broadband access and digital opportunity for all Americans.

Building a consensus to change Section 230 will be harder than it looks. The law’s critics have vastly different and sometimes incompatible ideas about how the law should work. Republican and Democratic policymakers alike have called for sites to bear more legal liability if users post illegal content.