Platforms

Watchdog group Campaign for Accountability is calling for an investigation into political campaigns' use of "imbedded" Facebook and Google staffers. It wants the House and Senate Rules Committees to investigate the practice and whether new laws are needed to prevent what it says are edge providers "abusing their relationships" with Washington. 

Sen. Mark Warner’s proposals to regulate social media platforms are by far the most ambitious to come from Congress.  Here, three experts discuss the pros and cons: 1) Beton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn. She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. 2) Daniel Crane, an antitrust law expert and the Frederick Paul Furth Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. 3) Hal Singer, an antitrust economist and senior fellow of the George Washington Institute of Public Policy.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the internet are not media. They are something new we do not yet fully understand. To call these platforms publishers is to presume that their task is merely to produce content. It is to presume, then, that the internet should be produced, packaged, and polished, and that when someone says something bad anywhere on it then the entire internet is beschmutzed. The larger question, of course, is what the internet is and how it fits into society and society into it. We are just beginning to see what it can be.

Apple, Google and Facebook erased from their services many — but not all — videos, podcasts and posts from the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars site. And Twitter left Jones’s posts untouched. The differing approaches to Jones exposed how unevenly tech companies enforce their rules on hate speech and offensive content. There are only a few cases in which the companies appear to consistently apply their policies, such as their ban on child pornography and instances in which the law required them to remove content, like Nazi imagery in Germany.

Not long after several of the country’s biggest tech firms — Apple, Facebook and Google — kicked the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones off their various online platforms, Jones’s allies complained that he had been deprived of his First Amendment rights to free speech. Several scholars of free speech had already concluded that many of the things he has said online were not in fact protected by the First Amendment. 

A group of First Amendment advocates has urged Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to change the social media giant’s platform rules to enable public service journalism and research on its platform. The issue is especially pressing as reporters and researchers investigate Russian interference in the midterm elections through platforms such as Facebook’s.

Because the stakes are so high, we need to look with extreme skepticism at proposals primarily designed to prop up the current consolidated and dysfunctional media landscape. If we want to address the very real problems created by a dysfunctional media, we need to separate which of these problems can properly be attributed to dominant platforms and which to structural problems in the traditional news industry.

Customer proprietary network information (usually abbreviated as “CPNI”) refers to a very specific set of privacy regulations governing telecommunications providers (codified at 47 U.S.C. §222) and enforced by the Federal Communications Commission. But while CPNI provides some of the strongest consumer privacy protections in federal law, it also does much more than that.

Sen. Mark Warner's office has laid out 20 different paths to address problems posed by Big Tech platforms — ranging from putting a price on individual users' data to funding media literacy programs. The proposal is a window t0 the options available to US policymakers concerned about disinformation and privacy. Enacting any of these plans is a long shot in the near-term, but a shift in party control of Congress come November could give them more momentum.

Alex Jones, the American conspiracy theorist who runs the InfoWars website, has been suspended from Facebook for bullying and hate speech. The suspension will last for 30 days, and affects only Jones’s personal account on the social network, not the main InfoWars account. His profile will continue to be published, but he will not be able to post content until the suspension elapses. A Facebook spokesperson said Jones was found to have violated its community standards.