(republished by permission) The biggest story of 2017? To my mind, there is no contest — the broad emergence of an awareness that the irresponsibility masquerading as Internet freedom represented a threat to global societies and to cherished aspects of our humanity, and that a course correction was badly needed. While recognition of the fact that rewarding lack of accountability would likely ...
’Tis the season of glad tidings and Year-in-Review articles. But those moods are decidedly incompatible. The crescendo of 2017 is more like a relentless cacophony of disaster scenes justifying the preponderance of the word apocalypse in so many social media comments. It was indeed a hard contrast between the vibe of “Winter Wonderland” and the image of a starving polar ...
When that cliché first entered our consciousness, it wasn’t really fair. The internet between the mid-90s and the mid-aughts wasn’t what it is today. It actually was just a dumb pipe through which content could could be delivered from creator to consumer in a new way. It was silly to imply that one should not believe a news story published ...
I can’t say I was surprised when the Internet Association announced on Friday that the major internet companies would be halting their lobbying efforts against the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking (SESTA) bill. While representatives for Google, Facebook, and Twitter were enjoying Day Three of occasionally intense inquiry by the Senate Judiciary Committee over foreign meddling in our politics via social ...
Yesterday afternoon the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled: “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find Solutions.” Representing the social media companies were Colin Stretch, General Counsel at Facebook; Sean Edgett, Acting General Counsel at Twitter; and Richard Salgado, Director of Law Enforcement And Information Security at Google. The news to come out of this ...
