About ten minutes after the world went into self-quarantine, and we all instantaneously became more dependent on internet platforms, you could almost hear the keyboards clacking, as various pundits raced to announce that the techlash is officially over. And that it never should have happened. For instance, Ryan Bourne of the libertarian CATO institute said as much. Writing on April 9 for The ...
As our attention turned to concerns about disinformation, hate speech, and data security after the 2016 election, it became clear that the big cyber policy on deck was going to be a fight about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996). For some detailed discussion about this legislation, see posts here, here, and here; but in nutshell, Section 230 ...
In an op-ed for The Hill published on September 30, Donald Trump, Jr. rails against the power of the major internet platforms, saying that “free speech is under attack” by Big Tech. His complaint, of course, is that the big internet platforms are censoring what he calls conservative voices, blaming “the technology giants that deplatform people at the behest of liberals and then ...
After the 2016 election and news began to break about the amount of fake information and manipulative content that was being financed by various parties, it seemed clear that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996) would soon be the number-one cyber policy issue in the United States. Recently, in response to the latest horror show of back-to-back spree ...
“One of the reasons Hamilton found the word democracy so offensive was because he realized that the vast majority of American citizens had not the dimmest understanding of what he was talking about.” – Joseph Ellis – Proving that it is easier to be a futurist than a historian, Cory Doctorow contributed a bit of soothsaying to a New York Timesseries the editors ...
