Category Archives: Big Tech

Joe Browns moment of clarity came in the dark. A father and a tech enthusiast, he figured that linking his Wi-Fi enabled light bulbs to his Google Home speaker would allow him to adjust the lights with his voice while his hands were busy.

And it did, most of the time, until last December, when a Google outage rendered the lights useless. A month earlier, an outage at Amazon disabled doorbells, vacuums, and thermostats up and down the East Coast. That outage also crashed newspapers and e-commerce sites, disrupted ride-hailing and food-delivery apps, and blocked people from accessing their bank accounts.

Some services have become the central hub of most of the internet traffic, says Primavera De Filippi, a faculty associate at Harvard Universitys Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Can these single points of failure be avoided? A number of efforts are underway to help restore the decentralized network envisioned in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, when he created the World Wide Web. These include using mesh networking, having multiple services to use as backups, and an idea promoted by Mr. Berners-Lee himself, creating pods where users can store their personal data and control who sees it.

Joe Brown thought he had it all figured out: By installing lights compatible with his Google Home, the former Popular Science editor could control the lights in his toddlers room with his voice each morning while his hands were occupied taking care of her.

Then came the Google outage. Suddenly, Mr. Brown, who now works for Hearst Magazines, found himself unable to turn on the lights.

You rarely have a free hand when you have a baby, he says. When he found himself stuck in the dark, all he could do was laugh.

As tech companies increasingly promote the so-called Internet of Things, anything from doorbells to thermostats can be connected to the cloud. It meansconvenience but also risk,as some users discovered during a November outage at Amazon and a December outage at Google. These previously analog devices can become inoperable because of a single failure at one company miles away. So canlarge swaths of the internet, especially as justthree companiesaccount for 60% of the cloud market.

People tend to forget that clouds are just computer servers, right? So were still down to all the mechanical, all the weather, electricity, water supply, cooling [malfunctions], says Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of tech company Catchpoint.

This isnt how Tim Berners-Lee envisioned things when, in 1989, he created the World Wide Web. Despite his vision of a decentralized web for everyone, the internet has instead become dominated by a few big companies. That concentration can lead to widespread outages from single failures at Amazon or Google, and also less tangible but still pressing problems, such as concerns about data privacy and censorship. And though changing the current landscape of the internet may seem daunting, some activists and companies are willing to try.

Saying that the internet is centralized is perhaps a little bit inaccurate. Its just that some services have become the central hub of most of the internet traffic, says Primavera De Filippi, a faculty associate at Harvard Universitys Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. And with online activity heavily concentrated in the most dominantfirms, those giants wield enormous power, fromcontrolling users data privacy to choosing what websites to host to being the single point of success or failure for the services they run.

And basically that means we are delegating, to them, the choice, on how the platforms are run and how our data is used, she says. And they can change at any point the structure of the platform.

Mr. Browns situation might seem like a niche problem, relegated to the type of people who go for things like app-controlled vacuums. But the November and December outages are simply the latest cloud crashes that have taken large parts of the internet with them. In November, during the Amazon Web Services outage, users reported issues with everything ranging from accessing their bank and using ride-hailing services. Food delivery apps faltered, and e-commerce and newspaper websites crashed. Whenever the popular messaging service Slack goes down as it did on the first work day of 2021 companies that use it can suddenly find themselves in a position where their employees cant communicate with each other.

When it comes to surviving outages, Mr. Daoudi recommends companies having as many backups as they can afford. He noted, for example, that his company maintains multiple video-conferencing subscriptions, even though employees primarily use Zoom. He spells out a hypothetical: For a company, lets say, that has an e-commerce platform and theyre down. Well, do you have a website hosted somewhere [on a different server or cloud] that you can redirect people to to just say, Were temporarily having issues. Please come back later. Here is a coupon.?

As partial outages on the internet have been rising, bigfirms like Amazon arent sitting still.They dont want disappointed customers, and aretrying to create more robust systems.

But some people are questioning existing models. They ask: What about doing more than just surviving outages what if there was a way to challenge the primacy of large tech companies, especially when it comes to the control they have over users data?

Thats the goal of Solid, a new project from Mr. Berners-Lee, which aims to put more control of data in users hands by having users rather than tech companies or websites store their data in individually controlled pods, with others able to access limited amounts only with direct permission. Davi Ottenheimer, vice president of trust and digital ethics at Inrupt, a firm that helps create Solid-compliant commercial products, says it flips traditional data-privacy practices on their head.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how does this change the idea that people can get information about me? Mr. Ottenheimer says. So you would give people consent to have [your] data or access to data for the purposes of a very specific thing and it doesnt get stored. If the model becomes popular enough, Mr. Ottenheimer says, eventually big tech companies will have to adapt to changing customer preferences that demand stronger data protection.

Another popular way to both secure data privacy and fight against single points of failure has been mesh networking, which at its most basic, is a network design where nodes are connected through multiple points rather than a single route. In New York, the practice has been adopted by the group NYC Mesh to create a Wi-Fi service users can connect to by installing a wireless router on their roof or balcony that connects to other nearby users. The result is an internet connection that doesnt store data, and bypasses corporate internet service providers, says organizer Brian Hall. Users are asked to set up recurring monthly donations to offset costs, in lieu of subscriptions.

The mesh networks still link people onto the regular internet, but they show that different models are possible. And if the rest of the web went dark, users of the mesh system would still have one another to be online with.

All in all, Mr. Browns outage wasnt the end of the world. He didnt feel like the methods to manually override the lights were worth the hassle, so he just carried on in the dark. And if the Google outage didnt fix itself, he would have simply put in a normal lightbulb.

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He hasnt sworn off smart products, either he still has the lights that temporarily failed him during the Google outage. But reflecting on some recent remodeling work he did in his kitchen, he noticed something.

I did just put some new lights in my kitchen. I wired in some new junction boxes, Mr. Brown says. And I did not connect them to the cloud.

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The internet breaks too easily. Can that be fixed? - Christian Science Monitor

Under the IT Act new rules, it appears that the interest is largely about trying to force technologists to fall in line

Last week, the Union Government issued a set of rules under the Information Technology Act, noting that it was superseding rules issued under Section 79 of that statute in 2011. Those earlier rules had specified the due diligence obligations that Internet intermediaries had to follow in order to qualify for the limited immunity for legal liability regarding user content, which Parliament had strengthened in 2008 when it amended that law.

The notification of these new rules, however, do not merely represent the executive branch superseding previous subordinate rules under a law with newer regulation. They represent a dramatic, dangerous move by the Union Government towards cementing increased censorship of Internet content and mandating compliance with government demands regarding user data collection and policing of online services in India. This has happened in the absence of open and public discussion of the full swathe of regulatory powers the government has sought to exercise, and without any parliamentary study and scrutiny.

Editorial | A wolf in watchdogs clothing: On govts move to regulate digital media

Indeed, these rules at the outset appear unlawful even with respect to whether they could have been issued under the Information Technology Act in the manner chosen by the government, leave alone their constitutionality with respect to fundamental rights. The Union Government has chosen to pass these rules under the requirement to outline the due diligence that Internet intermediaries ranging from telecom providers, search engines, Internet platforms hosting user generated content to cloud providers have to follow in order to be able to claim their qualified legal immunity under Section 79 of the IT Act.

The governments gazette notification has further claimed that the rules were also issued under the legal authority to specific procedure for blocking web content under Section 69A of the IT Act. This is curious, given that rules overseeing government web content blocking powers have already been issued for that section in 2009, and not superseded. Indeed, they form the core of the increasing number of web content censorship orders issued by the Union Government in recent years, including the most recent controversial stand-off with Twitter following the farmer protests.

The ability to issue rules under a statute i.e. to frame subordinate legislation is by its nature a limited, constrained power. When the Union Government issues subordinate rules, it is limited to the substantive provisions laid out by Parliament in the original act passed by the latter the executive branch is subordinate to what Parliament has permitted it and cannot use its rule-making power to seek to issue primary legislation by itself.

Also read | Provision for blocking content under new IT rules not new: Centre

Unfortunately, with the present Internet content and social media rules, the Union Government has done precisely that. Instead of specifying the basic due diligence requirements intermediaries had to perform in order to make use of the Section 79 safe harbour provision, the executive branch has created new rules that apply only to significant social media intermediaries a term that appears nowhere in the Information Technology Act.

It has included mandates for retention of user data by such intermediaries for use by government agencies and clauses on how popular messaging services have to enable the tracing of the original creator of a message (which is regarded as not possible for end-to-end encrypted messaging services without introducing flaws in their systems) even though the sections in the law cited by the government do not give them that power.

In Focus Podcast | Twitter, the IT Act, and the blocking saga explained

The rules have grown to include a chapter on how digital news sites have to be registered before the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and further laid out a mechanism by which streaming video sites featuring original content (which are generally not regarded as intermediaries for the purposes of Internet law) have to agree to a government-supervised self regulatory system. This, even though digital news service registration is not required under the IT Act and streaming video content has not been included under the ambit of the Cinematograph Act. In any other situation, the package contained in this gazette notification last week would be instead included in a bill sent to Parliament for its consideration and which would be regarded as ambitious and controversial for any administration.

Why has the Union Government created this legally uncertain, sprawling house-of-cards-like regulatory instrument? To understand these new Internet content control rules for that is what they essentially are you need to not only see what they directly give to the government, but what the government is seeking to get done behind a shadow of regulatory pressure. It appears that the government wants to send a message to all Internet ecosystem players that they desire compliance with their desires formal or informal regarding what content should be taken down, along with a removal of any push back against over broad demands for user data and other surveillance orders by government agencies.

Comment | Should governments regulate online platforms?

The Government of India already has significant legal powers, with practically no institutionalised oversight or true checks and balances, to force censorship and surveillance on Internet platforms and other web services in India.

However, the increasing public discussion of concerns regarding the usage of these powers and challenges being made by firms and impacted individuals against their abuse is something that the Union Government would like to avoid. Why issue direct formal orders when one can instead force compliance in less visible, more institutionalised ways? Indicating that the government has made up its mind to force these mandates by notifying them, even with doubtful legal validity, is a key signalling effect to Internet ecosystem players, especially firms keen to avoid public battles and smaller entities who do not have the resources or political position to be able to contest overboard government directives.

In Focus podcast | Will regulation of digital media lead to an era of government censorship?

The Union Government, when issuing these rules, made reference to increased global interest in regulating Big Tech. However, in advancing Internet content control interests and increased requirements around government demands for user data, while not advancing surveillance law reform or enacting a strong statutory data protection framework, it appears that the interest is more in advancing Big Government and trying to force technologists to fall in line, no matter the cost to our fundamental rights in our Internet age.

Raman Jit Singh Chima is Senior International Counsel and Asia Pacific Policy Director, Global Cybersecurity Lead, Access Now

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More about Big Government than Big Tech - The Hindu

Technology companies led a broad sell-off in stocks Wednesday, knocking more than 600 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average and handing the market its worst day in nearly three months.

The S&P 500 fell 2.6%, its biggest single-day drop since it lost 3.5% on October 28. It had set a record high just two days earlier. The Dow and tech-heavy Nasdaq composite also fell more than 2%. The sell-off left the S&P 500 and Dow in the red for the year.

A measure of fear in the U.S. stock market, the VIX index, surged more than 60%. Treasury yields edged lower, a sign of caution in the market.

Facebook, Netflix and Google's parent company led the pullback, which started early in the day as investors sized up the latest batch of company earnings reports. The market's skid accelerated toward the end of the day, following the release of a largely expected interest rate policy and economic update by the Federal Reserve.

The sharp selling is a shift from the market's recent record-setting run and comes as investors focus on the outlook for the economy and corporate profits amid a still-raging coronavirus pandemic.

Expectations on Wall Street built up in recent weeks for a big economic financial boost from the Biden administration, which has proposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. But Democrats' slim majority in the Senate has raised doubts about how soon more aid might arrive and whether such a package will end up being scaled back by spending-wary lawmakers.

"The reality is setting in that the package won't be quite as big and maybe a little bit delayed," said Sal Bruno, chief investment officer at IndexIQ.

The S&P 500 fell 98.85 points to 3,750.77. The Dow lost 633.87 points, or 2%, to 30,303.17. The Nasdaq slid 355.47 points, or 2.6%, to 13,270.60. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies gave up 41.16 points, or 1.9%, to 2,108.70.

The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it would keep its low interest rate policies in place even well after the economy has sustained a recovery from the viral pandemic. In a statement after its latest policy meeting, Fed officials said they are keeping their benchmark short-term rate pegged near zero and said they would keep buying Treasury and mortgage bonds to restrain longer-term borrowing rates and support the economy.

Meanwhile, investors continued to focus on the profit prospects for Corporate America. This is the busiest week so far of quarterly earnings reporting season for U.S. companies. More than 100 companies in the S&P 500 are scheduled to tell investors this week how they fared during the last three months of 2020.

As a whole, analysts expect S&P 500 companies to say their fourth-quarter profit fell 5% from a year earlier. That's a milder drop than the 9.4% they were forecasting earlier this month, according to FactSet.

Shares of GameStop more than doubled as the money-losing video game retailer remains caught in a tug-of-war between Wall Street institutions and an activist community of online investors. Those investors have bet that hedge funds have put too much money betting against the stock, a concept known as selling "short." A pair of professional investment firms that placed big bets that GameStop's stock would crash have largely abandoned their positions.

Boeing dropped 4% after the aircraft manufacturer posted its largest annual loss in the company's history, mostly due to the grounding of Boeing's 737-MAX fleet.

Markets have meandered since last week as investors weighed solid corporate earnings results against renewed worries that troubles with COVID-19 vaccine rollouts and the spread of new variants of coronavirus might delay a recovery from the pandemic.

"The real economy isn't reflective of what's happening in financial markets and there really is a disconnect there," said Charlie Ripley, senior investment strategist for Allianz Investment Management. "Investors have to be mindful of that gap."

The fate of President Joe Biden's stimulus plan, which includes $1,400 checks for most Americans and other support for the economy, remains a question for investors. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats are prepared to push ahead with the relief package, even if it means using procedural tools to pass the legislation without Republicans.

"That's certainly one of the factors putting a little bit of pressure on markets," Ripley said. "Maybe that's just the realization that growth expectations built into market around fiscal stimulus may not come as expected."

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Stocks have their worst day since October as Big Tech sinks - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Big Tech companies have amassed more "power" than anyone could have imagined, especially as many people rely on social media platforms for news, Fox News contributor Joe Concha said on Wednesday.

"Here is the bottom line. 70 percent of adults get their news from social media. It's like what radio and television was in the 20th century. That's how they get their news," Concha told "The Faulkner Focus."

Concha notedaround 1.82 billion daily users are on Facebook alone.

"Big Tech is more powerful than anybody ever could have imagined, more powerful than government, certainly in terms of speech," Concha said.

TRUMP'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL TO 'REMAIN SUSPENDED' AFTER CAPITOL RIOT DUE TO 'ONGOING POTENTIAL FOR VIOLENCE'

Concha remarks came following YouTube announcing former PresidentDonald Trump'schannel will "remain suspended," pointing to an "ongoing potential for violence" in the wake of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

YouTubesuspended Trump'schannel earlier this month, meaning it could not upload new videos or livestreams, afterFacebook,Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat banned the president's accounts from their platforms.

"In light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, the Donald J. Trump channel will remain suspended," a YouTube spokesperson told Fox News. "Our teams are staying vigilant and closely monitoring for any new developments."

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Concha pressed the seriousness of how "powerful" Big Tech has become.

"And we're seeing it now in terms of YouTube, which is owned by Google, is now basing their bans based on ... the potential of [Trump]possibly putting a video out there as opposed to an outright violation," Concha said.

Concha went on to say, "So now you have the ex-president of the United States, who had 89 million followers on Twitter, countless followers on Facebook, YouTube views, all that has been completely suppressed and shut down by Big Tech. That's how powerful they've become, Harris."

Fox News'Brooke Singmancontributed to this report.

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Joe Concha: 'Big Tech is more powerful' than government in terms of speech - Fox News

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SAN FRANCISCO Jack Dorsey, Twitters chief executive, publicly wrestled this month with the question of whether his social media service had exercised too much power by cutting off Donald J. Trumps account. Mr. Dorsey wondered aloud if the solution to that power imbalance was new technology inspired by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

When YouTube and Facebook barred tens of thousands of Mr. Trumps supporters and white supremacists this month, many flocked to alternative apps such as LBRY, Minds and Sessions. What those sites had in common was that they were also inspired by the design of Bitcoin.

The twin developments were part of a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the internets fundamental building blocks in ways that would be harder for tech giants like Facebook and Google to control.

To do so, they are increasingly focused on new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, which was built atop an online network designed, at the most basic level, to decentralize power.

Unlike other types of digital money, Bitcoin are created and moved around not by a central bank or financial institution but by a broad and disparate network of computers. Its similar to the way Wikipedia is edited by anyone who wants to help, rather than a single publishing house. That underlying technology is called the blockchain, a reference to the shared ledger on which all of Bitcoins records are kept.

Companies are now finding ways to use blockchains, and similar technology inspired by it, to create social media networks, store online content and host websites without any central authority in charge. Doing so makes it much harder for any government or company to ban accounts or delete content.

These experiments are newly relevant after the biggest tech companies recently exercised their clout in ways that have raised questions about their power.

Facebook and Twitter prevented Mr. Trump from posting online after the Capitol rampage on Jan. 6, saying he had broken their rules against inciting violence. Amazon, Apple and Google stopped working with Parler, a social networking site that had become popular with the far right, saying the app had not done enough to limit violent content.

While liberals and opponents of toxic content praised the companies actions, they were criticized by conservatives, First Amendment scholars and the American Civil Liberties Union for showing that private entities could decide who gets to stay online and who doesnt.

Even if you agree with the specific decisions, I do not for a second trust the people who are making the decisions to make universally good decisions, said Jeremy Kauffman, the founder of LBRY, which provides a decentralized service for streaming videos.

That has prompted a scramble for other options. Dozens of start-ups now offer alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazons web hosting services, all on top of decentralized networks and shared ledgers. Many have gained millions of new users over the past few weeks, according to the data company SimilarWeb.

This is the biggest wave Ive ever seen, said Emmi Bevensee, a data scientist and the author of The Decentralized Web of Hate, a publication about the move of right-wing groups to decentralized technology. This has been discussed in niche communities, but now we are having a conversation with the broader world about how these emerging technologies may impact the world at quite large scales.

Bitcoin first emerged in 2009. Its creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said its central idea was to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.

Business & Economy

Jan. 27, 2021, 4:55 p.m. ET

For several years, Bitcoin gained little traction beyond a small coterie of online admirers and people who wanted to pay for illegal drugs online. But as its price rose over time, more people in Silicon Valley took notice of the unusual technical qualities underlying the cryptocurrency. Some promised that the technology could be used to redesign everything from produce tracking to online games.

The hype fell flat over the years as the underlying technology proved to be slow, prone to error and not easily accessible. But more investments and time have begun to result in software that people can actually use.

Last year, Arweave, a blockchain-based project for permanently storing and displaying websites, created an archive of sites and documents from the protests in Hong Kong that angered the Chinese government.

Minds, a blockchain-based replacement for Facebook founded in 2015, also became an online home to some of the right-wing personalities and neo-Nazis who were booted from mainstream social networks, along with fringe groups, in other countries, that have been targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar start-ups are funded by prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

One of the biggest proponents of the trend has been Mr. Dorsey, 44, who has talked about the promise of decentralized social networks through Twitter and has promoted Bitcoin through the other company he runs, Square, a financial technology provider.

His public support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related designs dates to around 2017. In late 2019, Mr. Dorsey announced Blue Sky, a project to develop technology aimed at giving Twitter less influence over who could and could not use the service.

After shutting down Mr. Trumps account this month, Mr. Dorsey said he would hire a team for Blue Sky to address his discomfort with Twitters power by pursuing the vision set out by Bitcoin. On Thursday, Blue Sky published the findings of a task force that has been considering potential designs.

Twitter declined to make Mr. Dorsey available for an interview but said it intended to share more soon.

Blockchains are not the only solution for those in search of alternatives to Big Techs power. Many people have recently migrated to the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram, which have no need for a blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, has said decentralization made it hard to build good software.

The experimentation with decentralized systems has nonetheless ramped up over the last month. Brave, a new browser, announced last week that it would begin integrating a blockchain-based system, known as IPFS, into its software to make web content more reliable in case big service providers went down or tried to ban sites.

The IPFS network gives access to content even if it has been censored by corporations and nation-states, Brian Bondy, a co-founder of Brave, said.

At LBRY, the blockchain-based alternative to YouTube, the number of people signing up daily has surged 250 percent from December, the company said. The newcomers appear to have largely been a motley crew of Trump fans, white supremacists and gun rights advocates who violated YouTubes rules.

When YouTube removed the latest videos from the white supremacist video blogger Way of the World last week, he tweeted: Why do we waste our time on this globalist scum? Come to LBRY for all my videos in HD quality, censorship free!

Megan Squires, a professor at Elon University who studies new computer networks, said blockchain-based networks faced hurdles because the underlying technology made it hard to exercise any control over content.

As a technology it is very cool, but you cant just sit there and be a Pollyanna and think that all information will be free, she said. There will be racists, and people will shoot each other. Its going to be the total package.

Mr. Kauffman said LBRY had prepared for these situations. While anyone will be able to create an account and register content on the LBRY blockchain that the company cannot delete similar to the way anyone can create an email address and send emails most people will get access to videos through a site on top of it. That allows LBRY to enforce moderation policies, much as Google can filter out spam and illegal content in email, he said.

Even so, Mr. Kauffman said, no one would lose basic access to online conversation.

Id be proud of almost any kind of marginalized voice using it, no matter how much I disagreed with it, he said.

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They Found a Way to Limit Big Techs Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin - The New York Times

But the court shifted again, Lakier says, toward interpreting the First Amendment as a grant of almost total freedom for private owners to decide who could speak through their outlets. In 1974, it struck down a Florida law requiring newspapers that criticized the character of political candidates to offer them space to reply. Chief Justice Warren Burger, in his opinion for the majority, recognized that barriers to entry in the newspaper market meant this placed the power to shape public opinion in few hands. But in his view, there was little the government could do about it.

Traditionally, conservatives have favored that libertarian approach: Let owners decide how their property is used. Thats changing now that they find their speech running afoul of tech-company rules. Listen to me, America, we were wiped out, the right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino, an investor in Parler, said in a Fox News interview after Amazon pulled its services. And to all the geniuses out there, too, saying this is a private company, its not a First Amendment fight really, its not? The law that prevents the government from censoring speech should still apply, he said, because these companies are more powerful than a de facto government. You neednt sympathize with him to see the hit Parler took as the modern equivalent of, in Burgers terms, disliking one newspaper and taking the trouble to start your own, only to find no one will sell you ink to print it.

One problem with private companies holding the ability to deplatform any speaker is that theyre in no way insulated from politics from accusations of bias to advertiser boycotts to employee walkouts. Facebook is a business, driven by profit and with no legal obligation to explain its decisions the way a court or regulatory body would. Why, for example, hasnt Facebook suspended the accounts of other leaders who have used the platform to spread lies and bolster their power, like the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte? A spokesman said suspending Trump was a response to a specific situation based on risk but so is every decision, and the risks can be just as high overseas.

Its really media and public pressure that is the difference between Trump coming down and Duterte staying up, says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. But the winds of public opinion are a terrible basis for free-speech decisions! Maybe it seems like its working right now. But in the longer run, how do you think unpopular dissidents and minorities will fare?

Deplatforming works, at least in the short term. There are indications that in the weeks after the platforms cleaned house with Twitter suspending not just Trump but some 70,000 accounts, including many QAnon influencers conversations about election fraud decreased significantly across several sites. After Facebook reintroduced a scoring system to promote news sources based on its judgment of their quality, the list of top performers, usually filled by hyperpartisan sources, featured CNN, NPR and local news outlets.

But theres no reason to think the healthier information climate will last. The very features that make social media so potent work both to the benefit and the detriment of democracy. YouTube, for instance, changed its recommendation algorithm in 2019, after researchers and reporters (including Kevin Roose at The New York Times) showed how it pushed some users toward radicalizing content. Its also telling that, since the election, Facebook has stopped recommending civic groups for people to join. After Jan. 6, the researcher Aric Toler at Bellingcat surfaced a cheery video, automatically created by Facebook to promote its groups, which imposed the tagline community means a lot over images of a militia brandishing weapons and a photo of Robert Gieswein, who has since been charged in the assault on the Capitol. Im afraid that the technology has upended the possibility of a well-functioning, responsible speech environment, the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says. It used to be we had masses of speech in a reasonable range, and some extreme speech we could tolerate. Now we have a lot more extreme speech coming from lots of outlets and mouthpieces, and its more injurious and harder to regulate.

For decades, tech companies mostly responded to such criticism with proud free-speech absolutism. But external pressures, and the absence of any other force to contain users, gradually dragged them into the expensive and burdensome role of policing their domains. Facebook, for one, now has legions of low-paid workers reviewing posts flagged as harmful, a task gruesome enough that the company has agreed to pay $52 million in mental-health compensation to settle a lawsuit by more than 10,000 moderators.

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Why Is Big Tech Policing Speech? Because the Government Isnt - The New York Times

"Rubin Report" hostDave Rubinreacted to former congresswomanTulsi Gabbards scathing comments against Twitter and Big Tech on Wednesday, saying that tech leaders "coordinated"to remove then-President Trump from social media.

In an interview "America'sNewsroom,",Rubin added the message they sent by banning Trump was that if they can "take out"a sitting president, they can do the same to anybody on their platforms.

During an interview with Tucker Carlson on Tuesday, Gabbard said the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters behaved ike "domestic enemies" but asserted that the "John Brennans, Adam Schiffs and oligarchs in Big Tech" were more dangerous in their attempts to undermineconstitutionally protected rights and turn America into a "police state."

TULSI GABBARD SLAMS SCHIFF, BRENNAN, BIG TECH AS 'MORE DANGEROUS' THAN CAPITOL RIOTERS

DAVE RUBIN:"Look, her language is strongbut, in essence of course she iscorrect.Everyone absolutely condemnsall the violent rioters at thecapitol on January 6.Goes without saying. They're domestic terrorists andthe law should deal with themand by the way theres really nobody arguingthat's not the case.As far as what's going on with Big Tech and the Democrats,they are in effect now decidingwho can say what.It doesn't matter what youthink about what Donald Trumpsaid a day or two before the Capitol event.In essence Big Tech took himout.They coordinated to not onlytake him out so he couldn'tcommunicate on Twitter and say YouTube platforms to get out a message out, but they took him off Spotify, they took him off Pinterest.They coordinated, a few tech leaders to say this guy can't speak ...

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And the message that's sending to you andto me and everyone watchingis if we can take out thePresident of the United States,the sitting President of theUnited States, well, we cantake you out too.And Big Tech just has anextraordinary amount of powerto control the message, tocontrol the tenor of what isbeing said in the United Statesand we just have no idea howthe algorithms are manipulatingus and well, actually I think we do have someidea and it is is not well.Which is why the country sortof feels at odds rightnow ...

Mike Lundell is a good guy. It doesn't matter if everypolitical belief he has fallswithin exactly what they saythe Overton window is on that given day.He is allowed to expresshimself as an American.But, now he can't be on there.And again, who will be next?It is not as if they take outone person and then they all sit down and go OK, we solved the problem.Its we take out one person andnow theres blood in the water and who elsecan we take out? I believethe answer to this is we need to buildnew platforms.We have to build new platforms.I have started locals.com andit has blown up right now.But, we need many solutions to this.We can't have so much power inthe hands of a few.That's what the Founders wereworried about as far as thegovernment, but now it's interms of Big Tech."

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Big Tech has the power to 'manipulate' and 'control the message': Dave Rubin - Fox News

The call for abandoning ideological prejudice in the West, that sounds like, "But out of our affairs, we can do whatever we want to Uyghurs when there are a million in concentration and reeducation camps in our country." And we'll shut down journalists for even mentioning that if they try to operate inside China for that. The idea that the strong should not bully the weak sounds like, "Don't blame the United States. US, you better behave yourself." But what about the way the Chinese are treating Australia right now, or a host of other smaller countries that cross China's political, economic or national security interests? I mean, the willingness of Beijing to really make you pay when you engage in behaviors they don't like, is growing very quickly along with their international capacity to muscle flex.

And then on the pandemic, I mean, China is calling for greater global cooperation, but that also means that they need to cooperate in terms of transparency in what happened with coronavirus. And let's remember that there were, from my perspective, two big obscenities in terms of the world, in terms of coronavirus itself and the pandemic. One is the United States leaving the WHO in the middle of the pandemic, just an extraordinary antithesis of what a country should be doing, a country like the United States. But even more foundational was China lying to the World Health Organization about the lack of human-to-human spread for a month when we could have stopped this thing so much earlier, could have contained it, especially given the capacity we now see that China has to engage in contact tracing, quarantine and lockdown. And they chose not to. And that's a serious problem. For all of those reasons, this speech was not an enormously well-received speech by those watching.

Why did the Italian Prime Minister resign?

Well, I mean, largely it is over disagreement on how money should be spent in terms of massive coronavirus stimulus, sort of like the disagreement, the big disagreement, between Democrats and Republicans on the $1.9 trillion right now. I mean, how green, how sustainable should it be? How much money goes to healthcare? How much money goes to new technologies? How much to the workers? Former Prime Minister Renzi basically pulled out of the governing coalition over disagreements on that. And they weren't able to get a solid majority in a vote of confidence. That makes it much more difficult to governance done. And that's why Conte resigned. He is the 29th Prime Minister since World War II. If he doesn't get elected back in, if they can't put a new coalition together, they will have the 30th in Italy. Italy's kind of like the Doritos of G20 governments. Crunch all you want, they'll make more. That's kind of what we're looking at in Italy. The good news is it's not all that exciting.

Where is the international outrage for what's happening in Ethiopia's Tigray region?

And no question, there's a lot of violence. There are obvious human rights breaches across the board. There's danger of famine. There are tens of thousands of refugees. And this at the hands of a Prime Minister of Ethiopia that had won the Nobel Peace Prize, and some saying he should return the prize, just as they were saying that about Aung San Suu Kyi for some of her nationalist calls to help support minority repression in Myanmar after doing so much to stand up to the authoritarian government. A couple of points here. One is that Ethiopia, talking about this level of conflict at a time when everyone's focusing on coronavirus, everything small and local gets lost in the scrum. But also, Prime Minister Abiy in Ethiopia has led the charge in trying to move away from an ethnic-led federal government, where sort of different groups control political power, to one where it's much more of a traditional political party system, or I should say a modern political party system. And the Tigray in Ethiopia were the group that stood to lose the most party, a minority group that wielded effectively a majority of patronage and power. And so, the willingness to blame Abiy for the violence that we're seeing right now, even though he has the Ethiopian army, there's Eritrean military that's involved. It's an ally of his. I mean, clearly he has more power. But some of the initial violence clearly came at the hands of local Tigray as well who refused to recognize the Ethiopian election process and the suspension because of the pandemic, and instead held their own election, became a breakaway province. And so in these situations, there is so much conflicted narrative in terms of history, and it's very hard to lay responsibility and blame firmly at the hands of one side in this conflict. Those two things together get you why we're not paying as much attention as we perhaps should to a country with over 100 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the strongest growth trajectories economically in the entire world.

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Do the Democrats have enough power to rein in Big Tech? - GZERO Media

Business Insider columnist Adam Lashinsky discusses the future of Big Tech in the markets.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged President Joe Biden to join Europe in their clampdown on big tech, telling theDavos World Economic Forum Tuesday that the world must "address the darker sides of the digital world," which she partly blamed for the U.S. Capitol riot Jan. 6.

"I want to invite our friends in the United States to join our initiatives. Together, we could create a digital economy rulebook that is valid worldwide: It goes from data protection and privacy to the security of critical infrastructure," she said. "A body of rules based on our values: Human rights and pluralism, inclusion and the protection of privacy. So Europe stands ready."

The European Union unveiled draft legislation last month aimed at reining in big tech by making companies more accountable, enhancing privacy, and encouraging competition. Von der Leyen emphasized Tuesday the "need to contain this immense power of the big digital companies."

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"The business model of online platforms has an impact and not only on free and fair competition, but also on our democracies, our security, and on the quality of our information," she said."We want the platforms to be transparent about how their algorithms work. Because we cannot accept that decisions, that have a far-reaching impact on our democracy, are taken by computer programs alone."

President Biden has not taken any action on big tech yet, but hetold the New York Times on the campaign trail last year that Section 230, which protects platforms from liability for things users post,"immediately should be revoked."

"[Facebook]is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy," Biden told the newspaper's editorial board in January2020.

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There does appear to be a growing bipartisan push to crackdown on big tech.

Dozens of states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google last monthon the grounds that the company has an illegal monopoly on the online search market. In a separatelawsuit filed against Google last month, 10 states alleged that Google made an anti-competitive deal with Apple to manipulate the online ad industry.

Facebook was also targeted in the flurry of antitrust lawsuits, as theFederal Trade Commission and 48 states and districts accusedthe social media behemoth in a lawsuit last month of using its dominance to squeeze out competitors.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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EU urges Biden admin to join Europe in cracking down on big tech - Fox Business

In the week after Donald Trump incited a deadly riot in Washington, D.C., Twitter banned more than 70,000 users including the former president himself. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

In the week after Donald Trump incited a deadly riot in Washington, D.C., Twitter banned more than 70,000 users including the former president himself.

Removing disinformation and users who spread it can come at a cost for web hosts and social media platforms. But studies indicate "deplatforming" does stem the flow of disinformation.

Kate Starbird with the University of Washington explains why it's easier to see the effects of deplatforming in the short-term. And NPR's Shannon Bond looks at how one growing social media site is dealing with new attention and new challenges.

Additional reporting in this episode from NPR's Bobby Allyn, who's reported on the removal of Parler by Amazon Web Services.

In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Brianna Scott and Brent Baughman. It was edited by Lee Hale with help from Shannon Bond and Wynne Davis. Our executive producer is Cara Tallo.

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Does Deplatforming Work? Big Tech And The 'Censorship' Debate : Consider This from NPR - NPR