March 31, 2023 The Tiktok hearing backfires As expected, Congress tried to turn its cross-examination of Tiktok CEO Shou Chew into a public stoning. Committee members (helped along by Meta lobbying) came in with their minds made up, refused to listen to anything he said, and repeatedly interrupted him. The...
March 1, 2023 TikTok Ban would repeal free speech protections A House Committee is set to vote on their attempt to ban TikTok. The bill empowers the president to impose sanctions on any entity that operates a “connected software application” subject to the influence of China, but tries to skirt...
A new research paper by IGP conducts the first thorough national security threat analysis of TikTok, given recent drives to ban the application entirely from the US market. A bipartisan group of China hawks in Congress and a couple of government agencies have argued that TikTok is a Trojan horse...
December 15, 2022 US-EU Data Privacy Framework Moves Forward The European Commission published a “draft adequacy decision,” about the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. In a largely unheralded but highly consequential decision, the US committed itself to privacy protections for European citizens in an October Executive Order from the Biden administration....
At first, there was a reason to feel optimistic about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Mr Musk seemed to be interested in disrupting a cross-firm, collusive, and overly restrictive equilibrium on the standards and norms of social media content moderation. While I understand that the scope and value of “free...
November 1, 2022 The Twitter Acquisition Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, by threatening to upset the social media status quo, has kicked off a rambunctious but mostly healthy controversy in the US about the role of content moderation in the ”public square.” In a separate blog post, Milton Mueller explains...
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter last week. This process was accompanied by a fascinating public process, which reveals how politicized and polarized American social media have become. We have two factions competing for power; one has captured the Democratic party, the other has captured the Republican Party. The...
September 30, 2022 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is having its Plenipotentiary meeting in Bucharest. These four-year events are always redolent with claims that Russia and China will somehow use the ITU to “take over the internet” (despite the fact that the ITU has no power over...
September 1, 2022 Impartiality in Content Moderation (!) Post-2016 hysteria about “information warfare” - which should be labeled foreign influence operations (IO) - created serious concerns that U.S.-based social media platforms would collaborate with the U.S. government to censor foreign information sources that contradicted our state’s foreign policy narratives. Because...
A Chinese law that went into effect six months ago required online service providers to file details of the algorithms they use with China’s centralized regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). In mid-August, CAC released a list of 30 algorithms used by companies such as Alibaba, TenCent and Douyin,...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
