Public Knowledge

In late June, the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve, on a bipartisan basis, a six-part package of legislation designed to restrict dominant digital platforms from leveraging their power to disadvantage competitors or promote their own lines of business unfairly. We hope the bills will eventually have counterparts or companions from the Senate. Our purpose […]

Last week, Facebook disabled the accounts, apps, Facebook pages, and platform access associated with several researchers at the NYU Ad Observatory. The Ad Observatory is a voluntary data donation program that invites Facebook users to install a browser plugin — the Ad Observer — that collects information about the ads a user sees. Its most […]

Recently, we published a blog post and warned policymakers about the Journalism Competition and Protection Act (JCPA), which proposes to create a “safe harbor” from antitrust law and allow news companies to collectively negotiate compensation terms for their news stories with the largest online platforms. We cautioned that the proposal, which is being advocated for […]

Public Knowledge believes it’s vitally important to protect Americans’ access to trustworthy sources of news. Some of our team can quote from memory the numbers related to news deserts and laid-off reporters in this country. And we are advocating on multiple fronts for policies to sustainably fund newsgathering, mitigate the impact of disinformation on digital […]

In the next few months, Congress will debate what should be in the scope of an investment of up to $4 trillion in America’s infrastructure. A host of factors — years of wear and tear with inadequate investment, levels of federal spending that pale in comparison to those of other leading democracies, changing demographics, and […]

Have you heard? The COVID-19 pandemic has entered a new phase. No, it’s not the new, more contagious “super strains” of the virus, or the beginning of the vaccine rollout. It’s the shift in focus of the disinformation peddlers, from the virus itself (remember the “infodemic”?) and the 2020 election to the ramping up of […]

In a recent interview, former President Obama called the lack of a “common baseline of fact” the “single greatest threat to our democracy.” Our increasingly polluted information environment — including the proliferation of “crazy lies and conspiracy theories” on social media — divides society while undermining public faith in facts, impeding our ability to face […]

Media organizations and social media platforms approached preparing for the 2020 presidential election as if they were going to war. Informed by COVID-19 misinformation conspiracies, demands from both sides of the political aisle to adjust their content moderation policies, and at least four years of orchestrated political misinformation campaigns, our mainstream media and social media […]

Over the past couple of weeks, a who’s who of over 500 brands, including Verizon, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Levi’s, Starbucks, Reebok, Adidas, and Ford, announced they would withdraw their advertising from Facebook for the month of July or longer. Many were responding to the #StopHateForProfit campaign, organized by a coalition of civil rights and public interest […]

This blog post is part of a series on communications policies Public Knowledge recommends in response to the pandemic. You can read more of our proposals here and view the full series here. “When the next pandemic strikes, we’ll be fighting it on two fronts. The first is the one you immediately think about: understanding the disease, researching […]