The effects that digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter play in our society, and our democracy, have been under increasingly heavy scrutiny. Now, people are rightly looking at the platforms’ role in last week’s violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: both at how the attack was organized and instigated and at the platforms’ reactions to […]

Last week, President Trump used social media to encourage his supporters to storm the Capitol to attempt to maintain his power. In the wake of this violent insurrection against the certification of our election, the President and some of his supporters are claiming that the First Amendment rights of the President have been violated because […]

What a week. On Tuesday, if you stayed up late enough (or woke at 3 a.m. Wednesday morning to a screaming baby, as I did) we saw Democrats win control of the Senate via a special election in Georgia. On Wednesday, we witnessed an armed insurrection on the Capitol Building, directed by President Trump in […]

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 […]

I’ve had to shift focus several times while writing this blog post. No wonder, it’s been a pretty crazy couple of weeks for antitrust and digital platform competition. On Wednesday, a coalition of U.S. state attorneys general filed suit over Google’s market power in online advertising technology. Thursday saw another complaint, this one about Google […]

One of the most important and difficult goals of media policy is preserving and promoting voices of marginalized communities and diverse perspectives. It’s important because a functioning democracy requires informed points of view from multiple perspectives. There should be media that speak to and speak for everyone in our country. This applies to all media, […]

The DMCA was intended to protect copyright holders from having their work stolen or reproduced online.

On December 20th, something exciting is happening for television viewers, and no, it’s not a new Hallmark Christmas movie (although, we’re sure that’s happening too, and when it does happen, we’ll be there!). What’s happening is that FINALLY, consumers are going to get some transparency into how much they will spend on pay-TV service (e.g. […]

Full disclosure: this blog post was not written with just the best prose and policy prescriptions in mind. There was something else I considered, something shared by everyone from the smallest of bloggers to the New York Times: how to optimize ranking in Google’s search algorithm. As Google is the dominant search engine that people […]

Tomorrow, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss censorship, the suppression of news articles, and the companies’ handling of the 2020 presidential election. Last time Dorsey and Zuckerberg were brought in to the Senate to testify, the hearing turned into an opportunity for some […]