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      in Elections

      Big tech facilitated QAnon and the Capitol attack. It’s time to hold them accountable

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      Donald Trump’s election lies and the 6 January attack on the US Capitol have highlighted how big tech has led our society down a path of conspiracies and radicalism by ignoring the mounting evidence that their products are dangerous.But the spread of deadly misinformation on a global scale was enabled by the absence of antitrust enforcement by the federal government to rein in out-of-control monopolies such as Facebook and Google. And there is a real risk social media giants could sidestep accountability once again.Trump’s insistence that he won the election was an attack on democracy that culminated in the attack on the US Capitol. The events were as much the fault of Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg – CEOs of Google, Twitter and Facebook, respectively – as they were the fault of Trump and his cadre of co-conspirators.During the early days of social media, no service operated at the scale of today’s Goliaths. Adoption was limited and online communities lived in small and isolated pockets. When the Egyptian uprisings of 2011 proved the power of these services, the US state department became their cheerleaders, offering them a veneer of exceptionalism which would protect them from scrutiny as they grew exponentially.Later, dictators and anti-democratic actors would study and co-opt these tools for their own purposes. As the megaphones got larger, the voices of bad actors also got louder. As the networks got bigger, the feedback loop amplifying those voices became stronger. It is unimaginable that QAnon could gain a mass following without tech companies’ dangerous indifference.Eventually, these platforms became immune to forces of competition in the marketplace – they became information monopolies with runaway scale. Absent any accountability from watchdogs or the marketplace, fringe conspiracy theories enjoyed unchecked propagation. We can mark networked conspiracies from birtherism to QAnon as straight lines through the same coterie of misinformers who came to power alongside Trump.Today, most global internet activity happens on services owned by either Facebook or Alphabet, which includes YouTube and Google. The internet has calcified into a pair of monopolies who protect their size by optimizing to maximize “engagement”. Sadly, algorithms designed to increase dependency and usage are far more profitable than ones that would encourage timely, local, relevant and, most importantly, accurate information. The truth, in a word, is boring. Facts rarely animate the kind of compulsive engagement rewarded by recommendation and search algorithms.The best tool – if not the only tool – to hold big tech accountable is antitrust enforcement: enforcing the existing antitrust laws designed to rein in companies’ influence over other political, economic and social institutions.Antitrust enforcement has historically been the US government’s greatest weapon against such firms. From breaking up the trusts at the start of the 20th century to the present day, antitrust enforcement spurs competition and ingenuity while re-empowering citizens. Most antitrust historians agree that absent US v Microsoft in 1998, which stopped Microsoft from bundling products and effectively killing off other browsers, the modern internet would have been strangled in the crib.The best tool to hold big tech accountable is antitrust enforcement: enforcing the existing antitrust laws designed to rein in companies’ influence over other political, economic and social institutionsIronically, Google and Facebook were the beneficiaries of such enforcement. Over two decades would pass before US authorities brought antitrust suits against Google and Facebook last year. Until then, antitrust had languished as a tool to counterbalance abusive monopolies. Big tech sees an existential threat in the renewed calls for antitrust, and these companies have aggressively lobbied to ensure key vacancies in the Biden administration are filled by their friends.The Democratic party is especially vulnerable to soft capture by these tech firms. Big tech executives are mostly left-leaning and donate millions to progressive causes while spouting feelgood rhetoric of inclusion and connectivity. During the Obama administration, Google and Facebook were treated as exceptional, avoiding any meaningful regulatory scrutiny. Democratic Senate leadership, specifically Senator Chuck Schumer, has recently signaled he will treat these companies with kid gloves.The Biden administration cannot repeat the Obama legacy of installing big tech-friendly individuals to these critical but often under-the-radar roles. The new administration, in consultation with Schumer, will be tasked with appointing a new assistant attorney general for antitrust at the Department of Justice and up to three members of the Federal Trade Commission. Figures friendly to big tech in those positions could abruptly settle the pending litigation against Google or Facebook.President Joe Biden and Schumer must reject any candidate who has worked in the service of big tech. Any former White House or congressional personnel who gave these companies a pass during the Obama administration should also be disqualified from consideration. Allowing big tech’s lawyers and plants to run the antitrust agencies would be the equivalent of allowing a climate-change-denying big oil executive run the Environmental Protection Agency.The public is beginning to recognize the harms to society wrought by big tech and a vibrant and bipartisan anti-monopoly movement with diverse scholars, and activists has risen over the past few years. Two-thirds of Democratic voters believe, along with a majority of Republicans, that Biden should “refuse to appoint executives, lobbyists, or lawyers for these companies to positions of power or influence in his administration while this legal activity is pending”. This gives the Democratic party an opportunity to do the right thing for our country and attract new voters by fighting for the web we want.Big tech played a central role in the dangerous attack on the US Capitol and all of the events which led to it. Biden’s antitrust appointees will be the ones who decide if there are any consequences to be paid. More

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      in US Politics

      Engineer who stole trade secrets from Google among those pardoned by Trump

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterIn his final hours of office, Donald Trump pardoned a former Google engineer who was convicted of stealing trade secrets from the company before taking up a new role with competitor Uber.Anthony Levandowski, 40, had been sentenced in August 2020 to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to inappropriately downloading trade secrets from Google’s self-driving car operation Waymo, where he was an engineer.The surprise pardon was remarkable for its star-studded list of supporters and its justification. “Mr Levandowski [pleaded] guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation,” read the White House announcement. “Notably, his sentencing judge called him a ‘brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs’.”The single guilty count was the result of a plea bargain; the engineer was originally charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. And the sentencing judge, William Alsup, described Levandowski’s theft as “the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen” and refused the engineer’s request for home confinement, saying, it would give “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets. Prison time is the answer to that.”Levandowski had not yet begun his prison sentence due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A hearing on the timing of his prison sentence had been scheduled for 9 February.Levandowski was a leader in the race to develop self-driving cars. He made a name for himself in the autonomous vehicle space after building a driverless motorcycle in a contest organized by the Pentagon’s research arm, Darpa, in 2004.Levandowski went on to found his own startup, 510 systems, which was acquired by Google in 2011. At Google, he helped to develop driverless cars until 2016. Upon leaving the company and while negotiating a new role at Uber, he later admitted, he downloaded more than 14,000 Google files to his personal laptop.Whether any secrets from those files made their way into Uber’s self-driving technology became the center of a bitter legal battle between the two tech giants that resulted in a $245m settlement for Google’s self-driving spin-off, Waymo, and criminal prosecution for Levandowski.The White House cited the support of 13 individuals in its pardon statement, including the billionaire Facebook board member Peter Thiel and several members of his coterie: Trae Stephens and Blake Masters, who have both worked for Thiel’s various investment firms, and Ryan Petersen, James Proud and Palmer Luckey, who have all received investments for startups from Thiel.Thiel donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign, spoke at his nominating convention, and gave a press conference in which he argued that the then-candidate’s calls for a ban on immigration by Muslims should not be taken “literally”. In 2016, as Thiel was growing more engaged with the pro-Trump far right, Thiel met with a prominent white nationalist, BuzzFeed News reported. As Trump’s presidency floundered, Thiel distanced himself from his former support.Luckey is best known as the founder of Oculus, the virtual reality headset startup that was acquired by Facebook for $2bn in 2014. His politics came under scrutiny during the 2016 campaign when it was revealed that he was funding a group dedicated to “shitposting” and anti-Hillary Clinton memes, and he was pushed out of Facebook in 2017. In July, his new startup, Anduril Industries, won a five-year contract with US Customs and Border Protection to provide AI technology for a border surveillance.Other supporters of the pardon include the former Disney executive Michael Ovitz and three of Levandowski’s attorneys.Levandowski was one of 143 people to be granted clemency by Trump on his last day in office. The former president has pardoned 70 people and commuted the sentences of a further 73 people. The recipients include Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon, rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, the Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and scores of others.The White House said Levandowski had “paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good”.Since his legal troubles began, Levandowski has founded a new self-driving car company and established a church focused on “the realization, acceptance and worship of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software”. The website for the Way of the Future Church appears to have become defunct at some point in March or April 2020.Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump being banned from social media is a dangerous distraction | Matt Stoller and Sarah Miller

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      In the wake of Donald Trump’s instigation of a shocking attack on the US Capitol, it’s easy to demand that Trump be barred from social media.“These corporations should announce a permanent ban of his accounts,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, chair of the House homeland security committee. “Nothing short of that will meet this moment.”Indeed, Facebook, Google and Twitter have taken action, suspending the president from their platforms or removing videos.But whatever one thinks of stopping Trump fomenting violence by limiting his ability to communicate, the ability of democratically unaccountable monopolies with extraordinary control over communications infrastructure, like Facebook and Google, YouTube’s parent company, to silence political speech is exceptionally dangerous. It also sidesteps the underlying problem – that it’s their dominance and business model that promotes conspiratorial, fake and violent content to millions.Policymakers must recognize the choices that enabled the rise of these toxic but wildly lucrative business modelsTrump is not the first demagogue America has seen and he won’t be the last. But his power is amplified by a corrupted information ecosystem created by Google, Facebook and media barons like Rupert Murdoch. Those who came to the Capitol to riot sincerely believed they were stopping the subversion of American democracy because an entire information ecosystem encouraged them to discount any political or media institution that told them otherwise. That ecosystem of disinformation, extremism, rage and bigotry won’t go away by banning Trump or his supporters. That’s because the driving force behind it is profit: Facebook and Google make billions by fostering it.To understand why, policymakers must recognize the choices that enabled the rise of these toxic but wildly lucrative business models. Traditionally, US media regulation encouraged localized press and a neutral system of information distribution, starting with the Post Office in 1791. But beginning in the 1970s, policymakers changed their philosophy to encourage consolidation.They altered rules around advertising, publishing and information distribution markets, weakening antitrust laws, killing important protections like the Fairness Doctrine and passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which lifted local media ownership caps and unleashed a wave of mergers and acquisitions. They also enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that today allows tech platforms to escape liability for illegal content they help shape and monetize. And over the last 20 years, policymakers enabled Google and Facebook to roll up the entire digital advertising and communication space by permitting hundreds of mergers, without a single challenge.The net effect is that two giant corporations, Facebook and Google, dominate online communications, profiting by selling advertising against cheaply produced, addictive clickbait and conspiratorial content. Making matters worse, in seeking ad money and quick profits, Facebook and Google, as well as private equity, have killed the pro-social institutions on which we rely, such as local newspapers, by redirecting advertising revenue to themselves. More than one-fourth of American newspapers have disappeared in the last 15 years, with many of those left being hollowed out as “ghost papers” with no news-gathering ability.Filling their place are conspiracy theories like QAnon, which these platforms amplify to turn a handsome profit. Survey results show Google provided ad services to 86% of sites carrying coronavirus conspiracies.This isn’t a uniquely American problem: Facebook, with its addictive user interface designed to maximize engagement, has helped foster deadly mob attacks in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar and bent to the will of autocrats elsewhere. It’s not just the dramatic, either. More than three in five Americans feel lonely, and there is evidence that social media usage isolates and alienates us, changing our brains and drawing some to political extremism.The problem, in other words, won’t go away with banning Trump, because the problem is that the steady supply of toxic, addictive content that keeps eyeballs on ads is at the heart of these monopolies’ business models. Trump is far from the only supplier of that content now, and there’s no doubt others will rise up to replace him, with a boost from Facebook and Google.The Biden administration and the new Congress can fix these twin problems of monopoly power and profit motive by returning to a traditional policy framework of fair competition, neutral communication networks and business models that finance local news and a diversity of voices.For the tech platforms, Congress and agencies like the Federal Trade Commission have the authority to ban targeted advertising, much in the same way Verizon, for example, is prohibited by law from listening to your private calls and using that information to directly or indirectly advertise to you based on that surveillance.Breaking up these goliaths and prohibiting mergers by dominant firms would force them to compete over users based on data privacy and safety, as Facebook once had to do when it was in a competitive social networking world in the early 2000s. And imposing neutrality, like non-discrimination rules and interoperability requirements, would end the tyranny of algorithms that push us towards incendiary content.The good news is Republican and Democratic attorneys general in 48 states have filed historic antitrust suits against Google and Facebook, seeking to break them up, and the Biden administration and many in Congress seem wide awake to the pernicious role of social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Google, in the fraying of America’s social fabric.But until political leaders recognize that these tech barons make their billions by selling tickets to the end of American democracy, it will continue to creep ever closer. Seeing Trump booted off Facebook may be emotionally satisfying and even potentially prevent dangerous behavior in the short term. But only a wholesale restructuring of our online communications infrastructure can preserve democracy. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump attempted a coup: he must be removed while those who aided him pay | Robert Reich

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      A swift impeachment is imperative but from Rudy Giuliani and Don Jr to Fox News and Twitter, the president did not act aloneInsurrection: the day terror came to the US CapitolCall me old-fashioned, but when the president of the United States encourages armed insurgents to breach the Capitol and threaten the physical safety of Congress, in order to remain in power, I call it an attempted coup. Related: Saving Justice review: how Trump’s Eye of Sauron burned everything – including James Comey Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      All I want for 2021 is to see Mark Zuckerberg up in court | John Naughton

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      It’s always risky making predictions about the tech industry, but this year looks like being different, at least in the sense that there are two safe bets. One is that the attempts to regulate the tech giants that began last year will intensify; the second that we will be increasingly deluged by sanctimonious cant from Facebook & co as they seek to avoid democratic curbing of their unaccountable power.On the regulation front, last year in the US, Alphabet, Google’s corporate owner, found itself facing major antitrust suits from 38 states as well as from the Department of Justice. On this side of the pond, there are preparations for a Digital Markets Unit with statutory powers that will be able to neatly sidestep the tricky definitional questions of what constitutes a monopoly in a digital age. Instead, the unit will decide on a case-by-case basis whether a particular tech company has “strategic market status” if it possesses “substantial, entrenched market power in at least one digital activity” or if it acts as an online “gateway” for other businesses. And if a company is judged to have this status, then penalties and regulations will be imposed on it.Over in Brussels, the European Union has come up with a new two-pronged legal framework for curbing digital power – the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. The Digital Markets Act is aimed at curbing anti-competitive practices in the tech industry (like buying up potential competitors before they can scale up) and will include fines of 10% of global revenues for infringers. The Digital Services Act, for its part, will oblige social media platforms to take more responsibility for illegal content on their platforms – scams, terrorist content, images of abuse, etc – for which they could face fines of up to 6% of global revenue if they fail to police content adequately. So the US and UK approach focuses on corporate behaviour; the EU approach focuses on defining what is allowed legally.All of this action has been a long time coming and while it’s difficult to say exactly how it will play out, the bottom line is that the tech industry is – finally – going to become a regulated one. Its law-free bonanza is going to come to an end.Joe Biden’s choices for top staff in his administration include a depressing proportion of former tech company stalwartsThe big question, though, is: when? Antitrust actions proceed at a glacial pace because of the complexity of the issues and the bottomless legal budgets of the companies involved. The judge in one of the big American antitrust cases against Google has said that he expects the case to get to court only in late 2023 and then it could run for several years (as the Microsoft case did in the 1990s).The problem with that, as the veteran anti-monopoly campaigner Matt Stoller has pointed out, is that the longer monopolistic behaviour goes on, the more damage (eg, to advertisers whose revenue is being stolen and other businesses whose property is being appropriated) is being done. Google had $170bn in revenue last year and is growing on average at 10-20% a year. On a conservative estimate of 10% growth, the company will add another $100bn to its revenue by 2025, when the case will still be in the court. Facebook, says Stoller, “is at $80bn of revenue this year, but it is growing faster, so the net increase of revenue is a roughly similar amount. In other words, if the claims of the government are credible, then the lengthy case, while perhaps necessary, is also enabling these monopolists to steal an additional $100bn apiece.”What could speed up bringing these monopolists to account? A key factor is the vigour with which the US Department of Justice prosecutes its case(s). In the run-up to the 2020 election, the Democrats in Congress displayed an encouraging enthusiasm for tackling tech monopolies, but Joe Biden’s choices for top staff in his administration include a depressing proportion of former tech company stalwarts. And his vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, consistently turned a blind eye to the anti-competitive acquisitions of the Silicon Valley giants throughout her time as California’s attorney general. So if people are hoping for antitrust zeal from the new US government, they may be in for disappointment.Interestingly, Stoller suggests that another approach (inspired by the way trust-busters in the US acted in the 1930s) could have useful leverage on corporate behaviour from now on. Monopolisation isn’t just illegal, he points out, “it is in fact a crime, an appropriation of the rights and property of others by a dominant actor. The lengthy trial is essentially akin to saying that bank robbers getting to keep robbing banks until they are convicted and can probably keep the additional loot.”Since a basic principle of the rule of law is that crime shouldn’t pay, an addition of the possibility of criminal charges to the antitrust actions might, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning (pace Dr Johnson), concentrate minds in Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. As an eternal optimist, I cannot think of a nicer prospect for 2021 than the sight of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai in the dock – with Nick Clegg in attendance, taking notes. Happy new year!What I’ve been readingWho knew?What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy is a great Bloomberg column by Noah Smith.Far outIntriguing piece on how investors are using real-time satellite images to predict retailers’ sales (Stock Picks From Space), by Frank Partnoy on the Atlantic website.An American dream Lovely meditation on Nora Ephron’s New York, by Carrie Courogen on the Bright Wall/Dark Room website. More

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      in US Politics

      If you think Biden's administration would rein in big tech, think again | John Naughton

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      Before the US presidential election I wondered aloud if Mark Zuckerberg had concluded that the re-election of Trump might be better for Facebook than a Biden victory. There were several reasons for thinking this. One was the strange way Zuckerberg appeared to be sucking up to Trump: at least one private dinner in the White House; the way he jumped on to Fox News when Twitter first placed a warning on a Trump tweet to say that Facebook would not be doing stuff like that; and the majority report of the House subcommittee on tech monopolies, in which it was clear that the Democrats had it in for the companies.But the most significant piece of evidence for the belief that a Biden administration would finally tackle the tech giants, and Facebook in particular, came in the long interview Biden gave last January to the New York Times, in which he was highly critical of the company.“I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan,” Biden said. “I think he’s a real problem … I’ve been in the view that not only should we be worrying about the concentration of power, we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you’re not exempt. [The New York Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms.” As readers of this column know only too well, section 230 of the 1996 US Telecommunications Act is the clause that exempts tech platforms from legal liability for anything that users post on their platforms. It’s the nearest thing social media has to a kill switch. Pull it and their business models evaporate. Trump had been threatening to pull it before the election, but he lacked the attention span to be able to do anything about it. Biden, on the other hand, had already talked about it in January and would have people around him who knew what they were doing. So maybe we were going to get some real progress in getting tech giants under control.And then he gets elected and what do we find? Biden’s transition eam is packed with tech industry insiders. Tom Sullivan, from Amazon, is earmarked for the Department of State. Mark Schwartz, also from Amazon, is heading for the Office of Management and Budget, as are Divya Kumaraiah from Airbnb and Brandon Belford from Lyft, the ride-hailing company. The US Treasury gets Nicole Isaac from LinkedIn, Microsoft’s department of spam, and Will Fields, who was Sidewalk Labs’ senior development associate. (Sidewalk Labs was the organiser of Google’s attempt – eventually cancelled – to turn Toronto’s waterfront into a data-geyser for surveillance capitalism.) The Environmental Protection Agency, a body that Trump looted and sidelined, gets Ann Dunkin, who is Dell’s chief technology officer. And so on.Well, I thought, perusing this sordid list, at least there’s nobody from Facebook on it. How innocent can you be? Politico reveals that the joint chair of Biden’s transition team, Jeff Zients, is a former Facebook board member. Another former board member is an adviser. And two others, one who was a Facebook director and another who was a company lobbyist, have, according to Politico “taken leadership roles”. And then, to cap it all, it turns out that Biden himself has a friendly relationship with a guy called Nick Clegg, who was once a serious politician and now doubles as Mark Zuckerberg’s bagman and representative on Earth.Truly, you couldn’t make this up. And just to add a touch of satire to it, the woman who is now a heartbeat away from the presidency, Kamala Harris, has a career-long record of cosying up to Silicon Valley. She participated, for example, in the marketing campaign for Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s anthem of capitalist feminism, even though at the time Harris was California’s law enforcement official most responsible for overseeing Facebook. As the state’s attorney general, she took a semi-comatose view of the way the big tech companies were allowed to gobble up potential rivals and bulldoze their way into new industries. Facebook’s controversial acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, perhaps the most obvious anti-competitive mergers in the short history of the tech industry, happened on her watch and triggered no regulatory reflex. If Silicon Valley could be said to have a darling, then Ms Harris is it. And all those campaign donations from tech companies and moguls may turn out to have been a shrewd investment after all.Given these sobering circumstances, how should we calculate the odds of a Biden administration taking on the power of the tech giants? The answer: slightly better than those of a snowball staying cool in hell. But only slightly.What I’ve been readingIs 2020 just a taster?Graeme Wood has written a riveting essay, titled The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse, on the work of Peter Turchin, a quantitative historian who believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies.Birth of an iNationWhat if we viewed tech giants as countries? A thoughtful essay in Tortoise Media considers Apple as a one-party state as secretive as China. But more liberal. Phew!Is less Moore?I enjoyed a lovely post by Venkatesh Rao on the Ribbonfarm blog, about the mindset induced by living in a world governed by Moore’s Law. More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook and Twitter take emergency steps against Trump false victory claims

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      Facebook and Twitter have deployed emergency measures to counter Donald Trump’s false claims of victory on their social networks, bringing them more directly into conflict with the US president than ever before.The two tech platforms had announced plans in the run-up to the election to counter misinformation about the vote, as well as premature claims of victory, and on the night of and day after, both companies mostly stuck to the plan.Facebook notably dropped the euphemistic phrasing that had previously accompanied its announcements, which discussed the risk that “candidates” may falsely claim a win. It also walked back a previous policy that would have allowed candidates to claim state-level victories before they were called, despite barring the premature announcement of a national win. On Wednesday it started to flag posts from Trump and affiliates claiming the president had won Pennsylvania and other battleground states, even as ballots continued to be counted and official results had yet to be announced.A company spokesperson cited Trump by name in explaining its decision, saying: “Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected. We’re also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information.”When it came to reacting to individual posts, both platforms faced criticism for their responses. In late-night posts cross-posted to both Twitter and Facebook, Trump declared: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” That post was followed by a second that read: “I will be making a statement tonight. A big WIN!”Misinformation experts say because such posts are able to achieve widespread circulation before being addressed, more comprehensive policies to correct the effects of the misleading posts should be put in place, calling it a “democratic emergency”.“False claims of voter fraud, early victory and election-stealing are helping plunge the country further into chaos and confusion, creating alternate realities for Americans,” said Fadi Quran, the campaign director at Avvaz, an online activist network and non-profit. “Platforms must immediately adopt more effective policies such as retroactively sending corrections to all users who see misinformation and downgrading the reach of repeat misinformers.”Facebook initially labelled the first post with a simple box advising readers to “see the latest updates on the 2020 US election”. More than 30 minutes after it was posted, the company updated its warning to note that “final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks”. By that time the post had well over 100,000 reactions.Twitter restricted distribution on the first post from Trump on Tuesday night, blocking it from being retweeted or replied to, and appended a note saying the content “is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process”. A spokesperson said the warning was “for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our civic integrity policy.”Neither platform took specific action against the second post claiming “a big WIN!”. Twitter said the lack of action was because it was unclear what, specifically, was being referenced. While the post could have constituted a premature claim of victory in the national race, it could just as easily be construed as a legitimate expression of pleasure at winning a state such as Florida, which had declared several hours earlier. More

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      in US Politics

      'Who the hell elected you?' Big tech CEOs grilled in US Senate hearing – video

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      Republican and Democrat lawmakers grill the CEOs of tech giants Twitter, Facebook and Google in a hearing about a federal law protecting internet companies from legal liability for content generated by its users. While Republicans focused on disinformation and the ‘censoring’ of Donald Trump, Democrats accused their rivals of politicising the hearing, while also questioning the mechanics of the platforms that promoted content they deemed divisive
      Republicans use congressional hearing to berate tech CEOs and claim Trump is ‘censored’ More