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Quick Fix
— Public support: A new survey provided first to MT reflects the state of broadband access in the U.S. as Congress debates doling out $65 million to close the digital divide.
— Remembering El Paso: Two years after a mass shooting in Texas ignited debate over how social media platforms should handle online extremists, many are still grappling with what to do.
— Platform or publisher? Twitter’s partnership with AP and Reuters marks a new chapter in the collaboration between social media platforms and news publishers.
IT’S TUESDAY AND MY INBOX IS FULL OF OUT OF OFFICE MESSAGES. WELCOME TO MORNING TECH. Please take some time out of your morning to read this classic New York Times piece titled, “If only laws were like sausages.” An instructive take for this infrastructure week.
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Tech of the Town
BROADBAND RESULTS ARE IN — A survey from Consumer Reports out today provides fresh insight into how Americans feel about their internet access, just as Congress hashes out its mammoth infrastructure package. The survey reveals that almost 50 percent of Americans with broadband in their homes are dissatisfied with the price they pay (shocking, we know) — and shows that about 75 percent of Americans support municipal or community broadband “because it would ensure that broadband access is treated like other vital infrastructure such as highways, bridges, water systems, and electrical grids, allowing all Americans to have equal access to it.”
President Joe Biden originally pledged that his infrastructure plan would focus on boosting municipal broadband networks, propping up smaller competitors to the telecom giants. But the final version of the infrastructure package does not focus on municipal broadband, and it’s unclear how exactly the money will be doled out. The bill sets aside $42.5 billion for a new Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, which will be allocated across each state, as well as $14.2 billion for an affordable connectivity benefit program and a $250 million grant program to help states fund digital inclusion efforts.
What the numbers show — Consumer Reports conducted its survey in June, collecting responses from 2,565 adults. According to the survey, 32 percent of Americans without broadband internet service say it’s because it costs too much, while a quarter say it’s because broadband is not available where they live.
The survey also bolsters the Democrats’ focus on racial disparities in broadband access. A larger percentage of Black and Hispanic Americans than white Americans say it’s “somewhat” or “very” difficult to afford their monthly internet costs. “This survey reinforces what we already suspected: that getting online for millions of Americans is too costly and in many cases the service is inadequate,” said Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel at Consumer Reports.
2 YEARS SINCE EL PASO — On August 3, 2019, a gunman shot and killed 23 people, mostly Mexican nationals and Latino Americans, and injured 23 others at a Walmart in El Paso. The tragedy drew fresh attention to the role that both major and fringe social media networks play in enabling the spread of white supremacist ideologies, after the gunman was linked to hateful internet communities and said he was radicalized against immigrants online.
Two years on, the social media platforms are continuing to grapple with how — and how aggressively — to take down and contain the spread of extremist content. Many of the platforms have instituted new moderation policies, but experts and lawmakers say they have a long way to go.
— On the fringe: The anonymous message board 8chan, which the El Paso gunman allegedly used to publish a white supremacist manifesto just before the shooting, is gone (at least in its original form). But small, generally unmoderated “free speech”-oriented platforms have continued to pop up — and have continued to draw extremists. For instance, GETTR, the pro-Trump social network launched last month, has been flooded with propaganda spread by supporters of the Islamic State, POLITICO’s Mark Scott and Tina Ngyuen report. The site is also filled with content promoting the Proud Boys, a white nationalist group, alongside messages from more mainstream conservative influencers such as Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The platform touts itself as a sanctuary from “censorship” by big tech platforms.
— In the mainstream:: Meanwhile, just last week, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a coalition that counts Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft as members, announced a new initiative to crack down on white supremacist and far-right extremist groups.
Ivy Choi, a spokesperson for YouTube, said that since 2019, the video-sharing site has “further refined our systems and strengthened our policies, and as a result, the channels of many prominent extremist figures have been terminated from YouTube.” Choi said YouTube removed over 11,000 channels and 82,000 videos for violating YouTube’s violent extremism policy in the first quarter of this year.
Facebook, meanwhile, has banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations from its platform, a Facebook spokesperson said on Monday. And it has identified over 890 groups as militarized social movements, the company said in a blog post in January. Those groups are prohibited from maintaining pages and groups on Facebook, as well as Instagram accounts.
But these same companies have been accused of allowing hateful messages to spread as recently as this week. New research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Tiktok failed to remove 84 percent of antisemitic posts reported to them.
— Congress’s role: Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), speaking at a Monday event hosted by the League of United Latin American Citizens about El Paso and disinformation on social media,said these tech platforms “have yet to be adequately regulated or controlled, either by their corporate owners or unfortunately by Congress.”
She praised the House Judiciary Committee’s work on antitrust legislation, but added, “It’s not happening quickly enough, and we don’t have enough support yet to get laws that will protect communities from social media. I’m hoping we are able to gain momentum.”
ELEVATING THE CONVERSATION — Twitter has gotten in trouble more than few times this past year over its “trending topics” feature, which critics say can be manipulated to amplify misinformation and stoke controversy. So on Monday, the company announced a new partnership with the Associated Press and Reuters to help elevate more accurate information on its platform. AP and Reuters will help write descriptions on Twitter’s trending topics and insert fact-based context amid “developing discourse,” according to the announcement.
The AP and Reuters are also fact-checking partners with Facebook, but Twitter’s new partnership appears more hands-on. It could be a well-timed move for Twitter, which, along with Facebook, has continued to face escalating scrutiny over its role in allowing the spread of misinformation about Covid-19.
— Social media vs. news publishers: The partnership will also provide a new frontier in the love-hate relationship between social media platforms and news publishers. Platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Google have partnered closely with news organizations during breaking news events, bolstering credible reports in search results and users’ feeds. But news publishers have grown increasingly resentful of social media — particularly Google and Facebook — for gobbling up advertising dollars without paying news outlets, even as tech companies increasingly rely on them to fact-check content on their platforms. Twitter’s announcement, though, takes this dance one step further, allowing AP and Reuters to intervene directly when misinformation begins to take hold. It’s yet to be seen if it will result in a happy ending for both sides — or what the financial terms of the partnership will be.
Transitions
Ray Johnson, the former operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, was appointed CEO of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII). … Pallavi Guniganti, a former attorney advisor to FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson, is now a senior manager for public policy at Amazon. … Former senior director of Azure Space at Microsoft Chirag Parikh will serve as executive secretary of the National Space Council.
Silicon Valley Must-Reads
Return of the mask: Facebook and Amazon are requiring masks at their U.S. offices amid the spread of the Delta variant, Protocol reports.
Amazon’s army of cameras: Documents obtained by The Information show how Amazon is using high-tech video cameras in its vans to keep tabs on its drivers.
Quick Downloads
Score one for crypto: “A last-minute lobbying push by the cryptocurrency industry to change language in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was finalized over the weekend succeeded in scaling back some of the scrutiny that participants in the sector will face from the IRS,” according to The New York Times.
Bessemer fight reignites: A federal labor official recommended Monday that a regional arm of the National Labor Relations Board should scrap the results of an unsuccessful union election at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Ala., after finding that the tech giant interfered and violated workers’ labor rights. POLITICO’s Rebecca Rainey has more for Pros.
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