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For a law whose central clause contains just twenty-six words, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has generated vast amounts of debate over the past few years. Conservative politicians say the law—which shields online services from…
February 23, 2023
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
The Media Today For more than a billion users around the world, TikTok is just a mobile video-sharing app that they scroll through to watch people dancing and cats falling off of furniture (or cats dancing and people falling off of furniture). For…
February 16, 2023
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
The Media Today In November, OpenAI, a company that develops artificial-intelligence software, released ChatGPT, a program that allows users to ask conversational-style questions and receive essay-style answers. It soon became clear that, unlike with…
February 09, 2023
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
The Media Today On January 7, 2021, the day after rioters stormed the Capitol, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—which was not then, but is now, known as Meta—suspended Donald Trump’s accounts on those platforms, because, the company said,…
February 02, 2023
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
Last weekend, the Indian government ordered YouTube to remove clips from a BBC documentary. It sent a similar order to Twitter, telling that platform to remove any tweets that featured links to those clips and pointing to more than fifty specific…
January 26, 2023
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election saw the emergence of a virtual cottage industry—or perhaps even a real, full-size industry—bent on distributing blame for his win. Social media was one of its primary targets. The argument—in…
January 19, 2023
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
Former Twitter employees finally get severance offers after months of waiting, only to find them unsatisfactory. Twitter helps drive political mayhem in Brazil. Elon Musk says that Twitter will soon allow users to post tweets that are four thousand…
January 12, 2023
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
In March 2019, the company now known as Meta announced the Facebook Journalism Project, a plan to spend $300 million over three years “supporting local journalists and newsrooms with their newsgathering needs in the immediate future, and helping…
December 07, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
Ever since Elon Musk completed his $45 billion takeover of Twitter last month, there has been a steady stream of users, including a number of journalists, signing up for Mastodon, an open-source alternative. No one controls Mastodon—or rather,…
November 15, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
Last week, The Wire, an independent news outlet based in India, reported that Amit Malviya, the social media manager for India’s ruling BJP party, was able to remove images posted by Instagram users without having to go through the platform’s normal…
October 20, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
For the past several years, critics across the political spectrum have argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives social-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube too much protection from legal liability for…
October 06, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
In July, Twitter sued Elon Musk for his failure to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the company, a process he formally initiated in April. Musk subsequently filed a countersuit in which he alleged that Twitter was not telling the truth about…
October 04, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
In June, BuzzFeed News published an investigative report based on leaked audio from more than eighty internal meetings at TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app. In the report, labeled “The TikTok Tapes,” Emily Baker-White of BuzzFeed…
September 29, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
In August, Twitter, Google, TikTok, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, released statements about how they intended to handle election-related misinformation on their platforms in advance. For the most part, it seemed they weren’t planning to…
September 27, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review
In May, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit struck down most of the provisions of a social-media law, enacted by the state of Florida in 2021, which would have made it an offense for any social-media company to “deplatform” the account…
September 23, 2022
Article at Columbia Journalism Review