Mathew Ingram

TikTok’s CEO prepares to make his case to a hostile Congress

This morning, Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of the video-sharing app TikTok, will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee to respond to concerns about the app’s links to the Chinese government and its data-handling practices, as talk of a…

Canada imitates Australia’s news-bargaining law, but to what end?

Two years ago this month, Australia passed a law called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which, as the name suggests, forced digital platforms like Facebook and Google to negotiate deals to pay the news media for the…

Glitches, trolls, and declining revenue take center stage in the Twitter soap opera

Social media is known for producing drama. In Twitter’s case, that’s been true as much behind the scenes as on the platform of late. On Monday, the service was hit by the latest in a series of glitches; this one made it impossible for users to post…

Q&A: Anup Kaphle on Rest of World, three years in

When it comes to technology coverage, many media outlets spend the bulk of their time paying attention to what happens in the United States, with occasional articles about what’s happening in the rest of the world. For the news startup Rest of World,…

One year on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where does the ‘cyberwar’ stand?

After Russian troops invaded Ukraine a little over a year ago, the latter country set out to reinforce a second front in the war—a digital one. As I reported for CJR at the time, the Ukrainian government posted appeals in online hacker forums, asking…

Section 230 gets its day in court

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…

Concerns about TikTok balloon again in Congress

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…

Is AI software a partner for journalism, or a disaster?

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…

Facebook tries to have it both ways on Trump

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,…

A BBC documentary highlights growing social media censorship in India

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…

A new study reignites the debate over Twitter, bots, and 2016

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…

Is Twitter dying? And what would that mean for journalism?

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…

Is Facebook quitting the news business?

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…

Journalists want to recreate Twitter on Mastodon. Mastodon is not into it.

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,…

The Wire pledges transparency as it reviews its Meta coverage

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…

Section 230 heads to the Supreme Court

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…

Elon Musk, Twitter, and questions of diligence

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…

The road to a possible TikTok-Congress deal

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…

The social-media platforms, the “Big Lie,” and the coming elections

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…

Platform moderation, speech, and the courts

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…