On the antitrust battles facing Big Tech.

What a new court ruling might mean for independent local news.

At various moments last year, the question of how to regulate artificial intelligence took center stage. In March, more than a thousand technology leaders, researchers, and others—including Elon Musk, the billionaire who owns SpaceX and Tesla—signed…

In 2020, a House of Representatives subcommittee released a lengthy report that laid out what it described as the anticompetitive practices of the four major Big Tech companies—Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta (then known as Facebook)—and asked the…

In February of last year, Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—threw a metaphorical grenade into the market for artificial-intelligence software by announcing a new model that it called Llama. Meta’s offering is similar to those offered…

A year ago, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—launched a new social app called Threads. (I wrote about the launch and also did a Q&A with my CJR colleague Jon Allsop about my early experiences with the service.) More than a hundred…

Even before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020, there were debates as to where—and how—the virus originated. Some cited the emergence of the earliest COVID cases in or…

In early May, Aspen Digital—a program of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to the discussion of social issues—convened nearly a hundred news executives, editors, representatives of tech companies, and others for a full-day meeting…

Whenever Google makes a change to its search product, it inevitably generates a lot of anxiety among news outlets, many of which rely on the revenue they get from traffic driven by the platform. But the response to the company’s most recent…

Facebook users are probably aware that what they see in their news feeds is determined by the company’s recommendation algorithms. (Well, most users.) Many are accustomed to this fact, but some believe that there are alternatives to this kind of…

In December, the New York Times fired an early shot in the battle over whether it is legal for artificial intelligence engines such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT to scrape content from the Web as fodder for their databases. The Timesmade clear that it believes…

After almost four years of debating a law that would force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell the app or be banned in the United States, Congress finally passed legislation promising exactly that, and President Biden signed it…

Last week, the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove several widely used messaging apps—WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram—from its app store. According to the Wall Street Journal, these apps have about three billion users globally, and…

For almost four years, Congress has been talking about banning TikTok. Early last month, that talk seemed suddenly to turn into action: the House of Representatives brought forward a new bill—the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled…

You see a news story talking about the need for a national privacy law and how Congress is working on one—or, at least, should be. What year is it? Trick question: it could be almost any year in the past two decades. Including, now, 2024. Last week,…

Over the past decade or so, The Atlantic has published a series of articles warning of the harm that social media and smartphone apps are doing to teenagers. These articles have had headlines like “The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood,” “The…

Last week, Donald Trump looked to be in dire straits, both legally and financially. He owed four hundred and fifty million dollars in legal penalties after a New York judge found that he fraudulently inflated the value of his assets in order to get…

Over the past decade or so, as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become significant forums for public speech, governments in the US and elsewhere have made informal recommendations to them about their handling of issues such as…

Last month, Reddit announced that it had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, an event observers had been anticipating for several years. (The company filed an…

In December, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI—the creator of the popular artificial intelligence software known as ChatGPT—and Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s primary financial backers and partners. As reported by the Times, the suit…