News and Social Media matters 15 November 2024-

What is Bluesky?

Project 2025: What a second Trump term could mean for media and technology policies
Project 2025 echoes Donald Trump’s critical view of the media. As a result, it proposes to strip public broadcasting of its funding and legal status, thus endangering access to reliable news for American citizens.
The authors allege that Big Tech colluded with the government to attack American values and advance “wokeism.” In response, they envision sweeping antitrust enforcement not on economic grounds, but for socio-political reasons.
On artificial intelligence policy, Project 2025 remains vague and fails to propose solutions for key policy areas such as privacy, safety, and the information ecosystem. Lagging on AI oversight and dismantling existing protections is dangerous for individuals and democracies alike.
Trump denies involvement with Project 2025 despite close ties to its authors. His policy proposals, Agenda47, closely mirror those outlined in Project 2025. – Brookings 22 July 2024
How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America
A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times
Some foreign leaders have ruthlessly curtailed journalism. U.S. politicians could draw from their playbook.
(WaPo) After several years out of power, the former leader is returned to office on a populist platform. He blames the news media’s coverage of his previous government for costing him reelection. As he sees it, tolerating the independent press, with its focus on truth-telling and accountability, weakened his ability to steer public opinion. This time, he resolves not to make the same mistake. -September 5, 2024

22 March
Voice of America journalists sue Trump officials for dismantling the outlet
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to order Trump administration officials to restore the outlet.
Six Voice of America journalists — including the outlet’s former White House bureau chief — sued members of the Trump administration Friday, accusing officials of unlawfully shuttering a federally funded media outlet that has delivered news coverage to millions across the globe since its founding during World War II.
“In many parts of the world a crucial source of objective news is gone, and only censored state-sponsored news media is left to fill the void,” the plaintiffs said in the complaint. “What is happening to the VOA Journalists is not just the chilling of First Amendment speech; it is a government shutdown of journalism, a prior restraint that kills content before it can be created.”

15 March
Voice of America channels fall silent as Trump administration guts agency and cancels contracts
(CNN) Even top editors at VOA have been ordered to stop working, so employees expect the broadcaster’s worldwide news coverage to grind to a halt, according to half a dozen sources who spoke with CNN on the condition of anonymity.
“The Voice of America has been silenced, at least for now,” a veteran correspondent said.
Voice of America is part of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which also runs networks like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Those networks are also on Trump’s chopping block, as networks’ contracts with the operators have been terminated.
While Trump allies argue that the broadcasters are bloated and outdated, advocates say that by dismantling the networks, the United States is ceding the airwaves to China and other world powers, thereby harming American interests abroad.

5-7 March
Dana Milbank: Trump is fast dismantling the free press. We all have to stop him.
It’s part of a broader crackdown on the civil liberties of those who disagree with the president
President Donald Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky last week was rightly seen as a disaster for freedom in the world. But it also showcased a disaster for freedom at home: the administration’s attempts to extinguish the free press.
Barred by the White House from entering the room that day were the Associated Press and Reuters, venerable news agencies that have covered American presidents for decades. In their place: a correspondent from Russian state media, Tass’s Dmitry Kirsanov. The White House removed Kirsanov from the event in progress, claiming he was not “approved” to be there — asking us to believe that, in an astonishing security lapse, a Russian government propagandist had infiltrated the Oval Office without its knowledge.
Also brought into the room by the White House (which reversed more than a century of practice by seizing from journalists the authority to decide which reporters will be in the press “pool” that has access to Trump): Brian Glenn, correspondent for the MAGA outlet Real America’s Voice and boyfriend of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). He accused Zelensky of “not respecting the office,” asking: “Why don’t you wear a suit?”
… The First Amendment tells us that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But Trump tells us otherwise. “Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!” he posted on Truth Social last week, suggesting he wanted to make it illegal for journalists to use anonymous or off-the-record sources, an essential part of newsgathering because it protects people from retaliation. “They are made up, defamatory fiction, and a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty,” Trump wrote.

Trump is turning the media into a mouthpiece of the regime
Lawrence Douglas
As the White House handpicks members of the press pool, questions for the president amount to fluffy valentines
(The Guardian) You know we’re in trouble when Fox News emerges as the great defender of freedom of the press. But such was the case when Jacqui Heinrich, a senior political correspondent at Fox, responded to the news that Trump’s White House would now handpick the reporters who get to cover the president in small settings, with the post: “This move does not give the power back to the people – it gives power to the White House.” Heinrich was specifically responding to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s Orwellian claim that letting Donald Trump choose who would cover him was designed to restore power “back to the American people”.
The fruits of the new policy were richly on display during the sickening scene that unfolded in the Oval Office last week. If the president and JD Vance’s disgraceful treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy wasn’t bad enough, there was the unprecedented role that the “press” played in the unseemly drama.
Here I’m not simply referring to Brian Glenn’s pugnacious demand that the leader of a war-torn nation justify his sartorial decisions – less a question than a provocation that served as a prelude to the pile-on that followed. Trump appeared to wink at Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a far-right cable channel freshly included in the press pool, leading to speculation that Glenn’s question had been scripted in advance, a speculation that is both plausible – I mean, why not? – and irrelevant.

3 March
“Becoming Katharine Graham: The Only Woman in the Room” — premiered Sunday night at the Kennedy Center.
Eugene Robinson
Documenting the courage of Katharine Graham, it shows how she empowered The Washington Post to pursue and publish journalism that changed the world.

Where Jeff Bezos Went Wrong With The Washington Post
The billionaire handled his ownership admirably for more than a decade. But his courage failed him when he needed it most.
By Martin Baron
(The Atlantic) Now we know that Bezos is no Katharine Graham. It has been sad and unnerving to watch Bezos fall so terribly short of her standard as he confronts the return of Donald Trump to the White House. It’s been infuriating to observe the damage he has inflicted in recent months on the reputation of a newspaper whose investigative reporting has served as a bulwark against Trump’s most transgressive impulses.
All the signs lately point to a determined effort by Bezos to either placate Trump or please him outright: quashing an editorial that backed Kamala Harris for president only 11 days before the election and ending a decades-long tradition of presidential endorsements. A gushing postelection message of congratulations to Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback,” with no mention of Trump’s sordid resistance to the peaceful transition of power, which marked a historic low in presidential politics. Having Amazon join other tech companies in donating $1 million to the inauguration fund. Making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for a late-night dinner with Trump, where Bezos and Melania Trump discussed a documentary about her—a chat that led to a $40 million licensing deal with Amazon, reportedly nearly three times the offer of the next-highest bidder. Sitting on the dais, as Trump’s showpiece, during the inauguration ceremony. And, last week, a Bezos memo prohibiting any opinion articles in the Post that aren’t aligned with his own ideology of “personal liberties and free markets,” an imperious intervention that caused the editorial-page editor to resign. Trump himself disclosed that he’d dined with Bezos the very evening the Post owner issued his latest dictate.
… Concluding paragraph
If the Post does its job correctly in both its opinion section and its news coverage, it will hold Trump fully accountable when he engages in deceit and as he continues to subvert this country’s democratic institutions. It will report what Trump is seeking to conceal but what the public deserves to know. That, at some point, will make the Post a fresh target for malevolent and punishing attacks. Amazon and Blue Origin might well be in the line of fire too, and Bezos’s post-election outreach to Trump is unlikely to count for much amid his fury.

28 February
As tensions spike between journalists and the president, here’s a look at ‘viewpoint discrimination’
(AP) — President Donald Trump’s executive order was clear: The Gulf of Mexico was out after hundreds of years. The Gulf of America was its name now.
But The Associated Press decided to keep the original name for its style and also note that Trump changed it. Trump limited the global news outlet’s access to some presidential events. The AP sued.
A federal judge hearing the case this week observed that it seemed an obvious constitutional problem, calling Trump’s actions “pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination.”

27 February
Thinking About Collective Action As Threats Mount
What more can we, each and all, do to protect a free press?
Richard J. Tofel
Look for the helpers
(Second Rough Draft) A lot of resources to address current threats already exist, and deserve our support. Organizations like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press…, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have long done great work, and are stepping up in response to new threats. The Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY’s Newmark Journalism School has been smart and early in sounding alarms, and urging newsrooms and others to comprehensively assess the risks they face. Contributing to or otherwise supporting such endeavors would be great if you’re in a position to do that.
… A final thought
Most important, we all need to do what we can. That brings us to my last and, I think, most critical point for this week, and for each of you. What we can do about any or all of this varies with our circumstances. Those with institutional affiliations may face greater practical constraints. Those not in leadership roles, or not yet there, or past that, may have less influence than those responsible for leadership in this crucial time of choosing.
Nor is it for me or anyone else to say for sure what you can do. But you can surely do something. Do what you can, do it now, and keep at it. Whether or not our children or grandchildren will live in a society that enjoys the blessings and benefits of a free press may depend on it.

26 February
White House denies reporters from AP, Reuters and HuffPost access to cabinet meeting
(Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday denied reporters from Reuters and other news organizations access to President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting in keeping with the administration’s new policy regarding media coverage.
The White House denied access to an Associated Press photographer and three reporters from Reuters, HuffPost and Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper.
TV crews from ABC and Newsmax, along with correspondents from Axios, the Blaze, Bloomberg News and NPR were permitted to cover the event.
Bezos Orders Washington Post Opinion Section to Embrace ‘Personal Liberties and Free Markets’
(NYT) David Shipley, The Post’s opinion editor, is resigning after trying to persuade Jeff Bezos to reconsider the new direction.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced a major shift to the newspaper’s opinion section on Wednesday, saying it would now advocate “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
Not known for political coverage, Wired takes a leading role in tracking Elon Musk’s team

25 February
White House says it ‘will determine’ which news outlets cover Trump, rotating traditional ones
media experts said the move raised troubling First Amendment issues because the president is choosing who covers him.
The White House said Tuesday that its officials “will determine” which news outlets can regularly cover President Donald Trump up close — a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans.
The move, coupled with the government’s arguments this week in a federal lawsuit over access filed by The Associated Press, represented an unprecedented seizing of control over coverage of the American presidency by any administration.

7 February
Pentagon boots CNN and the Washington Post from workspace in favor of smaller conservative outlets
The Washington Post, CNN, The Hill and The War Zone will lose workspace at the Pentagon this year under an expanded “media rotation program” instituted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s press office.
Effective later this month, One America News Network will replace NBC News for the remainder of the year; Breitbart will replace National Public Radio; The New York Post will replace The New York Times; and HuffPost will replace Politico.

4 February
Maddow: Trump’s dismantling of independent news media is happening before our eyes
Rachel Maddow looks at examples of how Donald Trump and his allies are undermining news outlets, both local and national, by targeting revenue streams and exploiting oppressive legal strategies, while Trump embraces and rewards outlets that are politically loyal, building the basis of a state press.
A Newspaper’s Fight With a Trump-Aligned Local Official Heads to Court
Newsday plans to sue Bruce Blakeman, the executive of Nassau County, N.Y., after he made The New York Post the government’s official publication.

30 January
Trump’s FCC chief opens investigation into NPR and PBS
President Trump’s new head of the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an investigation of NPR and PBS, with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting.

17-20 January
TikTok awaits Trump reprieve as China signals it is open to a deal
TikTok awaits Trump executive order to grant time for deal
China signals open to deal to keep TikTok operating in US
Not all in Republican Party support ‘Save TikTok’ efforts
(Reuters) – TikTok awaited an executive order granting it more time to strike a deal after President Donald Trump returned to power on Monday, as China signaled it would be open to a transaction to keep the app in the U.S. market.
TikTok is restoring service, thanks Trump
Trump says he will issue executive order Monday expanding time before TikTok law takes effect
Trump says he wants 50% American ownership
Two Republican senators oppose TikTok’s temporary reprieve
(Reuters) – TikTok began restoring its services on Sunday after President-elect Donald Trump said he would revive the app’s access in the U.S. when he returns to power on Monday.
Biden and Trump Weigh In as TikTok Threatens to ‘Go Dark’ on Sunday
The Chinese-owned company said it would cut off its services unless the U.S. assures Apple, Google and other companies that they would not be punished for hosting and distributing TikTok.
The company’s statement was its latest attempt to pressure the administration to grant it a reprieve from a law, upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, that would effectively ban its service starting Sunday.
The law says that app stores and major cloud computing providers cannot deliver TikTok to U.S. consumers unless the company is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to a non-Chinese owner. Lawmakers introduced the measure last year over fears that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses a threat to national security.
President Biden signed the TikTok ban bill into law in April after it passed Congress with bipartisan support. Lawmakers said Beijing could pressure ByteDance to extract sensitive data on American users or influence TikTok content to serve the Chinese government’s interests.
Let’s Not Fool Ourselves About TikTok
America won’t miss the app.
By Kate Lindsay
For more than four years, TikTok has been plagued by questions about its ties to the Chinese government. Unless there’s a last-minute intervention—still possible!—the app could conceivably shut off on Sunday. (After the Supreme Court’s decision, Joe Biden’s administration announced that it would leave enforcement of the ban to Donald Trump.)
Supreme Court Backs Law Requiring TikTok to Be Sold or Banned
The company argued that the law, citing potential Chinese threats to the nation’s security, violated its First Amendment rights and those of its 170 million users.

13 January
Social Media as It Should Be
Robin Berjon
If our traditional media landscape featured only a couple of outlets that each flouted the public interest, we would not think twice about using every available tool to foster media pluralism. There is no reason to accept in social media and search what we would not tolerate in legacy media.
(Project Syndicate) … Bluesky, a younger social-media platform that recently surpassed 26 million users, was built for pluralism: anyone can create a feed based on any algorithm they choose, and anyone can subscribe to it. For users, this opens many different windows onto the world, and people can also choose their sources of content moderation to fit their preferences. Bluesky does not use your data to profile you for advertisers, and if you decide you no longer like the platform, you can move your data and followers to another provider without any disruption.

8-11 January
Jonathan Montpetit: Fact-checking has become partisan. Can it survive the backlash from conservatives and Big Tech?
(CBC Lite) On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced an abrupt end to Meta’s fact-checking program in the U.S., drawing praise from Trump.
Zuckerberg’s move appeared aimed, in part, at shielding Meta from an escalating effort by Republican lawmakers and activists to cripple the fact-checking industry that has arisen alongside social media.
It’s also causing a reckoning among fact-checkers themselves about the value and effectiveness of their work amid the daily tidal wave of falsehoods.
Meta rolls back hate speech rules as Zuckerberg cites ‘recent elections’ as a catalyst
(AP) It wasn’t just fact-checking that Meta scrapped from its platforms as it prepares for the second Trump administration. The social media giant has also loosened its rules around hate speech and abuse — again following the lead of Elon Musk’s X — specifically when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity as well as immigration status.
The changes are worrying advocates for vulnerable groups, who say Meta’s decision to scale back content moderation could lead to real-word harms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company will “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse,” citing “recent elections” as a catalyst.
For instance, Meta has added the following to its rules — called community standards — that users are asked to abide by:
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’” In other words, it is now permitted to call gay people mentally ill on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. Other slurs and what Meta calls “harmful stereotypes historically linked to intimidation” — such as Blackface and Holocaust denial — are still prohibited.
He’s No Elon Musk
But Mark Zuckerberg sure is trying to be.
By Matteo Wong
(The Atlantic) Yesterday morning, donning his new signature fit—gold chain, oversize T-shirt, surfer hair—Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social-media platforms are getting a makeover. His aggrievement was palpable: For years, Zuckerberg said, “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” No longer. Meta is abolishing its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the U.S.; loosening its content filters; and bringing political content back to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Meta’s chief executive declared.
In the announcement, Zuckerberg identified “the recent elections,” in which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans claimed both houses of Congress, as a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” He said Meta will take direct inspiration from X’s “Community Notes” feature, which allows users to annotate posts—and surfaces the annotations based on how other users rate them—rather than granting professional fact-checkers authority to remove or label posts. Among the notable changes is permitting users to describe gay and transgender people as having “mental illness.”
The dog-whistling around legacy media, censorship, and free-speech sounded uncannily like one of Zuckerberg’s greatest rivals: Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a defender of the most noxious speech—at least when he agrees with it.

2024

27 December
How one Canadian is trying to keep a fast-growing social media platform troll-free
Foreign paid influencers pose a threat to the next Canadian election, says executive at Bluesky Social
Aaron Rodericks, head of trust and safety for Bluesky Social and former co-lead of election integrity for Twitter, says the threat of foreign election interference online has evolved in recent years and promises to be even more complex in the next federal election.

23 December
Journalism needs better representation to counter AI
Nicol Turner Lee and Courtney C. Radsch
In July 2024, the Brookings AI Equity Lab convened news staff, other content stewards, and technologists to assess the opportunities and threats that AI presents to traditional journalism, with a focus on equity.
Some opportunities have supported interview transcription, data analysis, and automated drafting, while threats include the homogenization of narratives, the spread of misinformation, and further reliance of newsrooms on Big Tech companies.
Experts recommend improving equitable hiring practices alongside technological innovation, providing professional development and training for using AI tools, and developing standards and research across the field for appropriate, ethical AI use.
(Brookings) Across the United States, newsrooms are cutting staff as the rippling effects of digitization debilitate traditional operations and revenues. Earlier this year, Politico reported that more than 500 professionals from print, broadcast, and digital media were laid off in January 2024 alone. This number continues to grow as artificial intelligence (AI) and other automated reporting functions see more use in the sector. Journalists of color have been most affected by these cuts. In a 2022 survey of laid off professionals, the Institute for Independent Journalists found that 42% of laid off professionals were people of color, despite comprising only 17% of the total workforce. As newsrooms increasingly turn to AI to manage staff shortages or increase efficiency, how will journalistic integrity be impacted? More importantly, how will newsrooms navigate the under-representation of diverse voices who contribute to the universe of more informed news perspectives?

22 December
Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media
Press freedom advocates say they fear that the second Trump administration will ramp up pressure on journalists, in keeping with the president-elect’s combative rhetoric.
(WaPo) Trump’s recent settlement with ABC News and a cascade of lawsuits and other complaints against media entities from him and his allies signal a ramped-up campaign from the president-elect. Together, the action has spurred concerns that his efforts could drastically undermine the institutions tasked with reporting on his coming administration, which Trump has promised will take revenge on those he perceives as having wronged him.
In the two months before the presidential election, Trump attacked the media more than 100 times in public speeches or other remarks. The week before Election Day, Trump threatened to sue the New York Times, his campaign lodged a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Washington Post and he sued CBS News for editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in a way he said was deceptive. Those media outlets have defended their work.

21 December
ABC Had Good Legal Reasons to Settle with Trump
It doesn’t mean the press is caving to Trump.
… As an editorial matter, the segment was poorly done because Stephanopoulos repeatedly said something that was plainly inaccurate. I was surprised when I watched it at the time, and I have been curious ever since about why ABC did not simply and quickly issue a clarification or correction.
A variety of other routine legal considerations also reportedly informed the company’s decision to settle with Trump. According to The New York Times, ABC was concerned that a jury in Florida might side with Trump and award him even more money — and, in the worst-case scenario, that the case could be used by Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to erode legal protections for the press as a whole.
…it might be helpful to take a step back and to consider some lessons from the ABC settlement.
Those lessons concern some of the most basic tenets of journalism: Be careful and be precise. Distinguish facts from opinion. If you make a mistake, fix it. And don’t be afraid to admit that you screwed up. A quick on-air clarification from Stephanopoulos would have put ABC on much firmer legal ground.
Of course, one big reason that the settlement is so grating to people is that Trump — one of the most powerful people in the world — routinely breaks all of these rules himself. Barack Obama might have been able to file a sizable defamation suit against Trump for his years of lies claiming that Obama was a foreigner. But Trump seems to delight in headlines that suggest he is on the attack and a dominant figure even if he later comes out the loser.

17 December
Trump is already delivering on his promise to go after the press
First Amendment advocates worry about an emboldened Trump using civil litigation to target journalists he dislikes.
(Politico) Media lawyers are bracing for an onslaught of lawsuits from Donald Trump and his political allies in the wake of ABC’s decision to pay $16 million to settle a defamation case Trump filed against the network.
Many First Amendment advocates see the settlement as a capitulation by ABC that handed Trump both a lucrative victory and a legal roadmap. They worry it will embolden him to escalate his use of private civil litigation against his media critics when he returns to power next month.

14 December
ABC and Stephanopoulos to pay Trump $15M, apologize in defamation suit settlement
The network and anchor will also cover $1M of Trump legal fees.
(Politico) The settlement, filed in federal court in Miami Saturday afternoon, marks a win for Trump, who sued the network and its star anchor for libel after Stephanopoulos said on air that Trump was found liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll. Last year, a jury hearing a civil suit brought by Carroll found that Trump sexually abused and defamed her, but found Trump not liable for rape. Still, a federal judge in New York later ruled that it was accurate to say that Trump was found liable for rape in “common modern parlance.”

5 December
The ‘Mainstream Media’ Has Already Lost
The newspapers and networks of the 20th century are ceding ground. And the people taking their place aren’t playing by the same rules.
By Helen Lewis
(The Atlantic) … According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, Americans with a wide range of political views generally agree about which outlets fall within this definition: newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and television networks such as CNN. Everyone else who’s disseminating information at scale is treated like a couple of hipsters running a craft brewery who are valiantly competing with Budweiser.
That’s simply not true. Rogan is the “mainstream media” now. Elon Musk, too. In the 2024 campaign, both presidential candidates largely skipped newspaper and television sit-downs—the tougher, more focused “accountability” interviews—in favor of talking directly with online personalities. (J. D. Vance, to his credit, made a point of taking reporters’ questions at his events and sat down with CNN and the Times, among others.) The result was that both Trump and Harris got away with reciting slogans rather than outlining policies. Trump has not outlined how his promised mass deportations might work in practice, nor did we ever find out if Harris still held firm to her previous stances, such as the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalization of sex work. The vacuum was filled with vibes.
The concept of the mainstream media arose in the 20th century, when reaching a mass audience required infrastructure—a printing press, or a broadcast frequency, or a physical cable into people’s houses—and institutions. That reality made the media easy to vilify.