Imagine you are an influential nonprofit, well-funded by some of the world’s wealthiest companies, with the noble goal of “defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.” Congress has just come back into session after a lengthy hiatus. You have the resources to take up any issue you want, and boy,... Read more
Dear Mark Zuckerberg, Well, here we are again, sharing our outrage about your company’s seriously flawed system of monitoring “political” advertisements on your platform. We both know why we’re putting quotes around the word, “political.” We’ve been over this before – back in January, in fact, when we wrote you to complain about... Read more
Dear YouTube Human Resources, We were recently, as we are wont to do, whiling away the hours by reading the YouTube Creator Blog (not really), and came across CEO Susan Wojcicki’s post titled “Preserving Openness Through Responsibility.” We were dismayed to find numerous misstatements and errors, along with passages in which... Read more
Over the years, we are all faced with countless decisions that will determine the direction of our lives: Where to go to college. Where to live. Who to marry. What career to pursue. Where to work. What home to buy. Whether or not to have kids. How to raise them.... Read more
Meet Mitchell Block. He is the owner of Direct Cinema Limited, a production and distribution company specializing in under-the-radar documentaries, shorts, and other independent films that are only available through the company’s catalog. Block is a curator of the obscure and the avant-garde. His titles play frequently in colleges and libraries... Read more
The internet has given, and it has taken away. It has created abundant riches for some, and brought about staggering, even ruinous losses for others – and nowhere has this dichotomous paradigm been more apparent than in industries supported by copyright. People employed in the production of books, journalism, movies,... Read more
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is at it again – doing the bidding of their largest benefactors to the detriment of millions of American creatives who are looking toward their representatives in Congress to help them survive the scourge of digital piracy. We all know that the EFF starts tweaking... Read more
Facebook and Google have given us enough evidence for the urgency of #PlatformAccountability to last a lifetime… and that’s just in the seven weeks since the last time we published this series. Their burning dumpster fire burns hotter than ever, and the more they claim to be fighting it, the higher its... Read more
Breaking their own exorbitant lobbyist-spending records has become a regular occurrence for Google – but that’s just one tool in their toolkit of political influence. Google also makes friends and influences people by soliciting scholarship at leading university campuses throughout the country. While dressed up as “research grants,” Google enriches a... Read more
We’re almost a third of the way through 2019, and Facebook and Google’s endlessly burning dumpster fire is still burning hotter than ever. Their most recent jaw-dropping Gaffe? While claiming to have their content moderation problems under control, both companies were left scrambling to remove millions of videos of a New... Read more