News News

Media matters: The Reuters Institute Oxford Digital News Report is out with its annual survey of 37 countries, and it has some intriguing findings, including: Facebook use in the United States is down 9 percent, while WhatsApp, Instagram and SnapChat keep rising; more people are paying for news; and concerns about misinformation online have risen in many countries.

Media analyst Simon Owens writes that despite changes in Facebook’s NewsFeed algorithm aimed at downgrading some junk content, and a flurry of attention to two African-American media makers, Diamond and Silk, who claimed they were losing traffic because they were pro-Trump, the evidence suggests that conservative publishers are faring better than liberals and “the Facebook algorithm apocalypse has been greatly exaggerated.”

Here’s a list of projects aiming to solve the problems of misinformation and disinformation, catalogued by Shane Greenup of rbutr. (h/t Misinfocon)

Tech and politics: Silicon Valley VC Tim Draper has gotten his proposition to divide California into three states onto the November 2018 general election ballot, and Ed Kilgore of New York magazine thinks the chances of it every becoming enacted are slim.

A group of Democratic senators led by Ron Wyden of Oregon are pushing a bill to strengthen state voting systems ahead of the 2018 elections, Morgan Chalfant reports for The Hill.

Lina Khan, the 29-year-old legal scholar who set the antitrust bar on fire with her in-depth essay for the Yale Law Journal on all the problems with Amazon’s monopolistic practices, gets profiled by Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic.

Families Belong Together, a network of groups and volunteers organizing in response to the “forced separation” policy that is tearing families seeking asylum from their children as they enter the U.S., has put up a site listing dozens of local rallies happening today.

Attend: Next Tuesday here in NYC, our friends at Baker Hostetler are hosting an event on “Privacy Through the POC Lens: Exploring data privacy and security implications.” Register here.