Skip to main content

Media Bits and Bytes - January 26, 2021

The Capitol rampage turns the media world upside down

Credit,USA Today

Big Changes at FCC

By Stan Horaczek
Popular Science

What does the future hold for Net Neutrality, the digital divide, and big tech regulation?

The Capitol Rampage and Social Media

By Isobel Asher Hamilton
Business Insider

Democrats attack Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter over the Capitol riots, saying the tech giants play “whack-a-mole” with radicalization.

Twitter vs Antifa

By Lia Eustachewich
New York Post

If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary.

(One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.)

Twitter has suspended several popular accounts with alleged ties to Antifa — which have more than 71,000 followers combined — following violence on Inauguration Day.

Tech Titans in Trouble

Pandemic Woes  By Eve Szeftel, International Business Times

WhatsApp  By Gennie Gebhart, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Alibaba  By Celia Chen and Jane Zhang, South China Morning Post

Facebooks Political Clickbait

By Leon Yin and Alfred Ng
The Markup

Zuckerberg testified under oath before Congress in October that Facebook had stopped recommending all “political content or social issue groups.” But the platform continued to recommend political groups to its users throughout December.

The Curious Case Against Sci-Hub and Libgen

By Anirban Pathak
The New Leam

Three major publishing houses (Elsevier, Wiley and American Chemical Society) charge that online repositories which provide free access to millions of articles and books are involved in copyright infringement. 

Bolivia: MAS Beats MSM

By Francesca Emanuele
Red Pepper

Despite recent attacks on Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism, the country’s voters were ultimately undeterred by disinformation tactics.

France’s Far Right Press

By Chaim Narang
Roar

A right-wing reactionary press unashamedly peddles disgusting scare stories aimed at stoking racism and xenophobia.

New Yorker Unionizing

By Katie Smith
Book and Film Globe

Members of The New Yorker Union undertook a 24-hour work stoppage to demand better wages. Many subscribers and supporters took to Twitter to share their surprise that such a prestige publication would not recognize its staff’s union.

Your Data, Their Intelligence

By Mitchell Clark
The Verve

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has confirmed that the US government buys location data from data brokers. The data, collected by citizens’ smartphones, isn’t separated by whether a person lives in the US or outside of it.