What the FTC's consent decrees with platforms actually require
A consent decree binds a company to court-supervised conduct for decades, and the Facebook order of 2019 shows both the reach and the limits of the instrument.
Editorial Staff
Classifieds were newspapers' invisible profit engine — their loss broke the model
Small text ads once delivered a third or more of newspaper revenue at near-perfect margin, and the two-line listing's migration to vertical platforms took the industry's most profitable product with it.
Khalid Okonkwo
How television technology quietly redesigned political debating
From the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon cameras to the mute button of 2020, every debate format change tracks a broadcast capability — and the current format negotiation is the first one platforms, not networks, will run.
Gabriela Montoya
Section 230 is twenty-six words, and most of the debate skips them
The provision's protection and its limits both live in the exact statutory text, which is shorter than almost any headline written about it.
Alexandria Lucas
Perplexity's answer to publishers: revenue share instead of lawsuits
While OpenAI struck flat-fee licensing deals, Perplexity built a per-use revenue-sharing program — a different theory of the publisher relationship, still unproven at scale.
Aleksandr KomarovAnalysis & Opinion
How Community Notes decides which fact-checks the public actually sees
A note doesn't go public because a majority of raters like it — it goes public only when people who usually disagree agree it helps, a design choice now shaping correction systems on both X and Meta's apps.
What the EU's content-moderation database actually discloses, and what it doesn't
The DSA Transparency Database logs every platform takedown across the bloc in near-real time. Researchers say its categories are too vague to show what's really being removed.
Cloudflare's crawler deadline puts a price on AI's use of news
A September 15 default that blocks mixed-use AI crawlers turns publisher content into a metered, billable resource — but leaves Google's existing search advantage untouched.
How political ad-transparency libraries work — and where two still fall short
Meta and TikTok both publish searchable archives of political and social-issue ads. The European Commission's preliminary finding that both give researchers only partial or unreliable data shows what these tools promise and where the promise breaks down.
Policy
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What does an FTC consent decree actually require a platform to do?
Alexandria LucasMedia literacy is becoming state law — and curriculum fights follow it in
A dozen-plus states now require K-12 media literacy instruction, a rare bipartisan information-policy achievement whose implementation is being shaped by the same polarization it aims to treat.
Alexandria LucasCommunication
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Why presidents stopped asking networks for prime time
Gabriela MontoyaHow to tell a push poll from research that tests harsh messages
A push poll is a persuasion call disguised as a survey — thousands of calls, no data collected — while legitimate message testing looks similar on one call and completely different in aggregate.
Gabriela MontoyaEconomics
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Sports rights broke the cable bundle — and are now breaking for their new buyers
Khalid OkonkwoHow American public media is actually funded — and why its federal line is politically exposed
Federal money flows through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as two-year advance appropriations, deliberately insulated and deliberately contested — and it is a minority of the system's money.
Khalid OkonkwoMedia News
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Ireland's data regulator fined TikTok €345 million over children's accounts
Colin ReyesAI citations now exist at scale — and the referral math still doesn't work
Zero-click searches reached 68 percent in early 2026 while AI referrals stay under one percent of publisher pageviews: the citation is becoming real, and the click is not coming back.
Colin ReyesBusiness News
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What federal law actually requires of a political ad's disclaimer
Editorial StaffWhy platform transparency reports don't actually let you compare platforms
Meta, TikTok and YouTube each publish detailed content-moderation numbers, but their headline metrics measure different things, and no regulator currently requires a shared standard.
Aleksandr Komarov