Month: June 2017

Under the terms of a new German law, social networks like Facebook face fines of up to $57 million if they don’t delete illegal, racist or slanderous content within 24 hours. But free-speech advocates, including the Commission for Human Rights, say the law gives too much power to Facebook and other platforms to decide what constitutes hate speech.

“I am concerned with the lack of judicial oversight with respect to the responsibility placed upon private social networks to remove and delete content,” said David Kaye of the High Commission for Human Rights. “A prohibition on the dissemination of information based on vague and ambiguous criteria, such as ‘insult’ or ‘defamation,’ is incompatible” with the International Covenant on Civil Rights.”

The European Digital Rights group, made up of civil and human rights organizations, also protested the new law, saying “there is no indication of how a decision is to be made on what ‘violating content’ might be.” The group added that it is “easy to see how the fear of high fines will bring platforms to delete and block any content that appears to generate a risk of being punished under this new law.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists, meanwhile, said that the law is ostensibly aimed at combatting disinformation and hate speech, but the way it is going to be implemented “raises concerns about restrictions on free expression and the privatization of censorship.”

This is a disturbing decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, as explained by my former colleague (and fellow Canadian) Jeff Roberts at Fortune. It follows some equally troubling decisions in Europe that have ordered Google to delete results worldwide because of the so-called “right to be forgotten.”

In a 7-2 decision, the court agreed a British Columbia judge had the power to issue an injunction forcing Google to scrub search results about pirated products not just in Canada, but everywhere else in the world too.Those siding with Google, including civil liberties groups, had warned that allowing the injunction would harm free speech, setting a precedent to let any judge anywhere order a global ban on what appears on search engines. The Canadian Supreme Court, however, downplayed this objection and called Google’s fears “theoretical.”

Source: Google Loses Supreme Court of Canada Case Over Search Results

Update: Daphne Keller published a smart piece on this issue at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (which I found via Eugene Volokh). Here’s some of what she said:

Canada’s endorsement of cross-border content removal orders is deeply troubling. It speeds the day when we will see the same kinds of orders from countries with problematic human rights records and oppressive speech laws. And it increases any individual speaker’s vulnerability to laws and state actors elsewhere in the world. Content hosting and distribution are increasingly centralized in the hands of a few multinational companies – Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft with their web hosting services, etc. Those companies have local presence and vulnerability to formal jurisdiction and real world threats of arrest or asset seizure in scores of countries.

Source: Ominous: Canadian Court Orders Google to Remove Search Results Globally

It should be noted that Keller is associate general counsel at Google, and as such was involved in this particular case at the Court of Appeals stage. But her warning is still worth listening to. Another smart post on the topic comes from my friend Michael Geist, a Canadian law professor.

What happens if a Chinese court orders it to remove Taiwanese sites from the index? Or if an Iranian court orders it to remove gay and lesbian sites from the index? Since local content laws differ from country to country, there is a great likelihood of conflicts. That leaves two possible problematic outcomes: local courts deciding what others can access online or companies such as Google selectively deciding which rules they wish to follow.

Source: Global Internet Takedown Orders Come to Canada: Supreme Court Upholds International Removal of Google Search Results

Smart post from Eugene Wei about how information gets distributed now, and things that were commonly known in specific circles (like a certain VC’s reputation for sexual harassment) become more widely known.

We live in the age of distributed truth, and it’s an environment in which fake news can spread like mold when in viral form. But the same applies to the truth, and if there’s one lesson on how to do your part in an age of distributed truth, it’s to speak the truth and to support those who do. It may be exhausting work—is it really necessary to point out the emperor is buck naked?—but it’s the best we can do for now.

Source: The age of distributed truth — Remains of the Day

Copy editors at the New York Times have written an open letter to executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn, protesting the downsizing of editing functions at the paper. The Times is planning to get rid of its central copy desk, and aims to reduce the number of editors by about 50%.

“Dear Dean and Joe,” the letter begins. “We have begun the humiliating process of justifying our continued presence at The New York Times. We take some solace in the fact that we have been assured repeatedly that copy editors are highly respected here. If that is true, we have a simple request. Cutting us down to 50 to 55 editors from more than 100, and expecting the same level of quality in the report, is dumbfoundingly unrealistic. Work with us on a new number.”

Source: New York Times copy desk to top editors: ‘You have turned your backs on us’ – Poynter

I have a huge amount of respect for copy editors, and editors of all types — the good ones are invaluable, and have saved me from more stupid errors than I care to enumerate. But the harsh fact is that the kind of structure newspapers used to have, in which four or five different editors touched every story, simply doesn’t make any sense any more.

When I worked at Fortune, one editor was responsible for assigning, copy editing and publishing. Obviously we still made mistakes, but not that much more than any other publication I don’t think. As touching and heartfelt as the New York Times editor’s letter is, there is no way to turn back the hands of time and make the newspaper business what it used to be.

This seems like an interesting — and also ambitious — project aimed at developing a kind of crowdsourced journalism infrastructure based on the crypto-currency Ethereum. Instead of a traditional advertising-based model, the group is proposing to monetize the project (known as Civil) using Ethereum “tokens” or virtual currency that could be exchanged in a variety of ways.

We propose a solution called Civil, an Ethereum-based decentralized platform that can be used to create “newsrooms” and “stations”?—?blockchain-based marketplaces where citizens and journalists form communities around a shared purpose and set of standards, financially support factual reporting and investigative work, and substantially limit misinformation through effective collaborative-editing methods. The net result is a self-sustaining global marketplace for journalism that is free from ads, fake news, a

Source: Civil: Self-Sustaining Journalism — Medium

Facebook has reportedly been working on building support for paywalls and subscription models into its mobile-first Instant Articles platform. And as with so much of what the social network offers to publishers, it will be a giant double-edged sword.

The company is hoping to roll out support for third-party subscriptions by the end of this year, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal.

The proposed feature is still in the development stages, so it’s unclear whether Facebook is planning to take a percentage of the revenue from subscriptions that are activated through Instant Articles (as Apple does through Apple News) or allow publishers to keep all the money.

As far as the structure of the feature goes, Facebook reportedly prefers a metered approach where users would get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay. This is the kind of paywall the New York Times offers.

Imposing such a feature could rankle some other publishers who have harder paywalls, however, such as the Journal itself, or the Financial Times.

There’s no question that support for subscriptions, in whatever way Facebook chooses to implement it, could be hugely beneficial to many media companies. As the social network and Google have increased their dominance in the advertising industry, many publishers have turned to subscriptions as a way of boosting their declining revenues.

According to a recent estimate by industry analyst Brian Wieser, the two digital giants now control more than 75% of the digital advertising business, and last year they accounted for almost 100% of the growth in that industry in the U.S.

Subscriptions have also become more appealing because outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post have been having so much success with them, thanks to what appears to be a backlash against President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media.

The risk in Facebook’s new feature, however, is the same as it is with almost every other Facebook offering: Namely, that it will pull media companies even further into the giant social network’s orbit, and thereby give it even more control over their fate.

Instant Articles itself, which formats news articles so they load faster on mobile devices, is exactly this kind of Faustian bargain. It solves a huge problem for many media companies, many of which can’t afford to come up with their own mobile solution, and it offers the potential of reaching Facebook’s massive 1.8-billion user base.

At the same time, however, it gives Facebook an enormous amount of control over the content that publishers produce and how they make money from it. And over the long term, it risks turning media companies into commodity suppliers of news to the social network.

Surveys show that large numbers of people who get their news from Facebook—including the millennial audiences that many media companies are so concerned about reaching—can’t remember the original source of the news they read on the site. The only source that matters is Facebook. What effect does that have on a media company’s brand?

The social network also has a history of changing its mind when it comes to features it offers to publishers. A number of years ago, many bet their future on so-called “social reader apps,” which lived on Facebook and for a time brought in millions of new readers.

That worked until Facebook decided to de-emphasize those apps in the news-feed algorithm, however, and all of a sudden huge numbers of users never saw those apps or the articles within them.

Reaching the billions of users Facebook has is a huge lure for publishers, and understandably so. But building your business—or at least a significant part of it—on someone else’s land can have very real consequences. Facebook may genuinely want to help media companies. But it also wants to help itself. How long until the latter clashes with the former?

As a number of legal experts warned they might, Donald Trump’s tweets about his “travel ban” helped convince an appeals court to block the controversial order. It’s the second time his own comments have helped the courts knock down the proposed legislation.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision on Monday, ruling that the Trump’s attempt to block immigration from six predominantly Muslim countries “exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress.”

In their ruling, the judges cited a tweet from the president that was posted after the recent terrorist attack in London, in which Trump argued that the U.S. needed a travel ban “for certain dangerous countries.”

President Trump’s tweets continue to be cited in court decisions. This from the 9th circuit just now: pic.twitter.com/4qN3thefAq

— Matt Viser (@mviser) June 12, 2017

The Trump tweet was cited in a footnote in the decision, at a point where the court was questioning the justification for the ban.

“The Order seeks to ban people from specific countries, but it does not provide any link between an individual’s nationality and their propensity to commit terrorism or their inherent dangerousness,” the judges said. “In short, the Order does not provide a rationale explaining why permitting entry of nationals from the six designated countries… would be detrimental.”

The court also noted that press secretary Sean Spicer recently confirmed that Trump sees his tweets as official statements from the president of the United States, and therefore they should have the same effect as a statement from the Oval Office.

Immediately after the president posted his thoughts on the travel ban in the wake of the London attacks, a number of people were quick to respond that this was probably unwise, given the fact that the immigration order was still before the courts.

The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, warned in a tweet that it was planning to use Trump’s tweets as evidence in its ongoing fight against the order.

Another receipt to save for when we see you in court. https://t.co/7WMe0XMkrS

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 6, 2017

Even someone fairly close to Trump — George Conway, a New York lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway — suggested that posting such a comment was unwise. “These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad.”

Conway went on to say that he was a big supporter of Trump and of the immigration ban, but added that tweets on legal matters “seriously undermine Admin agenda and POTUS.”

To make matters worse, Trump didn’t stop at one tweet about the ban (which his own administration had argued vociferously was not actually a ban, and shouldn’t be referred to with that term). The president said that he supported his original order, not the “watered down, politically correct version” that his own advisers had convinced him to sign.

That earlier version of the law was struck down by two lower courts because it was targeted at Muslims, and blocking travel based on a person’s religion is unconstitutional.

“I think he shot himself in the legal foot,” Cornell Law School immigration professor Stephen Yale-Loehr said of Trump’s comments about his preference for the original version of the ban.

One would think that the Trump administration or the president himself might be more careful with posts on Twitter about a legal case, since this isn’t the first time that his tweets have been used against him in a court decision blocking his immigration order.

A lower court in Hawaii that blocked the most recent version of the order, in the case that led to the current ruling by the court of appeal, also cited tweets from the president, as did an earlier 9th Circuit decision on the previous version of the ban.

Two of the most difficult problems in the current world of always-on communication are hacking and the spread of “fake news” or misinformation. In some cases, these two very different problems are combining to create one big headache.

In Venezuela, for example, digital-rights group Access Now says it discovered recently that Twitter accounts belonging to a local journalist and a member of parliament and human-rights activist had been hijacked, using a procedure it calls “the Double Switch.”

The hackers then used the accounts to spread fake news, something that has been particularly problematic in Venezuela because of the political unrest there, including a government crackdown that involves online surveillance and censorship.

The journalist and the politician/activist both got in touch with a digital help-line that Access Now operates in a number of countries and asked for help in getting their accounts back.

According to the group, the Double Switch begins when a hacker gets access to the login credentials for an account, whether through a “phishing” attack (which often involves a phony email request pretending to be from the service itself) or through other means.

The hacker then resets the login name and password, as well as the recovery email, so that the original user can’t get access. Then the “double switch” begins.

First, the hacker changes the name on the Twitter account, Access Now says. Then later, they change the name back to the original account-holder’s name or “handle.” They can do this because once a Twitter account is deactivated, the name on the account is freed up for others to use.

By the time the second switch is activated, the hackers have full control, so any attempt by the original account holder to regain access fails, since emails and other messages from Twitter with password-reset information etc. go to the hacker.

Access Now says in its report that the victims worked with Twitter to regain access to their accounts, and were ultimately successful in doing so. But by then, much damage had been done.

In one case, the user’s account was deleted. In the other, some of the account-holder’s original tweets were deleted, and the account was used to spread misinformation about events in Venezuela.

The digital-rights group — which said that similar methods could theoretically be used to hijack an account on Facebook or Instagram as well as Twitter — asked for social-media companies to do more to make it easier for account-holders to get access to a hijacked account.

The group also recommended that Twitter and others have different methods for restricting access to an account, apart from what is called “two-factor authentication.”

Two-factor authentication uses two different methods to verify a user’s identity, such as a password and a special one-time code sent to a mobile phone. Activists in countries like Venezuela, however, might not want to have their phone associated with such an account, Access Now said, because it could open them up to surveillance and harassment.

Google confirmed recently that it is coming out with a new version of its Chrome browser that will have ad-blocking features built in, which the company says will make it easier for users to surf the web without being annoyed by intrusive ads.

The search giant is coming under fire for not blocking another annoying and intrusive aspect of web browsers, however—namely, the fact that they track their users’ behavior.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out on Wednesday, Apple just announced a new version of its Safari browser that will not only block certain types of annoying ads (including auto-playing video ads), but will also disable user tracking.

Google’s update is focused solely on blocking what it says are obtrusive ads such as unwanted videos, ads that have a timer that counts down before the user can see the content, and so on.

“At the EFF, we understand that advertising funds much of the media and services online, but we also believe that users have the right to protect themselves against tracking,” researcher Alan Toner wrote in an essay published by the foundation. “Advertising is currently built around a surveillance architecture, and this has to change.”

Google’s decision to block certain types of advertising by default has been criticized by publishers and antitrust experts because of its dominant position in the digital ad market.

According to a recent research report from Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser, Google and Facebook combined control more than 75% of the $70-billion digital advertising market in the U.S., and the two companies alone accounted for almost all the growth in the market last year.

That dominant position is likely also the reason Google doesn’t want to block user tracking, since advertisers rely on those methods to target ads effectively.

Apple has no real advertising business, and therefore it doesn’t mind cutting off tracking in its browser. And the company has made a point in the past of stressing that it doesn’t invade its users privacy the way that companies like Google and Facebook do.

In his essay, the EFF researcher also notes that in addition to blocking ads, Google is offering publishers a new feature called Funding Choices, which will allow them to offer users the ability to turn off third-party ad blocking software and pay the publisher directly for content.

Even if users choose to do this, however, they can still be tracked by advertisers, Toner says. The new feature lets people pay sites to avoid being shown ads “but does not prevent Google, the site, or any other advertisers from continuing to track people who pay.”

Toner says the advertising industry has repeatedly rebuffed efforts to come up with a standard for opting out of tracking, like the Do Not Track program that was initially proposed in 2011.

“The industry’s sole response has been to create a system called AdChoices, which offers users a complicated and inefficient opt-out from targeted ads, but not from the data collection and the behavioral tracking behind the targeting,” the EFF researcher said.

When Snap went public in March, in one of the most eagerly anticipated tech IPOs in recent memory, some analysts expressed concern about a slowdown in the growth of its Snapchat messaging app. Now, a new number suggests those concerns may have been well founded.

In a note to Nomura Instinet’s invesment clients on Wednesday, Snap analyst Anthony DiClemente said that statistics from SensorTower—a company that tracks the popularity of mobile apps—shows that downloads of Snapchat have fallen by 22% in the last two months.

Downloads on Apple’s iOS platform have been even worse, the company found—they declined by more than 40% in the first two months of the second quarter.

By comparison, downloads of Facebook-owned Instagram have shown year-over-year growth, DiClemente pointed out in his note, “suggesting that competitive pressures may be intensifying for Snap, challenging the platform’s ability to attract and retain new users.”

The analyst has a “reduce” rating on the stock and a $14 price target, and said he has lowered both his revenue and profit estimates for this year and next year.

Snap’s stock [fortune-stock symbol=”SNAP”] traded as high as $27 after it went public, giving the company a market value of $18 billion, but it has fallen sharply since. Its share price dropped by another 6% on Thursday to trade in the $18 range, not far from its IPO price of $17.

In its first quarterly report as a public company last month, Snap said that it lost over $2 billion, primarily as a result of equity grants to executives like CEO Evan Spiegel.

Much of the pressure on Snap’s shares stems from concerns that Instagram is eating into the company’s user growth, and taking away advertisers as well.

Instagram added a feature called Stories earlier this year, which allows users to add multiple photos and videos to create a collection with a specific theme. The feature is essentially a carbon copy of a Snapchat feature with the same name.

Instagram said earlier this year that more than 200 million people use its Stories feature, which is more than Snapchat’s entire user base.

Snap and its defenders, however, argue that Snapchat functions differently from Instagram because it is much more focused on sharing among individuals, whereas Instagram has more of a public broadcast model, in which users track how many likes and comments they get.

According to a recent survey by App Annie, another app analytics company, about 35% of Snapchat’s daily users in the U.S. aren’t on Facebook the same day they use the app, and more than 45% can’t be found on Instagram on the same day they use Snapchat.

The risk for Snap, is that while Snapchat’s model may be more appealing to users, Instagram’s model may actually turn out to be more interesting to advertisers.

Google parent Alphabet’s annual shareholder meetings are a very civilized affair, with chairman Eric Schmidt playing host, sharing a vision of the better world the company is creating, followed by polite questions and proposals from shareholders.

Those shareholder proposals, however, are largely a false front—window dressing, if you will. Because as everyone at the meeting probably knows, there are only two shareholders who really matter at an Alphabet annual meeting, and their names are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

That’s because Google founders Page and Brin control 51% of the votes, despite owning just 11% of the overall equity. Their voting control comes through their large ownership stake in Class B shares, which carry 10 votes each (Schmidt’s stake gives him 5% of the overall votes).

One by one, shareholder representatives stood up at the meeting in Mountain View, Calif. on Wednesday morning, including several from large investors such as Northstar Asset Management, which owns 7.2 million shares. They presented a range of proposals designed to try and force Alphabet to take action on a variety of issues.

A proposal from Arjuna Capital, for example, would have required that the company produce numbers related to the pay gap between male and female staff, an issue that is currently the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The department has alleged that there are “systemic compensation disparities against women” at Alphabet, but the company maintains that this is not the case. In the shareholder proxy document filed with regulators, it argued that shareholders should vote against the Arjuna proposal because it is “not in the best interests of the company and its stockholders.”

Another motion, also backed by Arjuna and several other institutional shareholders, proposed that the company be required to produce a report describing what kind of action it is taking to prevent the spread of “fake news” and misinformation through its networks.

Arjuna director Natasha Lamb told the meeting that such misinformation “has affected elections in the U.K, France and the U.S., and the confusion cuts across political lines—a study from Pew shows that 64% of Americans trust news on the Internet less than a year ago.” Steps the company has announced to take action, she said “are too little and too late.”

The investment fund presented an identical motion at Facebook’s recent annual meeting, and just like the proposal at Alphabet’s meeting, it was voted down—and for the same reason, since Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg controls a majority of the votes in the company.

The motion from NorthStar was perhaps the most quixotic of them all: It proposed that Alphabet restructure its shares in order to give every shareholder a single vote.

A representative for the fund said that it’s easy to ignore voting-rights inequities when profits are up, but it “poses significant risk” to the company’s future performance. “It’s impossible for shareholders to have any meaningful input,” the NorthStar spokesman said. “We are very concerned about the governance risks of relying on two or three people.”

Just like all the other shareholder proposals, the Northstar motion was voted down.

Most of the users watching Apple’s WWDC conference on Monday were probably interested in what the company’s new products can do, but at least some of the interest in Apple’s latest version of its Safari web browser was based on what it doesn’t do.

In a nutshell, the version of Safari that is rolling out with Mac’s new High Sierra operating system won’t display auto-playing videos on websites, something many web users hate. And it won’t allow websites to track users as they move across the web either.

https://twitter.com/JackMarshall/status/871782144993091585

These new features may put Apple on users’ good side, since both autoplaying videos and user-tracking are seen as annoying and intrusive. But publishers and media companies aren’t likely to greet these new additions with open arms, and neither are advertisers.

Apple’s Craig Federighi said the upcoming version of Safari will block autoplay videos and will feature what he called “intelligent tracking prevention,” which will prevent websites from tracking your browsing data. “Now your browser history is your own,” he said.

Apple’s moves come on the heels of an announcement from Google that the next version of its Chrome web browser—which has about 60% of the market—will block certain ad types by default, including autoplaying video ads. In some cases, websites that have a lot of low-quality ads will have all their ads blocked, not just the ones that breach Google’s rules.

In Google’s case, the fact that the company is one of the world’s largest advertising entities and Chrome is the leading browser by market share makes some publishers and advertisers nervous.

Although the search giant points out that the definition of which ads are acceptable comes from an independent industry group called the Coalition for Better Ads, some believe that the default blocking of certain ads puts too much power in Google’s hands.

Apple doesn’t have a huge digital advertising business the way Google does, and its browser is the third or fourth player in the market based on recent estimates. So it would be harder to make the case that Apple’s choice to not show autoplaying videos is anti-competitive.

That said, however, Apple has a large and powerful user base of loyal fans, and the fact that it is using that power to remove certain forms of advertising—and tools that advertisers and publishers use, such as user tracking—is bound to set off alarm bells for some in the industry.

https://twitter.com/readDanwrite/status/871781907889106944

Although it is a small player in relative terms, Apple sparked much of the current outcry about ad-blocking software when it enabled support for third-party ad blockers in iOS 9 in 2015.

Ad-blocking in general, on both the desktop and mobile web, has been growing rapidly over the past couple of years, according to industry surveys. Users on mobile devices in particular are not happy with the time-consuming and intrusive ads that many sites rely on.

Publishers, meanwhile, argue that they have no choice but to use these annoying features, because Google and Facebook have taken over so much of the digital-advertising market.

According to one industry analyst, the two companies combined have about 75% of the $70-billion U.S. digital advertising market, and between the two of them, they accounted for virtually all of the growth in the industry last year.

Twitter users block other users on the platform all the time, in some cases because they are abusive and sometimes because they are just irritating. But is it different if the user doing the blocking happens to be the president of the United States?

The Knight First Amendment Institute says it is different, or at least that it should be. The Institute, a non-profit group associated with Columbia University, has sent a letter to the White House arguing that Trump is breaching the First Amendment rights of those he blocks.

It might seem laughable at first, and there are some First Amendment experts and supporters who appear to find it so, but the Institute believes it has a valid case.

According to the letter, written by Institute director Jameel Jaffer, the president’s Twitter account fits the legal definition of a “designated public forum,” and as such it can’t be closed to public access under the First Amendment.

In effect, the Institute argues that the law requires Trump make his account available to everyone regardless of whether they criticize him. It has said it is considering pursuing a case against the president on behalf of two users who were blocked by him.

“Though the architects of the Constitution surely didn’t contemplate presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the President must not be allowed to banish views from public discourse simply because he finds them objectionable,” Jaffer said in a statement. “Having opened this forum to all comers, the President can’t exclude people from it merely because he dislikes what they’re saying.”

Not everyone is buying this argument, however. Ken White, a former assistant U.S. Attorney who writes legal commentary at Popehat and is a First Amendment expert, said that he found the idea of the Institute’s case “ridiculous.”

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/872160527153340416

Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, told the Wall Street Journal that the Institute had a “novel and ambitious argument” that was clearly in the public interest. But he also described it as a “tough sell.”

Is the president’s Twitter account “a public forum where interactive free expression is expected or more like a newsletter, where the communication is all one way?” Paulson asked. Municipalities that establish Facebook pages and invite citizen input may be creating public forums, “but I’m not sure that Donald Trump’s brief bursts of opinion are the same thing.”

https://twitter.com/andy_sellars/status/872160254229917696

There a number of problems with determining whether Trump’s Twitter account is a public forum or not, and one of them stems from the fact that the law is far from settled on the question of what exactly constitutes a truly public forum.

The laws relating to free public access to government property were designed to protect the ability of demonstrators, protesters, etc. to speak their mind in public parks and other areas. The extension of this right to any “public forum” didn’t occur until a Supreme Court decision in 1972, and from that point things just got more and more complicated.

As University of Florida law professor Lyrissa Lydsky put it in a legal paper on the First Amendment and online forums that was published in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court’s public forum and government speech doctrines are “lacking in coherence — to put it mildly.”

In a nutshell, there are several definitions for public forums, based in part on what the government’s intentions were in setting them up in the first place. A fully public forum, designed for what is described as “expressive activity,” can’t be censored. But a “limited public forum,” which has a specific purpose, can be restricted in a variety of ways.

To further complicate things, the government and its representatives are protected from First Amendment rules on such matters if what they are doing is defined by the court as “government speech.” If so, then feedback or input or access theoretically can be restricted.

So should Donald Trump’s Twitter account be considered a public forum, a limited public forum, or a form of protected government speech?

Comments from press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday could be pertinent to such a case, because he said that Trump’s tweets are considered to be “official statements by the president.” That could support the argument that Trump is engaging in government speech, and therefore opposing viewpoints can be restricted without breaching the First Amendment.

Early Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump said he would continue to use Twitter even though “the fake MSM” doesn’t like it, saying the social network allows him to broadcast what he called “the honest and unfiltered message” about his government to Americans.

The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

The President went on to criticize the “fake news” of media outlets such as CNN, NBC and the New York Times, saying if he had relied on those organizations, he would have had “zero chance of winning” the presidential election.

Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

It’s not the first time Trump has talked about how using social media allows him to get his message out to Americans directly. During an interview in January, he said he liked using the social network because he was “covered so dishonestly by the press.”

At the same time, however, that direct and unfiltered message has also caused problems for the president and his administration on a number of occasions.

To take just one example, courts in both Washington state and Hawaii used tweets that Trump posted about his proposed immigration ban to strike down the legislation, on the basis that his comments suggested the ban was targeted specifically at banning Muslims, which is unconstitutional.

Some legal experts have warned that his recent comments about the travel ban could cause similar complications as the case heads to the Supreme Court.

In a response to his Tuesday morning rant, the American Civil Liberties Union — one of the groups that has been fighting the immigration ban — suggested that it may use Trump’s tweets on the topic to help in that ongoing battle.

Yes, we may incorporate @realDonaldTrump's tweets about the ban into our Supreme Court argument.

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 5, 2017

Another receipt to save for when we see you in court. https://t.co/7WMe0XMkrS

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 6, 2017

There have been reports recently from a number of news outlets that members of Trump’s administration would very much like to filter his tweets by having his legal team look at them before they are sent out. But Trump apparently isn’t in favor of that kind of strategy.

Direct access to his Twitter account was reportedly taken away from the president for a brief period during the election campaign, because of concerns about the impact that his unfiltered tweets might have. During that time his tweets were edited by spokesman Hope Hicks.

According to a number of White House insiders, some of the tweets that appear on Trump’s personal account come from him, via his personal Android phone, while others are written by members of his staff and are posted from an iPhone.

Trump’s defense of his Twitter use comes just a day after one of his advisers, Kellyanne Conway, criticized the media’s focus on his individual tweets, referring to what she called its “obsession with covering everything [he] says on Twitter.”

A number of media observers have pointed out, however, that the tweets from Trump are essentially official communications from the president of the United States, just as press conferences or news releases are, and therefore they deserve to be covered.

CNN media analyst Brian Stelter said the president’s tweets are an important part of the public record of his administration, since they provide a glimpse into his emotional state and give his unfiltered perspective on the events going on around him.

What I said on @NewDay about Trump's impulsive tweets:

The emotional state of the president IS part of this story… https://t.co/fG7eUUu28S

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 6, 2017

As more than one journalist noted in response to Trump’s Tuesday morning rant, most of the media would probably love for him to continue tweeting, because it provides them with a real-time glimpse into his thought process and endless fodder for articles. Any pressure to stop doing so seems more likely to come from members of his own administration.

Fact Check: MSM eat up his tweets like Skittles. It's WH advisers, lawyers and Trump supporters who want him to stop tweeting. https://t.co/r6ZvJlTa8O

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 6, 2017

Google has confirmed that it intends to add a new feature to its Chrome web browser that will block certain types of ads from being seen by users, and in some cases could block all advertising on websites that don’t meet certain standards.

The Alphabet subsidiary says it wants to work with publishers to help them understand what kinds of ads will no longer be acceptable, and the standards being built into the browser come from an industry group rather than Google itself.

But that hasn’t stopped some from criticizing the idea, since Google controls a significant share of the digital ad market.

Word of the new feature first emerged in April, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Google had approached some publishing partners about its plans.

At the time, Cornell Law professor James Grimmelmann said that the idea of an ad blocker controlled by one of the world’s largest digital-advertising companies was almost certain to raise anti-competitive concerns in some circles.

If Google uses its 50%+ browser share to ship a product that blocks rivals’ ads but not Google’s own, my antitrust eyebrows go up.

— James Grimmelmann (@grimmelm) April 20, 2017

In a nutshell, Chrome will now include ad-blocking features that are turned on by default (although Google prefers to call it “filtering” rather than blocking). Ads that meet certain annoying criteria will not be shown, and if a website crosses a certain threshold of substandard ads, users won’t see any advertising at all.

Some of the ad types that will be blocked include pop-ups, videos that auto-play, and so-called “pre-stitial” ads that force readers to sit through a count down before they can see the page’s contents. Many leading publishers rely on some or all of these strategies to boost ad revenue.

To try and soften the blow somewhat, Google is also offering something called Funding Choices, which allows publishers to show users a note when their ads are blocked by third-party software. The note will give readers the option of either disabling their blocker or buying an ad-free pass or subscription of some kind for that site.

Google reportedly pays Eyeo, the German company that owns AdBlock—the leading ad-blocking software—to have its ads automatically whitelisted, so they are not blocked.

The company notes that the standards for what will be considered acceptable advertising under its new Chrome system have been developed by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group that includes advertisers and industry groups, media companies such as News Corp., as well as Google and Facebook.

The appeal of such a feature for users and publishers is obvious. The web has become a sea of popups, pop-unders, interstitials, auto-playing videos and other annoying behavior, and growing numbers of users have responded by installing ad-blocking software like AdBlock. Publishers lose revenue as a result, and no one is happy.

However, some media companies argue that they have no choice but to rely on such methods, because the bulk of the advertising business has been sucked up by Google and Facebook.

According to a recent estimate by Pivotal Research, not only do the two digital giants control over 75% of the $70-billion U.S. digital ad industry, last year they accounted for almost all of the growth that the industry saw compared to 2015.

Not only that, but Google’s Chrome browser has an estimated 58% share of the browser market, which makes it the leading player by far.

So in effect, what the company is rolling out is a system that will block ads by default for a majority of web users, based on standards that it and Facebook—two companies that control the bulk of the online advertising business—have a huge amount of control over.

Will it improve the web for users? Probably. But at the same time, it raises some significant questions about the extent of Google’s power over the advertising we see, and its increasing dominance when it comes to the ways in which publishers and media companies can make money.