Stuart N. Brotman – Page 4 – Media & Communications Policy

March 9, 2021July 7, 2021 By Stuart N. Brotman

Guardrails for Describing Fake News, Misinformation, and Disinformation

Perhaps the most distasteful national omelet we’ve been served during the past four years has been the one that has mixed together an unsavory combination of three ingredients: fake news, misinformation, and disinformation.

While many express growing concerns and look for ways to deal with them, that may be difficult – if not impossible – as long as we use these terms without any agreed-upon definitions that set useful boundaries and are easy to understand among the public at large. The alternative is to continue repeating the mantra “fake news-misinformation- disinformation” so often that it loses meaning, or using the terms interchangeably so that they become permanently blurred in our minds.

February 25, 2021July 7, 2021 By Stuart N. Brotman

Digital Privacy Laws Should Reflect Our Work-From-Home Pandemic Lives

With COVID-19 and economic recovery at the top of the policy agenda for the Biden Administration and the new Congress, it may take awhile until serious attention is devoted to enacting national digital privacy legislation. This continues to put states in a leadership position to craft their own approaches. Florida, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Washington are among the states that are in the process of developing their own bills for timely legislative approval.

And Virginia’s pending Consumer Data Protection Act is poised to be signed into law by Gov. Ralph Northam, after receiving very strong bipartisan support in both the Virginia House and the state Senate.

February 8, 2021July 7, 2021 By Stuart N. Brotman

Greater Social Media Trust Is Needed To Fight COVID-19

The resumption of daily press briefings by the new White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has brought back a welcomed routine of making the president’s chief spokesperson available for informational updates and responses to questions posed by various reporters in the press corps. Ms. Psaki typically holds these weekday sessions in the early afternoon and they can be viewed on a variety of websites.

With that scheduling constant now in place, it’s time for the Biden Administration to devise a separate social media schedule for COVID-19 updates to help minimize the tsunami of misinformation about testing, PPE availability, mandated mask orders, vaccine supply, and actual vaccinations. These updates should be based on actual data and science, not on rumors or speculation. And when sufficient information is not yet forthcoming, we should be told why it has not been released and when it may be made public.

January 29, 2021July 7, 2021 By Stuart N. Brotman

Why Distrust of News Needs More Sophisticated Analysis

With a start of a new year, some notable public attitudes about critical institutions seem to be on a downward trend. These include traditional media, like newspapers, broadcast stations, and cable networks, which are often thrown together in opinion polls aimed at gaining key insight into their credibility with audiences of readers and viewers.

The Edelman Trust Barometer found only 46 percent of Americans trust traditional media. This is the lowest number recorded since the data was first tracked two decades ago. It found 58 percent of Americans believe that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting one ideology or political position than with informing the public” and found over half also think that the Fourth Estate is “trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”

January 11, 2021July 7, 2021 By Stuart N. Brotman

A Better Way To Close the Digital Divide

As 2021 begins, one source of optimism from Congress was the recent enactment of much-needed legislation to expand broadband network availability into rural and tribal areas.

The new emergency stimulus funding includes $300 million to be made available as Broadband Infrastructure Deployment Grants to target unserved areas for network infrastructure construction that prioritizes funds for counties, cities, or towns with less than 50,000 inhabitants.

August 20, 2020August 19, 2020 By Stuart N. Brotman

Privacy Policy Research Deserves a Much Wider Audience

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted its fifth annual PrivacyCon on July 21, 2020. This was the first time the one-day conference was fully remote, rather than in person at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection in Washington, D.C.

PrivacyCon should not be confused with Comic-Con, the annual pop culture extravaganza that began the following day with over 350 virtual panels extending over nearly a week. Perhaps the thousands who show up there each year in San Diego with colorful costumes will not miss a beat as they turn on their Zoom cameras to participate in a way never imagined when this year’s Comic-Con was organized.

April 17, 2020August 19, 2020 By Stuart N. Brotman

Deploying U.S. AI Leadership for COVID-19

Among the cutting-edge technologies being employed by public health experts to map various aspects of COVID-19 both at home and abroad, artificial intelligence (AI) faces a test under life-and-death circumstances. The ability of AI systems to undertake pattern detection and predict the spread of the pandemic and its treatments is promising. The benefit of machine learning includes its powerful ability to analyze historic data to find key variables. This task is dependent upon humans, however, specifically in the ability of data scientists who can work on creating data sets that supercomputers then can model. On a global basis, this will require pooling both technical and human resources.

Given the unprecedented nature of COVID-19, historic data inputted for AI analysis may be of limited value. Real-time data comparing growth curves in countries around the world, along with population and demographic information by neighborhood, may prove to be a better vein for producing actionable data anywhere and everywhere. Automated machine learning also may improve the efficiency of data scientists, enabling them to focus on new data generation while relying on computer-to-computer analysis of massive-scale number crunching.

October 17, 2019October 17, 2019 By Stuart N. Brotman

The 5G Privacy Opportunity

The Federal Communications Commission announced on Sept. 16 that it would be granting experimental licenses for companies in New York City and Salt Lake City to test new advanced technologies and networks in specific geographic areas.

This initiative, dubbed Innovation Zones, will be especially useful in testing various technologies in real-world settings that will support 5G wireless networks. These networks will offer a range of advanced wireless services nationwide, with initial rollout in urban centers where spatial and population density makes technical and economic sense.

June 7, 2018June 7, 2018 By Stuart N. Brotman

The Continuing Leadership of the U.S. in Global Net Vitality

Regardless of your political leanings, the just-released report by the Telecommunications Research and Policy Institute shows that with regard to the global broadband Internet ecosystem, there is no need to Make America Great Again. That’s because the U.S. leadership role in this field remains well established, as documented in the study that I authored – “Net Vitality 2.0: Identifying the Top–Tier Global Broadband Leaders – The Net Vitality Index In Detail” (available at trpiresearch.org).

This is the only evidence-based analysis that compares countries on an apples-to-apples basis, based on four essential elements that work together seamlessly to create the Internet’s vitality that we rely on in virtually every aspect of our daily lives. These are (1) applications and content; (2) devices; (3) networks; and (4) innovation and competitiveness indicators. Omit one of these elements from the internet equation and the value of the Net to all of us would be greatly diminished.

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