Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator. There’s an apocryphal story of automation in the 1500s that runs as follows. The Reverend William Lee, an English inventor, studies the movements involved in knitting and builds a machine … Continue reading
Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator. There’s an old story that, sometime in the 1960s, NASA spent millions to create a pen that worked in space. American engineers worked for years on a high-tech marvel that could write … Continue reading
In August 2020, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency with an unlikely cause: the video-sharing app TikTok. At issue was TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and its close connections with the Chinese Communist Party. Trump argued that TikTok gave the CCP “access … Continue reading
In June 2022, Google suspended engineer Blake Lemoine from his work in artificial intelligence. Having previously assisted with a program called the Language Models for Dialog Applications (LaMDA), Lemoine was placed on leave after publishing confidential information about the project. … Continue reading
Over the course of 2020, the previously minor social media application Parler rose to national prominence. The site served as a smaller, right-leaning mirror to Twitter, attracting an audience that included (among others) both U.S. senators and QAnon conspiracy theorists. … Continue reading
On May 28, President Donald Trump issued an executive order charging federal agencies to “consider taking action … to prohibit unfair or deceptive acts” by social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. At issue is Section 230 of the Communications … Continue reading
Tony Wang, the general manager of Twitter, declared in 2012 that the company was “neutral as to the content” of speech, noting “[we] like to say that we are the free speech wing of the free speech party.” The same … Continue reading
The 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise of a new form of online-only marketplace. Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist became household words by providing familiar services from the convenience of a computer monitor. In 2004, Backpage.com joined the … Continue reading
On November 21, the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to revisit its Obama-era internet regulations. It seems likely that the resulting vote will repeal the policies often referred to as net neutrality. The name is, perhaps, misleading; to support net … Continue reading
