According to new research published Thursday, conservatives on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election were more isolated and saw more misinformation than the platform's liberal users -- though Facebook widely affected users' political content in different ways. Slashdot reader RUs1729 shared one of the four peer-reviewed studies, appearing in the journals Science and Nature. Forbes reports: The study, led by two researchers from the University of Texas and New York University, had hundreds of thousands of participants and analyzed mass amounts of Facebook user data. One of the study's papers, which used aggregated data for 208 million U.S. Facebook users, found that most misinformation on Facebook existed within conservative echo chambers, which did not have an equivalent on the liberal side of the platform. The paper found that news outlets on the right post a higher fraction of news stories rated false by Meta's third-party fact-checking program, meaning conservative audiences are more exposed to unreliable news.

In a separate paper that assigned users to Facebook and Instagram feeds chronologically instead of algorithm-based feeds, which are the platforms' default feed types, researchers found users on chronological feeds were less engaged and saw more political content compared to those viewing algorithm-based feeds, along with more content from untrustworthy sources and more content from ideologically moderate friends and sources with mixed audiences. However, the feed analysis noted replacing algorithmic feeds with chronological ones did not create any detectable changes in political attitudes, knowledge or offline behavior.

Another paper assigned nearly 9,000 U.S.-based Facebook users feeds with no reshares, later concluding that the removal of reshared content "substantially" lessened the amount of political news, and content from all untrustworthy sources decreased overall. The two lead researchers and 15 other academics, who had control rights for the study's papers, declined compensation from Meta to ensure an ethical study was completed.

United States presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced a plan to back the dollar with Bitcoin, and end taxes on Bitcoin.

From a report: Speaking at a Heal-the-Divide PAC event, Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlined specific Bitcoin-focused policies that he would enact as president, including gradually backing the U.S. dollar with bitcoin and making bitcoin profits exempt from capital gains taxes.

"My plan would be to start very, very small, perhaps 1% of issued T-bills would be backed by hard currency, by gold, silver platinum or bitcoin," Kennedy said, describing his vision for returning to a hard currency standard in the U.S.

He added that, depending on the outcome of that initial step, he would increase that allocation annually. This potential policy reimagines the financial system, pointing to a future where bitcoin's absolute scarcity and sound monetary principles reinforce the U.S. dollar's eroding position as the world reserve currency. Kennedy Jr. added: "Backing dollars and U.S. debt obligations with hard assets could help restore strength back to the dollar, rein in inflation and usher in a new era of American financial stability, peace and prosperity."

In addition, Kennedy announced his administration "will exempt the conversion of bitcoin to the U.S. dollar from capital gains taxes"

Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are calling (PDF) for an investigation into popular online tax filing companies, accusing them of sharing sensitive taxpayer data with Meta and Google without user consent. The Verge reports: On Tuesday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and others asked the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission, Treasury Department, and the IRS to investigate whether TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and TaxAct violated taxpayer privacy laws by sharing sensitive user information with the two tech firms. Senators also released (PDF) their own report Wednesday detailing the accusations, first raised by The Markup last November.

The report alleges that for years, tax preparation companies infused their products with Meta and Google tracking pixels that revealed identifying information -- like a user's full name, address, and date of birth. The senators also suggest that some of the information provided, like the forms a user accessed, could be used to show "whether taxpayers were eligible for certain deductions or exemptions." The senators claim that the companies did not receive user consent to share this information, which could violate laws banning tax preparers from sharing tax return information with third parties, especially since much of this data could be used for advertising purposes.

President Emmanuel Macron is partially blaming video games for the spread of violence in France following the shooting death of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week. NPR reports: "It sometimes feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them," Macron said in a press conference on July 1. He added that protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize themselves and spread "a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality." Concerns that video games promote shootings, massacres or rioting are now about half a century old; it has been traced back to the 1976 release of Death Race, an arcade video game which put players behind the wheel of a car to mow down humanoid figures for points. The argument gained renewed traction in the 1990s with the release of much more realistic first-person shooter games. It is an old bogeyman that politicians have latched onto in the wake of horrific tragedies. But it has become less common as troves of studies have largely concluded there is no causal link between video games and violent behavior.

Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the impact of such games on the public, said he is surprised at Macron's comments. The president is 45 years old and belongs to a generation raised with video games, so "seeing him mention this is almost anachronistic," Ferguson said, sounding perplexed. "The evidence is very clear. Whatever may be going on in France, whatever violence is occurring, it certainly is not due to violence in video games." Decades of research, especially long-term experiments spanning decades, have consistently found "that playing violent video games, do not cause even prank-level aggressive behaviors, let alone violent crimes," Ferguson said. He also noted that the overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped significantly between 1993 and 2020, the same period during which violent video games soared in popularity.

And it's not just in the United States. A 2019 study out of Oxford University determined that early violent video game playing among British teenagers does not predict serious or violent criminal behavior later in life. According to Ferguson, if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be rife with bloodshed. "Instead, they're three of the most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime," he said. "You could wave a magic wand and take all these people's video games away, and that's not going to have any effect in any way going to help their lives and reduce their aggression," Ferguson said. So why do politicians turn to the familiar refrain? Ferguson said it is a way for elected leaders to shift the blame away from failing government policies. "It gets people talking about the wrong thing. They're thinking about video games. They're not thinking about gun control or whatever inequalities are happening in France," Ferguson said.

A federal judge yesterday ordered the Biden administration to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies, siding with Missouri and Louisiana in a lawsuit (PDF) that alleges Biden and his administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social networks "to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." Ars Technica reports: The Biden administration argued that it communicated with tech companies to counter misinformation related to elections, COVID-19, and vaccines, and that it didn't exert illegal pressure on the companies. The communications to social media companies were not significant enough "to convert private conduct into government conduct," Department of Justice lawyers argued in the case. But Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee at US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granted the plaintiffs' request (PDF) for a preliminary injunction imposing limits on the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, the US Census Bureau, the State Department, the Homeland Security Department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and many specific officials at those agencies. The injunction also affects White House officials.

The agencies and officials are prohibited from communicating "with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms," Doughty ruled. The injunction prohibits "specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech." Government agencies and officials are further barred from urging, encouraging, or pressuring social media companies "to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech." The ruling also said the government may not coordinate with third-party groups, including the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, to pressure social media companies.

Doughty provided several exceptions that allow the government to communicate with social media companies about criminal activity and other speech that the First Amendment doesn't protect. The Biden administration may continue to inform social networks about posts involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies, national security threats, extortion, criminal efforts to suppress voting, illegal campaign contributions, cyberattacks against election infrastructure, foreign attempts to influence elections, threats to public safety and security, and posts intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures. The US can also exercise "permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern," communicate with social networks "in an effort to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity," and "communicat[e] with social-media companies about deleting, removing, suppressing, or reducing posts on social-media platforms that are not protected free speech by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."

Turkish presidential candidate Muharrem Ince withdrew from the race after an alleged sex tape circulated online. Ince claims it's a deepfake using footage taken from "an Israeli porn site." The Guardian reports: Ince, a two-time presidential candidate who also lost to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2018, pulled his candidacy just days away from Turkey's most consequential election in a generation saying: "I offered Turkey a third option, a third way. We couldn't succeed with this way."

The former school headteacher and longtime member of the Republican People's party (CHP) said an alleged sex tape circulating online was a deepfake, using footage taken from "an Israeli porn site." He added: "If I had such images of myself, they were taken secretly in the past. But I do not have such an image, no such sound recording. This is not my private life, it's slander. It's not real."

The high-profile deployment of deepfake videos has already hit Turkey's 45-day election cycle, after Erdogan played an alleged deepfake that claimed to show banned Kurdish militants declaring their support for Kilicdaroglu at a pre-election rally last weekend. "What I have seen in these last 45 days, I have not seen in 45 years," said Ince.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Parler, the self-described "uncancelable free speech platform," has been sold and shut down while its new owner conducts a "strategic assessment." The platform will be back eventually, new owner Starboard says. The Parler website is now a simple page containing only today's press release announcing the acquisition, which was completed without financial terms being disclosed. "No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," the acquisition announcement said, promising a revamp.

"While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities -- even extending beyond domestic politics," the press release said. No timing for a return was mentioned. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Starboard founder and CEO Ryan Coyne said that Parler is "going to take a breath of fresh air." Ars notes that Starboard was formerly called Olympic Media and owns conservative news sites American Wire News and BizPac Review.

The previous owner, Parlement Technologies, tried to strike a deal to sell to Ye (formerly Kanye West) in mid-October but canceled the deal after Ye praised Hitler and Nazis. The company laid off a majority of its staff earlier this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Ukrainian hackers claim to have broken into the emails of a senior Russian military spy wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for hacking the Hillary Clinton campaign and other senior U.S. Democrats ahead of Donald Trump's election to the presidency in 2016. In a message posted to Telegram on Monday, a group calling itself Cyber Resistance said it had stolen correspondence from Lt. Col. Sergey Morgachev, who was charged in 2018 with helping organize the hack and leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign.

InformNapalm said in an article about the breach that it had confirmed Morgachev's identity by poring through personnel files and a curriculum vitae stolen by the hackers, including one document that identified him as a department head in Unit 26165 -- the same position which the FBI accused him of holding in 2018. [...] It wasn't immediately clear what information the hackers had managed to steal or how significant it was. Morgachev's inbox could potentially hold insight into Russia's hacking operations, including the operation against Clinton and the Democrats.

In its indictment, the FBI described him as an officer in the Russia's military spy agency, still known by its old acronym, GRU. It said his department was "dedicated to developing and managing malware," including the "X-Agent" spy software used to hack the DNC. In its message announcing the theft, the group said of Morgachev: "A very cool and clever hacker, but ... We hacked him."

mspohr shares an excerpt from a New York Times article: When ChatGPT exploded in popularity as a tool using artificial intelligence to draft complex texts, David Rozado decided to test its potential for bias. A data scientist in New Zealand, he subjected the chatbot to a series of quizzes, searching for signs of political orientation. The results, published in a recent paper, were remarkably consistent across more than a dozen tests: "liberal," "progressive," "Democratic." So he tinkered with his own version, training it to answer questions with a decidedly conservative bent. He called his experiment RightWingGPT. As his demonstration showed, artificial intelligence had already become another front in the political and cultural wars convulsing the United States and other countries. Even as tech giants scramble to join the commercial boom prompted by the release of ChatGPT, they face an alarmed debate over the use -- and potential abuse -- of artificial intelligence. [...]

When creating RightWingGPT, Mr. Rozado, an associate professor at the Te Pukenga-New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology, made his own influence on the model more overt. He used a process called fine-tuning, in which programmers take a model that was already trained and tweak it to create different outputs, almost like layering a personality on top of the language model. Mr. Rozado took reams of right-leaning responses to political questions and asked the model to tailor its responses to match. Fine-tuning is normally used to modify a large model so it can handle more specialized tasks, like training a general language model on the complexities of legal jargon so it can draft court filings. Since the process requires relatively little data -- Mr. Rozado used only about 5,000 data points to turn an existing language model into RightWingGPT -- independent programmers can use the technique as a fast-track method for creating chatbots aligned with their political objectives. This also allowed Mr. Rozado to bypass the steep investment of creating a chatbot from scratch. Instead, it cost him only about $300.

Mr. Rozado warned that customized A.I. chatbots could create "information bubbles on steroids" because people might come to trust them as the "ultimate sources of truth" -- especially when they were reinforcing someone's political point of view. His model echoed political and social conservative talking points with considerable candor. It will, for instance, speak glowingly about free market capitalism or downplay the consequences from climate change. It also, at times, provided incorrect or misleading statements. When prodded for its opinions on sensitive topics or right-wing conspiracy theories, it shared misinformation aligned with right-wing thinking. When asked about race, gender or other sensitive topics, ChatGPT tends to tread carefully, but it will acknowledge that systemic racism and bias are an intractable part of modern life. RightWingGPT appeared much less willing to do so. "Mr. Rozado never released RightWingGPT publicly, although he allowed The New York Times to test it," adds the report. "He said the experiment was focused on raising alarm bells about potential bias in A.I. systems and demonstrating how political groups and companies could easily shape A.I. to benefit their own agendas."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1,000 scientists and postgraduate students were barred from working in the UK last year on national security grounds, amid a major government crackdown on research collaborations with China. Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were rejected by Foreign Office vetting in 2022, up from 128 in 2020 and just 13 in 2016.

The sharp increase follows a hardening of the government's stance on scientific ties with China, with warnings from MI5 of a growing espionage threat, major research centers being quietly shut down and accusations by a government minister that China's leading genomics company had regularly sought to hack into the NHS's genetic database. Geopolitical tensions stepped up further this week, as the US, Australia and the UK announced a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal aimed at countering China's military expansion in the Indo-Pacific. China said the Aukus plan to build a combined fleet of elite nuclear-powered submarines was "a path of error and danger."

The Foreign Office declined to give a breakdown by nationality, but data supplied by leading universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College suggests that, at these institutions at least, Chinese academics account for a majority of those denied clearance. Some have welcomed the policy shift, with one security expert saying the number of academics being barred is "commensurate with the threat." But leading scientists say the scheme is leaving universities struggling to recruit the best talent from abroad. "A majority of applicants are thought to be scientists seeking to move to the UK to take up offers of research degrees or fellowships," adds the Guardian. "But the Guardian is also aware of researchers, including five Chinese scientists at Imperial college, who did not pass clearance despite having already held positions at UK universities for several years -- and who may have had to leave the UK as a result."

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was hit Thursday with four new criminal charges, including ones related to commodities fraud and making unlawful political contributions, in a superseding indictment filed in New York federal court. A source familiar with the new counts said that SBF, as he is popularly known, could face an additional 40 years in prison if convicted in the case, where he is accused of "multiple schemes to defraud." CNBC reports: The charging document lays out how Bankman-Fried allegedly operated an illegal straw donor scheme as he moved to use customers funds to run a multimillion-dollar political influence campaign. Bankman-Fried and fellow FTX executives combined to contribute more than $70 million toward the 2022 midterm elections, according to campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. The indictment claims that Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators "made over 300 political contributions, totaling tens of millions of dollars, that were unlawful because they were made in the name of a straw donor or paid for with corporate funds." "To avoid certain contributions being publicly reported in his name, Bankman-Fried conspired to and did have certain political contributions made in the names of two other FTX executives," the new filing claims.

The document refers to one such example, in 2022, when Bankman-Fried and "others agreed that he and his co-conspirators should contribute at least a million dollars to a super PAC that was supporting a candidate running for a United States Congressional seat and appeared to be affiliated with pro-LGBTQ issues." The group of conspirators, according to the document, selected an individual only identified in the document as "CC-1" or co-conspirator 1, to be the donor. However, in 2022, then-FTX Director of Engineering Nishad Singh contributed $1.1 million to the LGBTQ Victory Fund Federal PAC, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

SBF's alleged campaign finance scheme included efforts to keep his contributions to Republicans "dark," according to the new indictment. And, the alleged straw donor scheme was coordinated, at least in part, "through an encrypted, auto-deleting Signal chat called 'Donation Processing,'" according to the indictment. The document says another unnamed co-conspirator "who publicly aligned himself with conservatives, made contributions to Republican candidates that were directed by Bankman-Fried and funded by Alameda," the crypto tycoon's hedge fund. Again, the document does do not name the alleged second FTX co-conspirator who contributed to Republican candidates.

The indictment alleges that Bankman-Fried and his allies allegedly tried to "further conceal the scheme" by recording "the outgoing wire transfers from Alameda to individuals' bank accounts for purposes of making contributions as Alameda 'loans' or 'expenses.'" The document says that "while employees at Alameda generally tracked loans to executives, the transfers to Bankman-Fried, CC-1, and CC-2 in the months before the 2022 midterm elections were not recorded on internal Alameda tracking spreadsheets." The internal Alameda spreadsheets, however, "noted over $100 million in political contributions, even though FEC records reflect no political contributions by Alameda for the 2022 midterm elections to candidates or PACs."

Tech privacy advocates frustrated by failures on Capitol Hill are looking to mine state capitals for legislative victories. From a report: A broad bipartisan federal privacy bill that died in Congress last year has quickly become the template for a statehouse-by-statehouse campaign to enact tough new restrictions on how Americans' personal data can be mined and shared. Lawmakers in Massachusetts and Illinois are already proposing privacy measures modeled on the federal bill, and Democrats in Indiana are using it as inspiration to strengthen legislation that's already been proposed. Four other states have already passed their own data-privacy laws in the past two years -- raising anxiety levels among tech companies about a national "patchwork" of hard-to-navigate data rules -- but encouraging advocates who see an appetite for broader consumer protections.

"We were wondering if there would be something passed federally. It would definitely guide what we would be doing for the state," Democratic Indiana state Sen. Shelli Yoder said in an interview. "Because that failed, it put us in a position of needing to do something." The new statehouse focus by privacy advocates isn't necessarily designed to sweep across all 50 states but rather tighten regulations just enough in just enough places to force the industry into a de facto national standard. They're hoping to enact state-level privacy proposals that align closely with what Congress attempted to pass with the American Data and Privacy Protection Act: regulations that would limit what data companies can collect and share, create a data broker registry and establish new rights for Americans to delete data about themselves. But they're playing catch-up to an industry-led campaign that's made significant headway in several states, including Virginia and Utah, where weaker laws were enacted over the past two years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two Republican lawmakers in Idaho have introduced a bill that would make it a misdemeanor for anyone in the state to administer mRNA-based vaccines -- namely the lifesaving and remarkably safe COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. If passed as written, it would also preemptively ban the use of countless other mRNA vaccines that are now in development, such as shots for RSV, a variety of cancers, HIV, flu, Nipah virus, and cystic fibrosis, among others. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Tammy Nichols of Middleton and Rep. Judy Boyle of Midvale, both staunch conservatives who say they stand for freedom and the right to life. But their bill, HB 154, proposes that "a person may not provide or administer a vaccine developed using messenger ribonucleic acid [mRNA] technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state." If passed into law, anyone administering lifesaving mRNA-based vaccines would be guilty of a misdemeanor, which could result in jail time and/or a fine.

While presenting the bill to the House Health & Welfare Committee last week, Nichols said their anti-mRNA stance stems from the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines were initially allowed under emergency use authorizations (EUAs) from the Food and Drug Administration, not the agency's full regulatory approval. "We have issues that this was fast-tracked," she told fellow lawmakers, according to reporting from local news outlet KXLY.com. [...] "They ultimately were approved under the ordinary approval process and did ultimately, you know, survive the scrutiny of being subjected to all the normal tests," Rep. Ilana Rubel, a democrat from Boise, said. Nichols seemed unswayed by the point, however, with KTVB7 reporting that she responded that the FDA's approval "may not have been done like we thought it should've been done."

To date, more than 269 million people in the US have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine, and over 700 million doses of mRNA-based vaccines have gone into American arms, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency keeps close tabs on safety through various national surveillance systems. Although the shots do carry some risk (as is the case for any medical intervention), they have proven remarkably safe amid widespread use of hundreds of millions of doses in the US and worldwide. A study released late last year found that COVID-19 vaccination in the US alone averted more than 18 million additional hospitalizations and more than 3 million additional deaths from the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The National Human Genome Research Institute notes that mRNA "is a type of single-stranded RNA involved in protein synthesis. mRNA is made from a DNA template during the process of transcription. The role of mRNA is to carry protein information from the DNA in a cell's nucleus to the cell's cytoplasm (watery interior), where the protein-making machinery reads the mRNA sequence and translates each three-base codon into its corresponding amino acid in a growing protein chain."

mRNA-based vaccines made their public debut amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but researchers have been "working toward these vaccines for decades beforehand," adds Ars.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., intends to make his focus in the current Congress a legislative package aimed at protecting children online -- including by setting the age threshold to be on social media at 16. From a report: In an interview with NBC News, Hawley detailed some top lines of what his agenda will include, such as:

1. Mandating social media companies verify the age of their users.
2. Providing parents a right to demand that tech companies delete their kids' data.
3. Commissioning a wide-ranging congressional mental-health study on the impact social media has on children.

"For me, this is about protecting kids, protecting their mental health, protecting their safety," Hawley said. "There's ample evidence to this effect that big tech companies put their profits ahead of protecting kids online." Since his election to the Senate in 2018, Hawley has made scrutinizing the tech industry core to his political brand and has pushed for breaking up the tech giants and curtailing the reach of TikTok.

Google plans to discontinue a pilot program that allows political campaigns to evade its email spam filters, the latest round in the technology giant's tussle with the GOP over online fundraising. The Washington Post reports: The company will let the program sunset at the end of January instead of prolonging it, Google's lawyers said in a filing on Monday. The filing, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, asked the court to dismiss a complaint lodged by the Republican National Committee accusing Google of "throttling its email messages because of the RNC's political affiliation and views." "The RNC is wrong," Google argued in its motion. "Gmail's spam filtering policies apply equally to emails from all senders, whether they are politically affiliated or not." [...]

While rejecting the GOP's attacks, Google nonetheless bowed to them. The company asked the Federal Election Commission to greenlight the pilot program, available to all campaigns and political committees registered with the federal regulator. The company anticipated at the time that a trial run would last through January 2023. Thousands of public comments implored the FEC to advise against the program, which consumer advocates and other individuals said would overwhelm Gmail users with spam. Anne P. Mitchell, a lawyer and founder of an email certification service called Get to the Inbox, wrote that Google was "opening up the floodgates to their users' inboxes ... to assuage partisan disgruntlement."

The FEC gave its approval in August, with one Democrat joining the commission's three Republicans to clear the way for the initiative. Ultimately, more than 100 committees of both parties signed up for the program, said Google spokesman Jose Castaneda. The RNC was not one of them, as Google emphasized in its motion to dismiss in the federal case in California. "Ironically, the RNC could have participated in a pilot program leading up to the 2022 midterm elections that would have allowed its emails to avoid otherwise-applicable forms of spam detection," the filing stated. "Many other politically-affiliated entities chose to participate in that program, which was approved by the FEC. The RNC chose not to do so. Instead, it now seeks to blame Google based on a theory of political bias that is both illogical and contrary to the facts alleged in its own Complaint." [...] "Indeed, effective spam filtering is a key feature of Gmail, and one of the main reasons why Gmail is so popular," the filing stated.

Republicans in the House plan to scrutinize communications between the Biden administration and big technology and social-media companies to probe whether they amounted to the censorship of legitimate viewpoints on issues such as Covid-19 that ran counter to White House policy. WSJ: House Republicans are expected as soon as Tuesday to launch the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The panel is expected to seek to illuminate what some Republicans say have been efforts by the Biden administration to influence content hosted by companies such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Alphabet, owner of YouTube and Google.

The panel will examine, among other things, how the executive branch works with the private sector, nonprofit entities or other government agencies to "facilitate action against American citizens," such as alleged violations of their free-speech rights, according to a draft resolution to establish it. A White House spokesman dismissed the effort. "House Republicans continue to focus on launching partisan political stunts," said spokesman Ian Sams, "instead of joining the president to tackle the issues the American people care about most like inflation."

House Republicans plan to launch a new investigative panel this week that will demand copies of White House emails, memos and other communications with Big Tech companies, Axios reported Monday, citing sources. From the report: Speaker Kevin McCarthy plans a quick spate of red-meat actions and announcements to reward hardliners who backed him through his harrowing fight for the gavel. The new panel, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, is partly a response to revelations from Elon Musk in the internal documents he branded the "Twitter Files."

The subcommittee will be chaired by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan -- a close McCarthy ally, and a favorite of the hard right. The probe into communications between tech giants and President Biden's aides will look for government pressure that could have resulted in censorship or harassment of conservatives -- or squelching of debate on polarizing policies, including the CDC on COVID. The request for documents will be followed by "compulsory processes," including subpoenas if needed, a GOP source tells Axios. In December, Jordan wrote letters to top tech platforms asking for information about "'collusion' with the Biden administration to censor conservatives on their platforms."

Three top Democratic campaign arms said Friday that they would set aside more than $1 million in contributions from former crypto golden boy FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, as first reported by The Washington Post. The groups plan to return the money to FTX customers as part of ongoing legal proceedings. The Verge reports: The Democratic National Committee and two top Democratic campaign groups announced the moves days after Bankman-Fried was arrested and charged with eight counts, including wire fraud and campaign finance violations. "Given the allegations around potential campaign finance violations by Bankman-Fried, we are setting aside funds in order to return the $815,000 in contributions since 2020," a DNC spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Verge on Friday. "We will return as soon as we receive proper direction in the legal proceedings."

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have also pledged to set aside the $103,000 and $250,000 each received from Bankman-Fried, respectively, according to The Post. Over the last two years, Bankman-Fried became one of the most prolific political megadonors in the US, contributing more than $40 million in personal donations to mostly Democratic campaigns and organizations. But shortly after FTX went bankrupt in November, Bankman-Fried told crypto reporter Tiffany Fong that he donated a similar amount of money to Republican groups as well.

While the extent of Bankman-Fried's GOP contributions has yet to be uncovered, Democratic candidates have been pressured to return any money they received from the crypto mogul. CBS News reported Thursday that most Democratic campaigns that received publicly disclosed contributions from Bankman-Fried have pledged to either return or donate the money to charity. Newly elected Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) confirmed Wednesday that he would donate Bankman-Fried's contributions to his campaign to the Zebra Coalition, a Florida-based group servicing homeless LGBTQ+ youth. [...] Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Tina Smith (D-MN), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) all received $5,800 from Bankman-Fried since last year and have either already donated or plan to donate the funds, according to CBS News.

CNN reports: Facebook's fact-checkers will need to stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following the announcement that he is running for president, according to a company memo obtained by CNN.

While Trump is currently banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says, and false statements made by Trump can be posted to the platform by others. Despite Trump's ban, "Team Trump," a page run by Trump's political group, is still active and has 2.3 million followers.... The carve-out is not exclusive to Trump and applies to all politicians, but given the rate fact-checkers find themselves dealing with claims made by the former president, a manager on Meta's "news integrity partnership" team emailed fact-checkers on Tuesday ahead of Trump's announcement. ...

The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians. "It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak," Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former politician, said in 2019, defending the exemption. The Meta memo sent to fact-checkers made clear that if Trump announced a 2024 presidential bid Tuesday night, he could no longer be fact-checked on the platform. The memo noted that "political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign."

It concluded that "if former President Trump makes a clear, public announcement that he is running for office, he would be considered a politician under our program policies."

Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said the memo was "a reiteration of our long-standing policy" and "should not be news to anyone...."

Meta plans on considering allowing Trump back on the platform as soon as January — two years since his initial ban.

According to documents recently declassified by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), former President Donald Trump posted a classified satellite image of a failed rocket launch in Iran on Twitter in 2019. NPR reports: Now, three years after Trump's tweet, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has formally declassified the original image. The declassification, which came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, followed a grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public. Many details on the original image remain redacted -- a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the U.S. government's most prized intelligence on social media, says Steven Aftergood, specialist in secrecy and classification at the Federation of American Scientists. "He was getting literally a bird's eye view of some of the most sensitive US intelligence on Iran," he says. "And the first thing he seemed to want to do was to blurt it out over Twitter." "[A]erospace experts determined the photo was taken by a classified spacecraft called USA 224, believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance aircraft," adds Gizmodo. "The spacecraft is similar to the Hubble Telescope, but instead of getting a closer look at the stars, it views the Earth's surface."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Should California's richest residents pay higher taxes to help put more electric vehicles on the road? That's a question the state's voters are weighing in the election that concludes Tuesday. Proposition 30 would place a new 1.75% tax on incomes above $2 million, which is estimated to be fewer than 43,000 taxpayers. It would raise billions annually, with most going to help subsidize the purchase of electric vehicles and construction of charging stations. Twenty percent of the money would go toward boosting resources to fight wildfires. The ballot fight comes as California races to reduce emissions from transportation -- by far the largest source -- and meet its ambitious climate goals. Wildfires, meanwhile, are spewing more carbon into the air as they become larger and more destructive, threatening to set back the state's progress.

Though Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed for a policy that bans the sale of most new gas-powered cars in the state in 2035, he does not support Proposition 30. That's pit him against the state Democratic Party and a number of environmental and public health organizations. Newsom has called it a taxpayer-funded giveaway to rideshare companies, which under California regulations must ensure nearly all trips booked through their services are zero-emission by 2030. Lyft supplied most of the "yes" campaign's funding; competitor Uber has not taken a position.

Backers of the measure, including most major environmental groups, say the state needs a dedicated, robust source of funding to set up infrastructure that can handle more plug-in cars and to help Californians of all income levels to buy them. The money won't go exclusively to passenger cars; the state could also tap it to put cleaner delivery trucks, buses and even e-bikes on the roads. A portion of the money must go to help people in low-income or disadvantaged communities buy or access electric cars. [...] Rideshare companies like Lyft do not own the vehicles their drivers use, but they are still on the hook to ensure that trips booked through their app will be zero-emission. Proposition 30 does not include any provisions that exclusively benefit Lyft. But Newsom and other opponents say the measure would allow Lyft to rely on taxpayer dollars, not company money, to help its drivers transition to electric cars. Supporters of the measure, though, say an effort to raise taxes on the rich to boost electric vehicle adoption was in the works before Lyft got involved.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to supportUkraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine's president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda. The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence. The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future. It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead ofTuesday's midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration's extensive military assistance to Ukraine.

"It's clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine," said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official now with Providence Consulting Group, a business technology company. The campaign -- using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka -- have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today. It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort. The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content. The agencies urged people not to like, discuss or share posts online from unknown or distrustful sources. They did not identify specific efforts, but social media platforms and researchers who track disinformation have recently uncovered a variety of campaigns by Russia, China and Iran.

These are much smaller campaigns than those in the 2016 election, where inauthentic accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. The efforts are no less pernicious, though, in reaching impressionable users who can help accomplish Russian objectives, researchers said. "The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks," said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future who identified the Nora Berka account. "But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims." Some characteristics of an inauthentic user to look out for include: no profile picture, no identifying biographical details, and posts exclusively on political issues that often include false or misleading posts and little engagement. They may also link to obscure websites like electiontruth.net, which Recorded Future said was almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.

According to The Record, New Hampshire will pilot a new kind of voting machine that will use open-source software to tally the votes. The Record reports: The software that runs voting machines is typically distributed in a kind of black box -- like a car with its hood sealed shut. Because the election industry in the U.S. is dominated by three companies -- Dominion, Election Systems & Software and Hart InterCivic -- the software that runs their machines is private. The companies consider it their intellectual property and that has given rise to a roster of unfounded conspiracy theories about elections and their fairness. New Hampshire's experiment with open-source software is meant to address exactly that. The software by its very design allows you to pop the hood, modify the code, make suggestions for how to make it better, and work with other people to make it run more smoothly. The thinking is, if voting machines run on software anyone can audit and run, it is less likely to give rise to allegations of vote rigging.

The effort to make voting machines more transparent is the work of a group called VotingWorks. [...] On November 8, VotingWorks machines will be used in a real election in real time. New Hampshire is the second state to use the open-source machines after Mississippi first did so in 2019. Some 3,000 voters will run their paper ballots through the new machines, and then, to ensure nothing went awry, those same votes will be hand counted in a public session in Concord, N.H. Anyone who cares to will be able to see if the new machines recorded the votes correctly. The idea is to make clear there is nothing to hide. If someone is worried that a voting machine is programmed to flip a vote to their opponent, they can simply hire a computer expert to examine it and see, in real time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit against Alphabet's Google on Friday for allegedly sending its emails to users' spam folders. The U.S. political committee accuses the tech giant of "discriminating" against it by "throttling its email messages because of the RNC's political affiliation and views," according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California. "Google has relegated millions of RNC emails en masse to potential donors' and supporters' spam folders during pivotal points in election fundraising and community building," the RNC said in the lawsuit. Google rejected the claims.

Spam filters on email services typically weed out unsolicited "spam" messages and divert them to a separate folder. The RNC said that for most of the month, nearly all of its emails end up in users' inboxes but at the end of the month, which is an important time for fund-raising, nearly all of their emails end up in spam folders. "Critically, and suspiciously, this end of the month period is historically when the RNC's fundraising is most successful," the lawsuit said, adding that it does not matter whether the email is about donating, voting or community outreach. The committee said the "discrimination" had been going on for about 10 months despite its best efforts to work with Google. It said the alleged routing of its emails to spam folders had eaten up revenue and that more money would be lost in coming weeks as midterm elections loom. "As we have repeatedly said, we simply don't filter emails based on political affiliation. Gmail's spam filters reflect users' actions," Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement. "We provide training and guidelines to campaigns, we recently launched an FEC-approved pilot for political senders, and we continue to work to maximize email deliverability while minimizing unwanted spam," he said, referring to the Federal Election Commission.

Further reading: US Approves Google Plan To Let Political Emails Bypass Gmail Spam Filter

Rishi Sunak will become Britain's next prime minister, prevailing in a chaotic Conservative Party leadership race on Monday after his remaining rival for the position, Penny Mordaunt, withdrew. He will be Britain's third leader in seven weeks and the first prime minister of color in its history. From a report: The 42-year-old former chancellor of the Exchequer who is the son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Sunak won the contest to replace the ousted Liz Truss, who resigned under pressure last Thursday after her economic agenda caused turmoil. Boris Johnson, the prime minister before Ms. Truss, pulled out of the race on Sunday night, clearing a path for Mr. Sunak, who challenged Ms. Truss last summer but lost in a vote of the party's members. As the only surviving candidate this time, Mr. Sunak was not subjected to another vote of the membership. It was a head-spinning reversal of fortune for Mr. Sunak, whose resignation from Mr. Johnson's cabinet in July set in motion the events that brought down his boss over a series of scandals and pitched Britain into weeks of political upheaval.

Prime Minister Liz Truss announced on Thursday that she would resign, just days after her new finance minister reversed virtually all of her planned tax cuts, sweeping away a free-market fiscal agenda that promised a radical policy shift for Britain but instead plunged the country into weeks of economic and political turmoil. From a report: "I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected," she said in brief remarks outside Downing Street. She said she had informed King Charles III that she was resigning as leader of the Conservative Party, and that she would remain leader and prime minister until a successor is chosen within a week.

Her departure, after only six weeks in office, was a shockingly rapid fall from power, and throws her Conservative Party into further disarray, following the messy departure of Boris Johnson from Downing Street over the summer. The announcement came minutes after Ms. Truss held an unscheduled meeting with Graham Brady, the head of a group of Conservative lawmakers known as the 1922 Committee that plays an influential role in selecting the party leader. Ms. Truss's political viability had become tenuous after her proposals for broad unfunded tax cuts roiled markets and sent the pound's value plunging. She suffered a grave blow on Monday, when her newly appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, said that the government was undoing the last vestiges of Ms. Truss's tax proposals. Financial Times adds: She will go down in history as Britain's shortest-serving prime minister, her government having collapsed in the wake of its failed "mini" budget of last month, which contained $50.6bn of unfunded tax cuts and triggered turmoil in the sterling and gilt markets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Synthetic Party, a new Danish political party with an artificially intelligent representative and policies derived from AI, is eyeing a seat in parliament as it hopes to run in the country's November general election. The party was founded in May by the artist collective Computer Lars and the non-profit art and tech organization MindFuture Foundation. The Synthetic Party's public face and figurehead is the AI chatbot Leader Lars, which is programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is meant to represent the values of the 20 percent of Danes who do not vote in the election. Leader Lars won't be on the ballot anywhere, but the human members of The Synthetic Party are committed to carrying out their AI-derived platform.

Leader Lars is an AI chatbot that people can speak with on Discord. You can address Leader Lars by beginning your sentences with an "!". The AI understands English but writes back to you in Danish. Some of the policies that The Synthetic Party is proposing include establishing a universal basic income of 100,000 Danish kroner per month, which is equivalent to $13,700, and is over double the Danish average salary. Another proposed policy change is to create a jointly-owned internet and IT sector in the government that is on par with other public institutions.

The Synthetic Party's mission is also dedicated to raising more awareness about the role of AI in our lives and how governments can hold AI accountable to biases and other societal influences. The party hopes to add an 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to the United Nations SDGs, which are goals relating to issues such as poverty, inequality, and climate change, to be achieved by all nations by 2030. The Synthetic Party's proposed SDG is called Life With Artificials and focuses on the relationship between humans and AI and how to adapt and educate people to work with machines. [...] So far, The Synthetic Party has only 11 signatures out of the 20,000 that would make it eligible to run in this November's election. If the party were to be in the parliament, [...] it would be the AI powering policies and its agenda, and humans acting as the interpreter of the program. "Leader Lars is the figurehead of the party. Denmark is a representative democracy, so would have humans on the ballot that are representing Leader Lars and who are committed to acting as a medium for the AI," said Asker Staunaes, the creator of the party and an artist-researcher at MindFuture.

"People who are voting for The Synthetic Party will have to believe what we are selling ourselves as, people who actually engage so much with artificial intelligence that we can interpret something valuable from them," Staunaes said. "We are in conversations with people from around the world, Colombia, France, and Moldova, about creating other local versions of The Synthetic Party, so that we could have some form of Synthetic International."

The top executive of an elections technology company that has been the focus of attention among election deniers was arrested by Los Angeles County officials in connection with an investigation into the text, the county said on Tuesday. From a report: Eugene Yu, the founder and chief executive of Konnech, the technology company, was taken into custody on suspicion of theft, the Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascon, said in a statement.

Konnech, which is based in Michigan, develops software to manage election logistics, like scheduling poll workers. Los Angeles County is among its customers. The company has been accused by groups challenging the validity of the 2020 presidential election with storing information about poll workers on servers in China. The company has repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States, including in recent statements to The New York Times. Mr. Gascon's office said its investigators had found data stored in China. Holding the data there would violate Konnech's contract with the county.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Dubbed the Facial Recognition Act, the bill would compel law enforcement to obtain a judge-authorized warrant before using facial recognition. By adding the warrant requirement, law enforcement would first have to show a court it has probable cause that a person has committed a serious crime, rather than allowing largely unrestricted use of facial recognition under the existing legal regime. The bill also puts other limits on what law enforcement can use facial recognition for, such as immigration enforcement or peaceful protests, or using a facial recognition match as the sole basis for establishing probable cause for someone's arrest.

If passed, the bill would also require law enforcement to annually test and audit their facial recognition systems, and provide detailed reports of how facial recognition systems are used in prosecutions. It would also require police departments and agencies to purge databases of photos of children who were subsequently released without charge, whose charges were dismissed or were acquitted. [...] The bill has so far received glowing support from privacy advocates, rights groups and law enforcement-adjacent groups and organizations alike. Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Boston University, praised the bill for strengthening baseline rules and protections across the U.S. "without preempting more stringent limitations elsewhere."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Trade Commission is facing mounting pressure to block Amazon's proposed $1.65 billion purchase of iRobot, the company behind Roomba autonomous vacuums. In a letter (PDF) to FTC Chair Lina Khan on Thursday, a group of Democratic lawmakers argued that the proposed merger would unfairly bolster Amazon's dominance in the smart home market by acquiring one of the company's leading competitors. They also criticized Amazon's data privacy and security practices following past acquisitions of companies like Ring, including data sharing partnerships with over 600 law enforcement agencies across the country. "iRobot is a powerful market incumbent, and Amazon, given its vast resources, history of producing smart vacuums... and powerful platform, is an extraordinarily significant 'potential entrant' into the market," the lawmakers wrote on Thursday. "Amazon's ability to acquire iRobot would cause substantially less competition." Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) led Thursday's letter along with four other House lawmakers, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who represents thousands of Amazon workers in Seattle.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that antitrust enforcers at the FTC were already reviewing the proposed deal. iRobot confirmed in recent securities filings that the FTC formally requested any documents outlining the proposed purpose and scope of the merger. "Given Amazon's record of infringing on consumers' privacy, and their ongoing history of anticompetitive mergers to increase their monopoly power, the FTC should use its authority to oppose the Amazon -- iRobot transaction," the lawmakers wrote. These investigations would be led by Chair Khan, whose criticisms of Amazon's market power led to her rise in prominence. Khan published a legal paper in 2017 arguing that the federal government may need to pass new antitrust statutes to properly address the market dominance of online tech platforms like Amazon.

TikTok says it plans to ban all fundraising activity soon -- only six weeks before the November midterm elections. The Verge reports: In a blog post, TikTok's president of global business solutions, Blake Chandlee, said the company would immediately turn off all advertising and monetization features, like gifting and tipping, for politicians and parties on the platform. Additionally, accounts belonging to governments, politicians, and political parties will have to apply for verification. Over the next few weeks, TikTok expects to roll out a sweeping ban on campaign fundraising altogether. The ban will prohibit politicians and parties from using the platform to direct viewers to their campaign websites to make donations. TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza told The Verge on Tuesday that the company plans to enforce these new rules "through a combination of technology and human moderation."

"We will work with governments, politicians, and political parties to verify their account either when they submit a verification request, or if we identify an account we believe belongs to a government, politician, or political party, we will confirm the authenticity of the account and begin the verification process."

Google is launching a pilot program to keep emails from political campaigns from going to users' spam folders this week, the company told Axios. From the report: Google asked the Federal Election Commission in June if a program that would let campaigns emails bypass spam filters, instead giving users the option to move them to spam first, would be legal under campaign finance laws. Despite hundreds of negative comments submitted to the FEC arguing against it, the FEC approved the program in August. Eligible committees, abiding by security requirements and best practices as outlined by Google, can now register to participate.

Google has come under fire that its algorithms unfairly target conservative content across its services, and that its Gmail service filters more Republican fundraising and campaign emails to spam. This is partly based on a study from North Carolina State University, though its authors say it has been misconstrued. "We expect to begin the pilot with a small number of campaigns from both parties and will test whether these changes improve the user experience, and provide more certainty for senders during this election period," Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, told Axios. "We will continue to listen and respond to feedback as the pilot progresses." He added: "During the pilot, users will be in control through a more prominent unsubscribe button."

The US Federal Election Commission approved a Google plan to let campaign emails bypass Gmail spam filters. From a report: The FEC's advisory opinion adopted in a 4-1 vote said Gmail's pilot program is permissible under the Federal Election Campaign Act and FEC regulations "and would not result in the making of a prohibited in-kind contribution." The FEC said Google's approved plan is for "a pilot program to test new Gmail design features at no cost on a nonpartisan basis to authorized candidate committees, political party committees, and leadership PACs." On July 1, Google asked the FEC for the green light to implement the pilot after Republicans accused the company of giving Democrats an advantage in its algorithms. Republicans reportedly could have avoided some of their Gmail spam problems by using the proper email configuration. At a May 2022 meeting between Senate Republicans and Google's chief legal officer, "the most forceful rebuke" was said to come "from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed that not a single email from one of his addresses was reaching inboxes," The Washington Post reported in late July. "The reason, it was later determined, was that a vendor had not enabled an authentication tool that keeps messages from being marked as spam, according to people briefed on the discussions."

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed a bipartisan bill that aims to strengthen U.S. competitiveness with China by investing billions of dollars in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and science research. From a report: "Today is a day for builders. Today America is delivering," Biden said at the signing ceremony outside the White House. He was joined by a crowd of hundreds, including tech executives, union presidents and political leaders from both parties. The bill, dubbed the Chips and Science Act, includes more than $52 billion for U.S. companies producing computer chips, as well as billions more in tax credits to encourage investment in semiconductor manufacturing. It also provides tens of billions of dollars to fund scientific research and development, and to spur the innovation and development of other U.S. tech. The Biden administration also contended that the legislation will "unlock hundreds of billions more" in private spending in the industry. The White House said Tuesday that multiple companies, "spurred" by the chips bill, have announced more than $44 billion in new semiconductor manufacturing investments.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: At 3:02 p.m. EST, vice president Kamala Harris began presiding over the U.S. Senate. After a vote on the very last proposed amendment, the Senate heard these final remarks from Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer on what he called "the boldest climate package in US history."

"It's been a long, tough, and winding road. But at last — at last — we have arrived. I know it's been a long day and long night, but we've gotten it done...."

"It's a game changer. It's a turning point. And it's been a long time coming.

"To Americans who have lost faith that Congress can do big things, this bill is for you... And to the tens of millions of young Americans who spent years marching, rallying, demanding that Congress act on climate change, this bill is for you. The time has come to pass this historic bill."

One by one, Senators delivered their votes for the official tally, and at 3:18 PST Harris announced that "On this vote, the yeas are 50, the nays are 50." And with the vice president casting deciding votes in an equally-divided Senate, "the bill as amended is passed."

And the Senate broke into spontaneous applause.

The bill now goes to the U.S. House of Representatives, which is expected to vote on it Friday.
As Slashdot reported last week: The bill helps U.S consumers buy electric vehicle chargers, rooftop solar panels, and fuel-efficient heat pumps. It extends energy-industry tax credits for wind, solar and other renewable energy sources -- and for carbon capture technology. In fact, most of its impact is accomplished through tax credits, reports the New York Times, "viewed as one of the least expensive ways to reduce carbon emissions.

"The benefits are worth four times their cost, according to calculations by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago." One example is ending an eligibility cap on the $7,500 tax credit for consumers buying electric vehicles.

White House adviser Tim Wu, who worked to shape the Biden administration's agenda to increase economic competition, is set to leave his position in the coming months, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the move. From a report: Wu is expected to return to antitrust law at Columbia Law School after serving as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy since March 2021. He was the key architect behind President Joe Biden's executive order to bolster competition last year, which included 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies. The administration focused on improving competition within industries including technology, health care and agriculture.

A proposed $369 billion bill would have far-reaching impacts on America's energy landscape — and in a wide variety of ways. The Washington Post took a close look at its tightly targetted energy-industry tax subisidies. "The goal? To make new green energy production cheaper for utilities to build than fossil fuel plants are." But others benefit too:

The bill contains numerous smaller measures aimed at specific parts of the economy with high emissions: $20 billion for agriculture subsidies to help farmers reduce emissions, $6 billion to reduce emissions in chemical, steel and cement plants, and $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Yet how do you convince a congressman from a coal-producing state? Politico explores what changed the mind of one of the legislation's last hold-out votes and convinced West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin that "The next generation of clean tech needed Washington's backing to take off."

Brandon Dennison, CEO of the economic development organization Coalfield Development, said he'd argued that the legislation offered a way for the coal-producing region to "stay an energy state.... If we want to benefit from the investments and the jobs that are going to come with that transition, we need to be part of the proactive solutions and policies rather than constantly playing on defense." Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, said several West Virginia companies pushed Manchin to back the credits as well — even suggesting failure to pass the bill imperiled their plans to invest in new operations. "There were folks who I can't talk about who are directly involved in potentially developing clean energy manufacturing in the state of West Virginia where site visits had happened where all they needed was a set of investments," Walsh said. "And that communication happened as well."

A senior executive with a utility operating in Appalachia said that his company communicated with Manchin how aspects of the bill such as tax credits to build clean energy manufacturing plants at former coal sites and incentives for developing small nuclear reactors and hydrogen would help West Virginia's economy. "We know coal plants are ultimately going to close," the executive said. "What is going to replace them? What are the jobs? What are we transitioning to? In this case, we are going to explore hydrogen, new nuclear and get manufacturing in the state."

Form Energy, a battery storage startup backed by Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and which has plans for a West Virginia manufacturing hub, walked Manchin's staff through its growth trajectories with and without the proposed suite of legislative incentives, a person directly familiar with the interaction said. That person said Form Energy officials showed the differences on a graph. Its investors — including Gates — also called to assuage Manchin's concerns over disbursing the tax credits to companies through a direct pay system rather than using tax equity markets.

This week U.S. lawmakers drew closer to passing a $369 billion bill with wide-ranging climate provisions.

It helps U.S consumers buy electric vehicle chargers, rooftop solar panels, and fuel-efficient heat pumps. It extends energy-industry tax credits for wind, solar and other renewable energy sources -- and for carbon capture technology. In fact, most of its impact is accomplished through tax credits, reports the New York Times, "viewed as one of the least expensive ways to reduce carbon emissions.

"The benefits are worth four times their cost, according to calculations by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago." One example is ending an eligibility cap on the $7,500 tax credit for consumers buying electric vehicles: Currently, the credits are phased out after a manufacturer has sold 200,000 electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Restoring the credits would be huge for Tesla and General Motors, which have used up their quotas, as well as companies like Ford Motor and Toyota that will soon lose access to the credits. The new tax credit, available through 2032, would make vehicles from those companies more affordable and address criticism that only rich people can afford electric cars...

As it exists, the 200,000-vehicle cap on tax credits would provide a competitive advantage to market newcomers like BYD of China that are expected to use electric vehicles to enter the U.S. market. They could have benefited from the credit while Tesla, the Texas-based company, could not. The Democratic climate legislation would flip that. As written, the bill appears to disqualify cars not made in North America from the credit. Cars made in North America by foreign companies like Mercedes-Benz, Toyota or Volvo would qualify, but imported models would not.
In fact, the 725-page legislation also includes "a strong dose of industrial policy," with several provisions that "appear designed to undermine China's hold over the electric vehicle supply chain... It favors companies that get their components and raw materials from the United States or its allies, while effectively excluding China." "I think it is absolutely a transformative bill," said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in energy and climate change...

Cars would qualify for the full credit only if their batteries were made with materials and components from the United States and countries with which it has trade agreements. The percentage of components that have to meet those restrictions to qualify for the credit would increase over time, under the bill. That provision is aimed at encouraging domestic development of businesses like lithium mining and refining.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The US Senate is going to move forward with a sweeping new bill after Senator Joe Manchin finally accepted to include investments to curb climate change. The new bill is going to include the long-awaited electric vehicle tax credit reform that is going to give back access to the tax credit to Tesla GM vehicles, along with other changes. Last year, the US House of Representatives passed the $1.9 trillion "Build Back Better" legislation, but it has been stuck in the divided Senate ever since. The bill is interesting to the EV community because it includes a long-needed reform to the federal tax credit for electric vehicles. Even though it is technically a small part of the overall bill, it is a point of contention.

The main goal of the reform, and the one most people agree on, is the need to eliminate the tax credit cap after automakers hit 200,000 EVs sold, since it is putting automakers that were early in pushing electric vehicles at a disadvantage. It also happens that those automakers are American automakers, like Tesla and GM, while many foreign automakers still have access to the credit. Joe Manchin, a Democrat and senior United States senator from West Virginia, has been holding his vote, which is the deciding vote since the Democrats need every single one of their votes in the Senate to pass anything. The senator, who comes from a very conservative state, has proven to be difficult to deal when it comes to initiatives that deal with climate change, but in a reversal today, he announced that he accepted a new version of the bill, now called "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022." Here are some of the key changes to the EV federal tax credit in the new bill (as confirmed by Electrek):

- Federal tax credit for EVs maintained at $7,500
- Eliminates tax credit cap after automakers hit 200,000 EVs sold, making GM and Tesla once again eligible
- The language in the bill indicates that the tax credit would be implemented at the point of sale instead of on taxes.
- In order to get the full credit, the electric vehicle needs to be assembled in North America, the majority of battery components need to come from North America, and contain a certain percentage of minerals from countries with free trade agreements with the US
- A new federal tax credit of $4,000 for used EVs
- Zero-emission vans, SUVs, and trucks with MSRPs up to $80,000 qualify
- Electric sedans priced up to $55,000 MSRP qualify
- The full EV tax credit will be available to individuals reporting adjusted gross incomes of $150,000 or less, $300,000 for joint filers

A long-awaited bill in the U.S. Congress proposes $79 billion (over 10 years) to boost U.S. semiconductor production, reports the Associated Press, "mostly as a result of new grants and tax breaks that would subsidize the cost that computer chip manufacturers incur when building or expanding chip plants in the United States."

But opposing the bill are 31 Republican senators — and democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders: Supporters say that countries all over the world are spending billons of dollars to lure chipmakers. The U.S. must do the same or risk losing a secure supply of the semiconductors that power the nation's automobiles, computers, appliances and some of the military's most advanced weapons systems. Sanders (Independent — Vermont), and a wide range of conservative lawmakers, think tanks and media outlets have a different take. To them, it's "corporate welfare...."

"Not too many people that I can recall — I have been all over this country — say: 'Bernie, you go back there and you get the job done, and you give enormously profitable corporations, which pay outrageous compensation packages to their CEOs, billions and billions of dollars in corporate welfare,'" Sanders said.

Senator Mitt Romney (Republican — Utah), is among the likely Republican supporters. Asked about the Sanders' argument against the bill, Romney said that when other countries subsidize the manufacturing of high technology chips, the U.S. must join the club. "If you don't play like they play, then you are not going to be manufacturing high technology chips, and they are essential for our national defense as well as our economy," Romney said....

"My fear is that more and more companies will locate their manufacturing facilities in other countries and that we will be increasingly vulnerable," said Senator Susan Collin (Republican — Maine).
The bill's supporters remain confident it will pass the U.S. Senate, but then "the window for passing the bill through the House is narrow if progressives join with Sanders and if most Republicans line up in opposition based on fiscal concerns.

"The White House says the bill needs to pass by the end of the month because companies are making decisions now about where to build."

According to a new report from The Washington Post, congressional Democrats are expected to introduce a new bill codifying net neutrality in the coming weeks. The Verge reports: The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act -- spearheaded by longtime Senate internet advocates Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) -- would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service under Title II. This would give the Federal Communications Commission new enforcement powers over the internet, including the power to set rules against throttling, blocking, or paid prioritization. [...] The lawmakers could introduce the bill as early as August, a source familiar told The Verge on Monday. The measure would restore the FCC's authority over broadband and allow the agency to investigate consumer complaints and roll out new rules to promote broadband competition and close the digital divide, the source said.

In 2017, the Trump FCC, led by former chair Ajit Pai, rolled back the net neutrality provisions put in place under the former administration. The rules banned broadband providers from throttling and blocking certain lanes of traffic and offering paid fast lanes for specific services. Since the Trump reversal, congressional Democrats have vowed to codify net neutrality permanently. [...] Without an FCC Democratic majority, Markey's net neutrality bill may be the Biden administration's only means of reinstating the open internet regulations.

In a rare move, more than 200 congressional staffers have sent a letter to Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, demanding they close the deal on a climate and clean energy package and warning that failure could doom younger generations. From a report: "We've crafted the legislation necessary to avert climate catastrophe. It's time for you to pass it," the staffers wrote in a letter, sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday evening. The letter, which staffers signed anonymously with initials, was shared first with CNN.

"Our country is nearing the end of a two-year window that represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass transformative climate policy," the letter continues. "The silence on expansive climate justice policy on Capitol Hill this year has been deafening. We write to distance ourselves from your dangerous inaction." The staffers' grievances were delivered as Schumer negotiates with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia on a Democrat-only package that is expected to address inflation, the cost of prescription drugs, energy and the climate crisis. The climate and energy portion has remained the largest sticking point in negotiations, as Manchin has publicly stated he wants to lower gas prices by increasing US energy production.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Google sent a request (PDF) to the Federal Election Commission seeking an advisory opinion on the potential launch of a pilot program that would allow political committees to bypass spam filters and instead deliver political emails to the primary inboxes of Gmail users. During a public commenting period that's still ongoing, most people commenting have expressed staunch opposition for various reasons that they're hoping the FEC will consider. "Hard pass," wrote a commenter called Katie H. "Please do not allow Google to open up Pandora's Box on the people by allowing campaign/political emails to bypass spam filters."

Out of 48 comments submitted (PDF) as of July 11, only two commenters voiced support for Google's pilot program, which seeks to deliver more unsolicited political emails to Gmail users instead of marking them as spam. The rest of the commenters opposed the program, raising a range of concerns, including the potential for the policy to degrade user experience, introduce security risks, and even possibly unfairly influence future elections. Business Insider reported that the period for public commenting ends on Saturday, July 16, which is longer than what was shared in conflicting reports that said the initial deadline to comment was July 11. That means there's still time for more Gmail users and interested parties to chime in. "For some opposing commenters, it's about rejecting unnecessary strains on the Gmail user experience," adds Ars. "In short: People don't want emails coming to their inbox that they did not sign up for."

"Other commenters were more concerned over a perceived government overreach." There were also commenters that said the move could introduce security risks, influence elections, and make Gmail more vulnerable to "emotionally charged" messaging that they never signed up for.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Independent: The so-called "blank check" company behind former president Donald Trump's Truth Social platform now appears to be the subject of an investigation by federal prosecutors who are looking into whether the company or its executives violated federal securities laws. Shares of the Special Purpose Acquisition Company, known as Digital World Acquisition Corporation, fell nine percent in early trading on Monday after CEO Patrick Orlando filed a statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to report that the company, which is pursuing a merger with the former president's Trump Media and Technology Group, was issued a subpoena by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York.

Mr Orlando also wrote that each member of DWAC's board of directors has also been issued a subpoena by the same grand jury. The grand jury subpoenas, he said, appear to be "seeking various documents and information" that are substantially similar to subpoenas issued to the company by the SEC earlier this year, as well as documents relating to the company's previous SEC filings, "communications with or about multiple individuals, and information regarding Rocket One Capital," a venture capital and private equity firm. The US securities regulator is probing whether DWAC executives violated laws which ban negotiations between the company and Mr Trump's tech firm before DWAC went public in late 2021. After Mr Trump announced his company's pending deal with DWAC, shares in the public company skyrocketed by over 400 per cent.

A previous filing by Mr Orlando stated that the SEC subpoena sought documents concerning "among other things, Digital World's due diligence regarding TMTG, communications regarding and due diligence of potential targets other than TMTG, relationships between and among Digital World (and/or certain of Digital World's officers and directors) and other entities (including ARC Global Investments II LLC, Digital World's sponsor, and certain advisors, including Digital World's underwriter and financial advisor in its initial public offering)." Additionally, the pending merger is also the subject of an investigation by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a commercial entity that acts as a self-regulator for brokerage firms and securities exchange markets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, Connecticut is hiring a "security analyst" tasked with monitoring and addressing online misinformation. The New York Times first reported this new position, saying the job description will include spending time on "fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble and mainstream social media sites." The goal is to identify election-related rumors and attempt to mitigate the damage they might cause by flagging them to platforms that have misinformation policies and promoting educational content that can counter those false narratives.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont's midterm budget (PDF), approved in early May, set aside more than $6 million to make improvements to the state's election system. That includes $4 million to upgrade the infrastructure used for voter registration and election management and $2 million for a "public information campaign" that will provide information on how to vote. The full-time security analyst role is recommended to receive $150,000. "Over the last few election cycles, malicious foreign actors have demonstrated the motivation and capability to significantly disrupt election activities, thus undermining public confidence in the fairness and accuracy of election results," the budget stated, as an explanation for the funding.

While the role is a first for Connecticut, the NYT noted that it's part of a growing nationwide trend. Colorado, for example, has a Rapid Response Election Security Cyber Unit tasked with monitoring online misinformation, as well as identifying "cyber-attacks, foreign interference, and disinformation campaigns." Originally created in anticipation of the 2020 presidential election, which proved to be fruitful ground for misinformation, the NYT says the unit is being "redeployed" this year. Other states, including Arizona, California, Idaho, and Oregon, are similarly funding election information initiatives in an attempt to counter misinformation, provide educational information, or do both.

A bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the nation's largest tech companies is facing fresh resistance from a faction of Senate Democrats over complaints the measure could threaten their chances of holding their slim majority, 10 people familiar with the matter told POLITICO. From a report: The internal opposition comes as Democratic leaders are pushing for a vote on the bill by summer, in an effort to pass what has become a central element of the party's broader antitrust agenda. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, S. 2992 (117) -- led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) -- would ban major tech firms like Amazon and Google from favoring their products over their competitors. For example, the legislation would bar Amazon from promoting its own private-label products over rival items on its e-commerce platform. The bill marks the most serious attempt at tightening oversight of the tech industry in years and passed the Senate Judiciary Committee with support from both parties earlier this year. Yet in the days since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told Klobuchar he would hold a floor vote as early as next month, several Democratic senators have privately expressed deep reservations about voting for the legislation, particularly with a midterm election looming, in their conversations with Schumer and other Democratic offices.

Meta's ad transparency tools will soon reveal another treasure trove of data: advertiser targeting choices for political, election-related, and social issue spots. The Register reports: Meta said it plans to add the targeting data into its Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) environment for academic researchers at the end of May. The move comes a day after Meta's reputation as a bad data custodian resurfaced with news of a lawsuit filed in Washington DC against CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Yesterday's filing alleges Zuckerberg built a company culture of mishandling data, leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The suit seeks to hold Zuckerberg responsible for the incident, which saw millions of users' data harvested and used to influence the 2020 US presidential election.

Jeff King, Meta's VP of business integrity, said that FORT would allow researchers to look at detailed targeting information for social issue, electoral and political ads. "This data will be provided for each individual ad and will include information like the interest categories chosen by advertisers," King said. Prior to this announcement, data for social, electoral, and political ads in the run-up to the 2020 election was available as part of a pilot program. This new release will expand the pilot and add data from all ads in those categories run globally since 2020, King said.

The non-academic public has to wait until July to get their hands on that data in Facebook's Ad Library, and when released it will be in a summarized form. Included in the update will be data on total number of social, electoral, and political ads ran on a page using particular targeting data, percentage spent on the different issues, and whether the page uses a custom or lookalike audience. King said that Meta hopes the release will "help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies," and emphasized yet again that Meta is "committed to providing meaningful transparency, while also protecting people's privacy."

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is introducing legislation that would strip the Walt Disney Company of special copyright protections granted to the corporation by Congress, while also limiting the length of new copyrights. From a report: The "Copyright Clause Restoration Act of 2022" would cap the length of copyrights given corporations by Congress to 56 years and retroactively implement this change on companies, including Walt Disney. "The age of Republican handouts to Big Business is over. Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists. It's time to take away Disney's special privileges and open up a new era of creativity and innovation," Hawley told Fox News Digital in an exclusive statement. According to Hawley's office, Congress has used an old law, also known as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," in order to extend copyrights to corporations for up to 120 years. Instead of issuing copyright protections to create enough monopoly protection in order to foster innovation, companies are getting handouts from Congress for a much longer period than needed.

The Senate has voted to confirm privacy expert Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission. The confirmation secures a Democratic voting majority at the agency tasked by the Biden administration with investigating big tech companies like Facebook and Google over potential data privacy and competition violations. The Verge adds: Vice President Kamala Harris voted to break a 50-50 tie on the Senate floor to finalize Bedoya's confirmation. Bedoya will replace former Commissioner Rohit Chopra who left the FTC last year to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Before his confirmation, Bedoya was a Georgetown law professor with a focus on privacy law, founding the university's Center on Privacy and Technology in 2014. In his academic career, Bedoya explored the disproportionate effects of surveillance on minority groups, particularly regarding facial recognition technology.

Earlier today, Twitter announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Elon Musk for approximately $44 billion. The announcement led to speculation that former President Donald Trump may return to the social media platform after being permanently banned in January 2021 for his role in the January 6th insurrection. However, according to TechCrunch, "it looks like he's not interested and is instead planning to formally join his own Truth Social platform over the next seven days." From the report: "I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth," Trump told Fox News. "I hope Elon buys Twitter because he'll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth. The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter." [...] Trump's comments from today come as shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp, which announced a deal in October to acquire Trump Media & Technology Group, fell 9.5% as Twitter officially announced its deal with Musk. It's possible that Truth's shaky start could cause Trump to change his mind about rejoining Twitter down the road.

Trump's media group released its Truth Social iOS app in February, but the app remained unavailable to users for quite some time. Truth is being marketed as an alternative to social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. If Trump does end up posting on Truth regularly this week, it will mark the former president's return to social media following his ban from numerous platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. So far, he's only posted on Truth once.

As for Twitter, Musk says that "free speech" is key to Twitter's future. Twitter says the transaction, which was unanimously approved by the board, will likely close this year following shareholder and regulatory approval and "the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions."