Jonathan Zittrain

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Last month the F.B.I. issued an urgent warning: Everyone with home internet routers should reboot them to shed them of malware from “foreign cyberactors.” Putting aside the strangeness that for once power-cycling a device could perform an effective exorcism upon it, the episode reveals more than just the potential for disruption of internet access for people using equipment they never expect to have to physically manage. It also underscores how unprepared we are to manage downstream-networked devices and appliances — the “internet of things” — that are vulnerable to attack. A longstanding ethos of internet development lets anyone build and share new code and services, with consequences to be dealt with later. I call this the “procrastination principle,” and I don’t regret supporting it. But it’s hard to feel the same way about the internet of things.

Today, the European Union cements its status as the global leader in data privacy. The E.U.’s sweeping new data privacy law is taking effect, ushering in new restrictions on what companies can do with people’s personal data and setting tough penalties for those that break the rules...The European law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, requires companies that collect data on E.U. citizens to use simple language to explain how they handle it. Companies must get explicit consent from consumers before doing anything with their information and allow them to request copies of their data or delete it entirely. The law also mandates that companies report data breaches on strict timelines. Fines for violations could cost them 4 percent of their global profits...What’s more, the GDPR’s ripple effects in the United States may have gone far enough, said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “In some ways Europe may be doing the job for us,” he said, “since companies above a certain size will be adopting GDPR-friendly practices for all users, not just Europeans.”

Bloomberg Boston Bureau Chief Tom Moroney and Radio News Anchors Peter Barnes, Pat Carroll and Anne Mostue are joined by top names from local business and finance to medicine and politics, along with Bloomberg reporters covering the latest stories in Boston, the Bay State and beyond...Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain explained what he believes Mark Zuckerberg could do to fix the mess at Facebook.

When Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook, he constantly uses the word “community” to describe the internet platform. In his 2017 manifesto, Zuckerberg famously argued “Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.” Indeed, “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.” In his testimony before Congress this week, he again used the term several times. “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together,” he told the Senate. The notion of this community of more than 2 billion users worldwide, and over 200 million in the United States, seems core to Zuckerberg’s conception of the platform, and perhaps his own identity. But is Facebook a community?...[Jonathan Zittrain]: “Community” is used all the time by social media and other Internet companies to describe their users. It’s a poor choice of words, adopted no doubt because it makes the relationship between subscriber and company seem less transactional than it really is.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. The news about Facebook is not getting better. The company has sharply increased the number of users whose data was improperly shared with an outside company connected to President Trump’s campaign, to possibly 87 million. Amid an outcry, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, is expected to testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. There is a dog-eared playbook for industry titans called before lawmakers: Apologize repeatedly, be humble, keep it boring. Mr. Zuckerberg can and should toss that playbook.

As Americans increasingly turn to social media as their primary source for news and information, the dangers posed by the phenomenon of “fake news” are growing...In a recent study described in the journal Science, lead authors Matthew Baum, the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and an associate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and more than a dozen co-authors argue that a multidisciplinary effort is needed to understand better how the internet spreads content and how readers process the news and information they consume. Such broad-based efforts are necessary, the authors said, “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”...In addition to Baum and Lazer, the paper was co-authored by Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain.

An article by David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain. The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed.

James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired after distributing a memo questioning the company’s diversity policies, filed a class-action lawsuit Monday claiming that the technology giant discriminates against white men and conservatives. Damore’s suit came on the same day that conservative publisher Charles C. Johnson sued Twitter for banning him from the platform in 2015. The cases are the latest signs of a broad effort by some conservatives to challenge technology companies on the grounds that they favor liberal or moderate voices, reflecting the prevailing political sensibilities in Silicon Valley...Courts in that state have in the past highlighted the importance of free speech rights even when exercised on private property, making the state potentially more amenable to Johnson’s claims about censorship on a private online platform such as Twitter, said Jonathan Zittrain, faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “Of all the places to bring a long-shot case like this, California would be the place,” Zittrain said.

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook influence more of our lives every year. Congress has talked about regulating the tech giants without taking action. In Europe, it's a different story. Just before Christmas, the European Union's highest court issued a ruling against Uber. European courts have also said that Google has to remove some search results at a person's request. It's known as the right to be forgotten. To talk with us about why Europe is regulating these tech companies more aggressively than the U.S., Jonathan Zittrain joins us now. He's a professor of law and computer science at Harvard.

It’s almost quaint to think that just five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg cheerfully took credit for major pro-democracy movements during Facebook’s IPO launch...Today, the company has to reckon with its role in passively enabling human-rights abuses. While concerns about propaganda and misinformation on the platform reached a fever pitch in places like the United States in the past year, its presence in Myanmar has become the subject of global attention...As Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society put it, “[Facebook] abdicating feels weird because quite often (and this is sometimes reflected in the law) if you’re in a position to do something, to alleviate a great harm—and you’re profiting, you’re not a bystander, you’re implicated or involved—we tend to think you have a responsibility to do something.”

Trump raised alarm bells in his published response to the news that his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. The tweet published to Trump’s account clearly implied that he already knew that Flynn had deceived the Feds when he fired him back in February: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” That unleashed a frenzy of speculation about whether Trump had just admitted to obstructing justice, since it seems he must have known that Flynn had committed a felony when he was pressuring then-FBI director James Comey to ease up on the Flynn case...But then came word that maybe Trump didn’t write the tweet after all. The Washington Post reported that “Trump’s lawyer John Dowd drafted the president’s tweet, according to two people familiar with the twitter message.”...Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain noted, “I’ve seen lawyers write each. It’s not like, you know, ‘hung’ and ‘hanged.’” Indeed, both “pleaded” and “pled” are both considered acceptable by American usage guides—though, in many newsrooms, “pled” is considered a rookie mistake, which helps explain why some journalists seized on it.

Two friends started a greeting card company on the internet. It was cheap to launch and it instantly reached millions. Then one day without warning, Facebook changed the way it did business. This is a story about survival in the age of Facebook, when a privately held algorithm can turn a beloved product into a hobby with no monetary value...What happened next, as the cards thrived and then suddenly withered on Facebook, illustrates the mercurial power of a new near-monopoly, with implications for all sorts of publishers and businesses, said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “Facebook has grown at a pace and had an impact that it’s really hard to say anybody planned,” he said. “It isn’t just a mere commercial platform. It’s a place that people are turning to to get their sense of what’s going on in the world."

Over just two days this week, the Trump administration has both sued AT&T Inc. to block its planned takeover of Time Warner Inc. and proposed allowing internet-service providers—like AT&T—to form closer alliances with content companies, like Time Warner. ...Because the FTC doesn’t have the authority to create and enforce broad rules, it isn’t in a position to police fast and slow lanes that may harm competition, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University and a former chairman of the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee.

An open letter to the Massachusetts Legislature from Chelsea Barabas, Christopher Bavitz, Ryan Budish, Karthik Dinakar, Cynthia Dwork, Urs Gasser, Kira Hessekiel, Joichi Ito, Ronald L. Rivest, Madars Virza, and Jonathan Zittrain. Dear Members of the Massachusetts Legislature: We write to you in our individual capacities¹ regarding the proposed introduction of actuarial risk assessment (“RA”) tools in the Commonwealth’s criminal justice system. As you are no doubt aware, Senate Bill 2185² — passed by the Massachusetts Senate on October 27, 2017 — mandates implementation of RA tools in the pretrial stage of criminal proceedings...As researchers with a strong interest in algorithms and fairness, we recognize that RA tools may have a place in the criminal justice system. In some cases, and by some measures, use of RA tools may promote outcomes better than the status quo. That said, we are concerned that the Senate Bill’s implementation of RA tools is cursory and does not fully address the complex and nuanced issues implicated by actuarial risk assessments.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Twenty years after it was first litigated in earnest, the U.S. Communications Decency Act’s §230 remains both obscure and vital. Section 230 nearly entirely eliminated the liability of Internet content platforms under state common law for bad acts, such as defamation, occasioned by their users. The platforms were free to structure their moderation and editing of comments as they pleased, without a traditional newspaper’s framework in which to undertake editing was to bear responsibility for what was published. If the New York Times included a letter to the editor that defamed someone, the Times would be vulnerable to a lawsuit (to be sure, so would the letter’s author, whose wallet size would likely make for a less tempting target). Not so for online content portals that welcome comments from anywhere—including the online version of the New York Times.