“Two prominent departures at top universities this month have a common link: inquisitive student journalists.”

“65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018. Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.”

“There are still several stages to go until Google completes its Privacy Sandbox rollout, but shipping these APIs is a significant milestone toward the company’s goal of phasing out third-party cookies entirely. Google is still aiming to enable an opt-in testing mode that will allow advertisers to experiment with the Sandbox tools without cookies by late 2023 and to turn off third-party cookies for 1 percent of Chrome users sometime in Q1 2024. The company has set a goal to completely turn off third-party cookies by Q3 2024.”

“BDG’s editors are not simply trying to game the duopoly’s algorithms for clicks. Instead, BDG is looking for audiences and revenue in places where Google and Facebook cannot compete,” such as email and events.

“Meta is shunning the news business, giving lower priority to current affairs and politics on its social media platforms while refusing to engage with efforts from governments to make the US tech giant pay more to media organisations.”

“Showtime’s decision to kill the DeSantis story has gotten lost amid the two companies’ other woes — Vice’s bankruptcy, Paramount’s scramble to cut expensive original programming. But the episode is in fact a rare, and serious, glimpse at how a big media company killed a potentially controversial story.”

“So many of the shows I’ve watched during the past five days were obsessed with the West, with our Clintons and Soroses and Von der Leyens. Russia is the spurned lover with the ‘very aggressive nature’ taking out his inhumanity on the innocent neighbor next door. Despite all the posturing and doublespeak, Russian television announces as much to the world.”

“None of this is the product of malevolence, nor is it anybody’s fault in particular. But the effects are to tighten the vise gripping newspaper publishers who still need print ad revenues but can’t sustain the product that delivers them, and to further undermine local news, even as we increasingly recognize how much [is] lost when it is threatened.”

“Counties with high exposure to Fox News tend to elect judges who impose harsh criminal sentences, finds the research, which analyzes 7 million prison sentencing decisions from 2005 to 2017.”

“The study found that for children aged 12-15, TikTok is now the most used single source of news across all platforms at 28%, followed by YouTube and Instagram at 25% each.”