The Senate is currently considering the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693), with a scheduled hearing tomorrow. In brief, the proposed legislation threatens to roll back aspects of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which relieve content providers, or so-called “intermediaries” (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter) of liability for the content that is hosted on their […]
The future of ad blocking
April 14, 2017 by
There’s an ongoing arms race between ad blockers and websites — more and more sites either try to sneak their ads through or force users to disable ad blockers. Most previous discussions have assumed that this is a cat-and-mouse game that will escalate indefinitely. But in a new paper, accompanied by proof-of-concept code, we challenge […]
Disrupting The Business Model of the Fake News Industry
December 14, 2016 by
By Katherine Haenschen & Paul Ellenbogen In the aftermath of the 2016 election, researchers and media professionals alike seized on the vast proliferation of so-called “Fake News” on Facebook as a cause for concern. An informed citizenry is a necessary condition for democracy, so it is far from ideal to have millions of people consuming […]
Has Apple Doomed Ads on the Web? Will It Crush Google?
September 24, 2015 by
Recently Apple announced that, for the first time ever, ad-blocking plugins will be allowed in mobile Safari in iOS 9. There has been a large outpouring of commentary about this, and there seems to be pretty broad agreement on two things: (1) this action on Apple’s part was aimed at Google and (2) for publishers […]
