Timothy Karr

Timothy Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press Action Fund, the advocacy organization that fights for everyone’s rights to connect and communicate. Follow him on Twitter: @TimKarr.
Articles by this author
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Views Monday, February 22, 2021 Cutting Deals with Big Tech Won't Save Journalism This week, Australia will put the finishing touches on a plan to force Google and Facebook to pay millions of dollars to local news publishers in exchange for featuring their content on their powerful platforms. Many in the news industry are hailing Australia’s bargaining code as a way to bring Big... Read more |
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Views Friday, January 08, 2021 Facebook, Twitter and YouTube: Ban Trump or Face Another Mass Boycott Social-media executives at Facebook and Twitter want to be congratulated for temporarily banning Donald Trump from their platforms. All it took for them to act was a racist insurrection against our democracy—a violent mob assault on Congress that was incited by Trump’'s incessant lies about a "... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 15, 2020 Confused by Section 230? So Is Donald Trump One of the most consequential—and for some confusing—pieces of internet legislation of the past 25 years has been the subject of white-hot political debates in Washington this election year. And no one seems more confused by Section 230 than Donald Trump, who in May signed an executive order to... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, April 01, 2020 We Must De-Trump the Airwaves to Protect Public Health Amid COVID-19 Outbreak As COVID-19 spreads from city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood and house to house, misinformation is being spread over the public airwaves by syndicated right-wing personalities and the media conglomerates that air their programs. In many cases, radio and TV hosts like Sean Hannity, Laura... Read more |
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Views Friday, November 15, 2019 Why Facebook Filtering Will Ultimately Fail In its content-moderation report released this week, Facebook revealed that it had removed a whopping 3.2-billion fake accounts from March through September 2019. That’s a lot of disinformation, wrote tech reporter Aditya Srivastava: “To put it in perspective, the number is [nearly] half of living... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, October 16, 2019 Can Anyone Stop Facebook from Poisoning Democracy? Freedom (to lie) isn’t free. For the campaign to re-elect Donald Trump it costs $1.5 million a week. And that’s just last week’s tab. In exchange, Trump’s team gets to spread false and misleading political ads across Facebook’s social network. This includes a 30-second ad that makes the... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 04, 2019 A Pivot to Digital Shouldn't Spell the End of Local News Last Saturday, the final printed edition of the Vindicator rolled off the presses in Youngstown, Ohio. After 150 years, the city’s last remaining daily closed its doors, handing its subscription list and masthead to the Tribune Chronicle , based in nearby Warren, which has begun to produce a... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 26, 2019 Want to Save Journalism? Tax the Attention Economy Way, way back in 2009 as Facebook was celebrating its fifth anniversary, CEO Mark Zuckerberg blogged that the company was founded “to give people the tools to engage and understand the world around them.” In the 10 years since then, Facebook’s user base has multiplied more than 10 times. But... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 01, 2019 On Net Neutrality and Why Ajit Pai Is No Jedi The FCC's chairman's rationale for ending Net Neutrality in 2017 was that existing Title II rules had supposedly shackled the forces of the marketplace, “deter[ing] the massive infrastructure investment that we need.” If the rules were allowed to stand, he said, we’d “pay the price in terms of less... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 07, 2019 Chairman Pai Can't Win for Losing No amount of spin can undo that. But that hasn’t stopped Pai from trying and trying, again and again. His latest came in the form of a statement , released Wednesday, touting the expiration of a bipartisan congressional effort to restore the Net Neutrality protections. “I’m pleased that a strong... Read more |