Craig Timberg Tony Romm The Washington Post

The Democratic Party's rapidly fading love affair with Big Tech has broken into open acrimony in recent weeks, punctuated by a presidential debate Tuesday in which leading candidates took turns decrying the industry's impact on the nation and workshopping ways to rein it in.

This means Facebook posts and campaign ads by politicians operate in an alternative system.

Google will pay $170 million to settle allegations that it illegally collected data about children younger than age 13 who watched toy videos and television shows on YouTube, settling a long-running government investigation but leaving some in Washington once again furious that regulators had been outmatched by Silicon Valley.

Twitter's new policy for holding powerful leaders to account for engaging in hate speech and harassment received its first major test this weekend when President Donald Trump called on several Democratic members of Congress to "go back" to their countries - prompting widespread allegations of racism against women of color.

US Federal Trade Commission is said to be in the late stages of an investigation into how YouTube handles children's videos.

Facebook said it is investigating whether an organization backed by billionaire and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman violated the social media giant's policies when it set up a series of misleading news pages in a bid to target U.S. voters with left-leaning political messages.

Billionaire Reid Hoffman apologized Wednesday for funding a group linked to a "highly disturbing" effort that spread disinformation during last year's Alabama special election for U.S. Senate, but he said he was not aware that his money was being used for this purpose.

Facebook said its investigation had not found that accounts or pages operated by New Knowledge violated its policies.

Nine months after a whistleblower revealed that Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States - a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia's disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters' interests to help elect President Donald Trump - and worked even harder to support him while in ...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that new AI tools require companies to set ethical guardrails and think through how the technology can be abused.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, head of one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, said in an interview this week that concerns about harmful applications of the technology are "very legitimate" - but the tech industry should be trusted to responsibly regulate its use.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai confronted a barrage of criticism Tuesday from House Republicans who said his company suppresses conservative voices, exposing Google to the same kind of scrutiny that has destabilized its tech peers this year. Pichai insisted that Google is careful to avoid political bias in its search engine and other products.

YouTube does not have a policy against falsehoods.

The more than 250 pages of documents, which a British parliamentary committee recently obtained as part of a wide-ranging investigation into Facebook, revolve around a decision Facebook made in 2014 and 2015 to cut off developers' access to posts, photos and other profile information from Facebook users.

The Democratic Party's rapidly fading love affair with Big Tech has broken into open acrimony in recent weeks, punctuated by a presidential debate Tuesday in which leading candidates took turns decrying the industry's impact on the nation and workshopping ways to rein it in.

This means Facebook posts and campaign ads by politicians operate in an alternative system.

Google will pay $170 million to settle allegations that it illegally collected data about children younger than age 13 who watched toy videos and television shows on YouTube, settling a long-running government investigation but leaving some in Washington once again furious that regulators had been outmatched by Silicon Valley.

Twitter's new policy for holding powerful leaders to account for engaging in hate speech and harassment received its first major test this weekend when President Donald Trump called on several Democratic members of Congress to "go back" to their countries - prompting widespread allegations of racism against women of color.

US Federal Trade Commission is said to be in the late stages of an investigation into how YouTube handles children's videos.

Facebook said it is investigating whether an organization backed by billionaire and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman violated the social media giant's policies when it set up a series of misleading news pages in a bid to target U.S. voters with left-leaning political messages.

Billionaire Reid Hoffman apologized Wednesday for funding a group linked to a "highly disturbing" effort that spread disinformation during last year's Alabama special election for U.S. Senate, but he said he was not aware that his money was being used for this purpose.

Facebook said its investigation had not found that accounts or pages operated by New Knowledge violated its policies.

Nine months after a whistleblower revealed that Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States - a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia's disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters' interests to help elect President Donald Trump - and worked even harder to support him while in ...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that new AI tools require companies to set ethical guardrails and think through how the technology can be abused.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, head of one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, said in an interview this week that concerns about harmful applications of the technology are "very legitimate" - but the tech industry should be trusted to responsibly regulate its use.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai confronted a barrage of criticism Tuesday from House Republicans who said his company suppresses conservative voices, exposing Google to the same kind of scrutiny that has destabilized its tech peers this year. Pichai insisted that Google is careful to avoid political bias in its search engine and other products.

YouTube does not have a policy against falsehoods.

The more than 250 pages of documents, which a British parliamentary committee recently obtained as part of a wide-ranging investigation into Facebook, revolve around a decision Facebook made in 2014 and 2015 to cut off developers' access to posts, photos and other profile information from Facebook users.