The Political Puerto Rican

Chip Somodevilla / Getty / The Atlantic In the 2020 election, it seemed that faith in the right to free and fair elections was at an all time low as this country's former president sowed discontent and distrust in the existing voting system. The voting system in the United States is far from perfect but as we finished another census year, state legislatures across the country are redrawing their districts and many GOP-led states are doing so in ways that will dilute the power of Black and Latinx voters. While the "cracking" part of gerrymandering is technically illegal, redistricting in partisan favor is not, and Republican states have little interest in granting minorities more voting power. Voting rights are once again on the national agenda and many worry that the White House is not doing enough to guarantee voting rights across the country. President Biden and Vice President Harris ran on the promise to enfranchise previously discriminated against populations by expan...

As I was sitting in one of my classes this morning, my professor made the grand and sweeping statement that we should not Google to get our news. At the very least, we should have a specific digital source of which we find our news, but we should not be willy-nilly searching into the void for our news. While doing research for this week's blog post I found an article that showed how a gubernatorial campaign is using Google ads in a new way of highlighting news stories about the candidate . The majority of people will Google people or things they're relatively uninformed about and from there amass the knowledge they are seeking be it from just using headlines or from clicking on various links to become further informed.  If one knows how to do proper research, in other words, are able to distinguish proper information from clickbait then googling your news is not going to be especially detrimental. It is when googling leads to only focusing on sensationalized headlines and not s...

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via AP, Pool Congress heard the testimony from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen today in what many see as a crucial step in regulating social media. Haugen corroborated claims that the social media platform perpetuates negative and misinformed posts to increase their profit margins. Facebook is one of the most prolific social media platforms and is no stranger to the infamous attention it is receiving at the moment. Especially following an election cycle where the "fake news" moniker gained a lot of traction on this specific platform, this committee hearing is not suggesting widespread regulation but small changes that they believe can yield big impacts in slowing or eliminating the spread of misinformation that Facebook has become synonymous with.  There are two possible arguments to be made in why regulation in the social media and tech industry is slow and difficult to come by. 1) As I have pointed out in previous posts on this blog, a...