Trump’s Dangerous Claim to the Internet He Wants: “Mr Trump, unable directly to censor the publications he detests, is now manoeuvring to limit their visibility on the internet. The European Union’s “right to be forgotten” law on search results would be trumped by his claim to a presidential right to favourable news coverage. That threat must be resisted, for liberty’s sake,” write editors of the Financial Times.

How Duterte Used Facebook to Fuel the Drug War: “For all the recent hand-wringing in the United States over Facebook’s monopolistic power, the mega-platform’s grip on the Philippines is something else entirely. Thanks to a social media–hungry populace and heavy subsidies that keep Facebook free to use on mobile phones, Facebook has completely saturated the country. And because using other data, like accessing a news website via a mobile web browser, is precious and expensive, for most Filipinos the only way online is through Facebook. The platform is a leading provider of news and information, and it was a key engine behind the wave of populist anger that carried Duterte all the way to the presidency,” writes Davey Alba for BuzzFeed.

Libya: A Facebook War: “Social media enjoys outsize influence in Libya, a sparsely populated yet violently fractured country that is torn by a plethora of armed groups vying for territory and legitimacy. They battle for dominance on the streets and on smartphones. But Facebook, by far the most popular platform, doesn’t just mirror the chaos — it can act as a force multiplier. Armed groups use Facebook to find opponents and critics, some of whom have later been detained, killed or forced into exile, according to human rights groups and Libyan activists,” write Declan Walsh and Suliman Ali Zway in the New York Times.