As the historic events unfolded on Capitol Hill during the afternoon and evening of Jan. 6, people around the world tuned into news networks and social media to follow what was happening. The TV networks also harnessed social platforms such as YouTube to share breaking news, videos and more as the Capitol was thrown into chaos.

According to social video analytics company Tubular Labs, as of this writing there have been over 207 million views on YouTube videos related to the U.S. Capitol crisis and its aftermath, with 5 million engagements. Four out of the top 10 videos by views were live streams to YouTube, including the No. 1 clip: NBC News’ “Live: Congress Resumes Electoral Vote Count After Rioters Cleared From Capitol” with 14.9 million views (the video is no longer available) — making it NBC News’ 11th most-watched YouTube video ever. 

Also Read: Networks Hustle to Cover Capitol Coup

CBS News also had a top-five most-viewed video, “Live coverage: Protesters swarm Capitol, abruptly halting electoral vote count,” which has racked up nearly 3.9 million views. The popularity of these live YouTube streams illustrates how social video can help networks reach households that may not be linear TV subscribers, but who still want access to breaking news. In this respect, platforms like YouTube aren’t necessarily a threat to traditional networks, but rather a way to supplement their content and reach viewers beyond the live TV audience. 

In the days following Jan. 6, networks continued to leverage YouTube to share updates, such as CNN’s “More arrests made after riots at the US Capitol,” which is the No. 7 most-viewed clip so far related to the U.S. Capitol events, with nearly 3 million views, nearly all of which occurred in the first three days after it was uploaded on Jan. 9. 

MSNBC also drew a large number of viewers for its Capitol Hill coverage on YouTube. Its video “Must-See New Video Shows Capitol Riot Was Way Worse Than We Thought” has generated 11.4 million views in the five days its been live, making it the network’s third most-watched YouTube clip ever. 

It’s worth noting the absence of Fox News from the ranking of top videos related to the Capitol Hill events. The network’s most-watched YouTube video related to the events, “US Capitol on lockdown as protests threaten security,” has 979K views.

Looking at Tubular Audience Ratings for the three major cable news networks provides an additional perspective on how they’ve performed on YouTube recently. In November, CNN won for unique viewers (34 million) and 30-second views (173.7 million). But when examining total minutes watched, Fox News ranked highest with 1 billion. While MSNBC had the fewest total minutes watched (632.3 million), its audience consumed more individual videos on average — 7.3, vs. CNN’s 5 and Fox News’ 4.8 — and it had the highest count of minutes watched per viewer (36.7).

This is a quick snapshot of TV by the numbers for the week of Jan. 4-10, revealing the most-watched shows and networks using glass-level data from Vizio’s Inscape, and the top shows and networks by TV ad impressions with insights via iSpot.tv. 

Most-Watched Shows and Networks

Via Vizio’s Inscape, the TV data company with insights from a panel of more than 17 million active and opted-in smart TVs. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).

NFL games continue to capture the most minutes watched, up to 9.97% from the previous week’s 5.11%, thanks to a super-charged Wild Card Weekend with six nationally televised games. And due to the historic events that unfolded on Capitol Hill last week, many news programs jumped up the ranking. CNN’s coverage of the election certification (which then turned into broader coverage of the Capitol Hill events on Wednesday afternoon) and Georgia Senate runoffs were second and third, respectively. Of the top 25 programs, only six were not sports or news related.

Also Read: Networks Hustle to Cover Capitol Coup

On the network side of things, NBC and CBS both moved up the ranking with help from NFL games and news coverage, while cable news networks CNN, Fox News and MSNBC also rose up. The only networks to maintain their positions week-over-week were Fox, HGTV, Investigation Discovery and Food Network. With some help from a marathon of Hawaii Five-0, ION moved into No. 19 from No. 25. (Hawaii Five-0 was also the most-binged timeshifted show of the weekend.)

Inscape also shared a deeper look at cable news viewership during the Capitol Hill events on Jan. 6. CNN was No. 1 for live tune-in throughout the afternoon, with rising viewership that peaked right after 4 p.m. ET, as did Fox News; MSNBC viewership was highest closer to 4:30 p.m.

Top Shows and Networks by TV Ad Impressions

Via iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. Rankings are by TV ad impressions, for new episodes only. 

TV ad impressions for NFL games were up 80% week-over-week to 12.7 billion, thanks to the Wild Card games, dwarfing other programs on the ranking. NBA and college basketball both made the top five, in third and fourth places, respectively. Multiple CNN programs made the ranking as well. Also notable: The season 25 premiere of The Bachelor on ABC, which generated 346.9 million impressions putting it at No. 21. There were only four non-sports or news programs in the ranking.

CBS and NBC led the network ranking, with NFL games accounting for about half of each’s total impressions for the week. With 6.5 billion impressions, CNN took third place, followed by ABC (6.3 billion) and Fox News (3.5 billion). MSNBC saw a notable 73% week-over-week increase in impressions as well, up to 2.7 billion, beating out Fox’s 2.5 billion. One ranking newcomer was Freeform (216.3 million impressions), thanks in part to the NFL Wild Card MegaCast that aired across various Disney-owned networks.

Underscoring the policy uncertainty in Washington right now: there’s a dramatic drought of the usual think tank and lobbyist predictions that materialize between Election Day and the opening of the new Congress and/or Inauguration Day.  In most election years, policy wonks trot out forecasts (and/or wishful thinking) about what will fill Washington’s legislative and regulatory agenda, with telecom/media and tech prognostications often among the liveliest categories.  Their outlooks are typically mixed with policy recommendations and are frequently unveiled at hyped presentations as analysts and journalists look for a policymaking agenda for the new Administration and Congress (and nibble at the catering tables that accompany such events).   

For 2021: not so much.

Only a handful of seers and solons have offered their outlooks in recent weeks, and they have primarily been wan wonk-wise.  The predictable roster includes ideas about antitrust, copyright, privacy, cybersecurity, mending the digital divide and resolving broadband issues – depending on which side is offering solutions.  And of course, the sessions - if they existed at all - were virtual.  

The Brookings Institution kicked off the seer season with a Zoom seminar on “The Future of Tech Antitrust in the Biden Administration.” With recent lawsuits against Facebook and Google, much of the focus was on the possible breakup of those behemoths.  

Avery Gardiner, general counsel and senior fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, contended that the Biden team would dedicate more resources to antitrust than has been done in the past 20 years. She said the goal will be to see if new laws are “flexible enough to handle the digital economy.”  Gardiner also warned that it is hard to approach antitrust “from a regulatory angle, [since] we don’t regulate it.”

“It’s an enforcement issue,” she insisted, contending that competition policy “will be incredibly important for the new administration.”

Also Read: 'Landmark' Copyright Act Reform Proposed

The role of digital platforms (notably those of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon) quickly became part of the discussion. Matt Perault, director of the Center on Science & Technology Policy and Associate Professor at Duke University, said he expects that “antitrust [will] move beyond platforms,” expecting federal examinations to include more than those four firms.

“We should develop policies that apply to a broad set of companies,” he said, noting that the prospects for sweeping reforms such as Glass-Steagall legislation (the defunct financial separations laws) are “off the table, so specific reforms are more likely.”  Perault acknowledged that such restrictions become “more difficult as companies move into different categories.”

Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow at Brookings and director of its Center for Technology Innovation, put the spotlight on Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, calling her a “dealmaker who will go behind the scenes” based on her background in California with some of the target companies. But Darrel West, also a Brookings senior fellow and Vice President added a political reality. He pointed out that if Biden serves only one term and Harris runs for President in 2024, “She’ll be careful about what she does to cover herself.”

In a document accompanying the seminar, Brookings cited what it expects to be the policy skirmishes for the coming year:

Recommendations Rather Than Predictions

Many of this year’s slew of visions took the shape of reports, such as the Next Century Cities’ case studies on broadband connectivity. NCC’s Executive Director, Francella Ochillo, summarized the findings as evidence of the need to use all available resources “to ensure that residents are able to get online.”  The NCC study found that communities recognize the importance of both “broadband access and adoption needs, not one or the other.”

“Addressing these persistent digital divides require meaningful investments from every level of government coupled with public and private partnerships that reflect the magnitude of the problem,” Ochillo said.

Several think tanks reverted to shopping lists, loaded with the reliable staples of policy reforms.  For example, the Technology Policy Institute, which focuses on the economics of innovation, technology and related regulation, issued “Ten Tech Principles for the Biden Administration,” half of which deal with broadband and regulatory reform. TPI’s roster calls for action to tackle the digital divide “through data-driven approaches” and employing market-based mechanisms for allocating spectrum. 

“Do not treat broadband as a public utility, as that is likely to slow investment and innovation and increase prices,” TPI urged, recommending that policymakers should “rethink positions on net neutrality, particularly with respect to paid prioritization…which may be useful for socially productive services such as telemedicine and education.”  TPI also warned that the Defense Department and other agencies should not be allowed to control spectrum policy.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation combined a video webinar with its recent “Analysis of U.S. Broadband Policy” report for its transition-season evaluation of “what has worked well and what has not.”  It found that much still remains to be done to remedy the digital divide, and that attempts at mandating facilities-sharing obligations or open-ended net neutrality rules have failed.   The ITIF webinar was also an approximate anniversary celebration (10 years for the National Broadband Plan and 25 years for the 1996 Telecommunications Act) – with nudges to reexamine and update both documents.

In particular, ITIF’s report offered the complex opinion that government has “a critical role to play in the broadband marketplace” – but it should be done carefully.  For example, it contends, “closing these digital divides does not even logically support a call for more intrusive regulation of the broadband industry. To the contrary, such regulation would, if anything, make the underlying problems worse by placing a thumb on the scale against additional broadband investment.”

Plus Gossip and Rumors

Several of the transition period reports and conversations touched on the overdue update of the 1996 Telecom Act. Even former FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, in his swan-song news conference after his final Commission meeting in mid-December, said, “a rewrite is in order,” citing that “the marketplace has changed since ’96.”

Meanwhile, President-Elect Biden has begun to fill in the Plum Book, the legendary roster of political appointees beyond the usual high-profile heads of agencies.  As we await official announcements of Attorney General (and other Justice Department jobs), chairs of the FCC, FTC and other top regulators, gossip bubbles up about other jobs. 

The names of media moguls Robert Iger (longtime Disney chief) and Jeffrey Katzenberg (of assorted credentials) might become ambassadors, possibly to the United Kingdom and China, said The Hollywood Reporter.  It also mentioned that producer Matt Walden, husband of Walt Disney Television chairman Dana Walden, could be considered as an ambassador in Europe, citing his long friendship with entertainment attorney Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

Predictably, Biden’s office had nothing to say about such speculation.

Legislators on both sides of the Capitol were hammering Zoom Thursday (June 11) on reports it had closed the accounts of U.S.-based Chinese activists after they commemorated the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre pro democracy movement. That shuttering reportedly came at the behest of the Chinese government.

Zoom said it was due to "local laws."

“Zoom’s recent actions and acquiescence to China raise serious concerns about your data practices, including how you protect information you collect on Americans and, importantly, who you grant access to such information,” wrote Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), ranking member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), in a letter to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

They want answers to a lot of questions, including how it collects information on Americans, what third parties it shares that info with and whether any Chinese state-owned entities have access to that information.

Separately, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), one of Big Tech's biggest critics, wrote Yuan asking him to "pick a side." Zoom's choices, said the senator, were "American principles and free-speech, or short-term global profits and censorship."

He said trading values for profits, as he is asserting Zoom is doing, "never ends well."

“These oppressive ‘local laws’ are what Party officials use to oppress more than a billion people, including more than one million Uighurs who have been forced into slavery," said Hawley. "These ‘local laws’ are what China is using to crack down on protesters in Hong Kong who just want the basic liberties they were promised by international treaty,” Senator Hawley writes.

Zoom's videoconference tech has been much in the news as remote meetings, professional and personal, become the new normal with COVID-19.

The House Energy & Commerce Committee Consumer Protection Subcommittee will hold a hearing Jan. 8 on "deception online," "Americans at Risk: Manipulation and Deception in the Digital Age." 

Among the topics for discussion will be deepfakes and disinformation campaigns. 

“As the internet has matured from a blogging platform to the engine that powers our economy, bad actors who seek to manipulate consumers have become more sophisticated," said House E&C chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.). 

No witnesses have been announced, but they will be asked to provide input on how to combat "harmful" deception and manipulation. 

House Energy & Commerce Committee leadership said Friday that they have come up with bipartisan, bicameral, legislation to combat unwanted robocalls.

The FCC is on the same page and a parallel track with various initiatives and fines for illegal robocalls, but it is one of the key constituent issues on the Hill so legislators want to put their own stake in that turf.

Signing on to the compromise bill are Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.), Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), Energy & Commerce Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-Ore.), Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), and ranking member Bob Latta (R-Ohio).

Related: Cable Ops Oppose Default Robocall-Blocking Mandate

“Today, we are proud to announce that we have come to an agreement in principle on legislation, the Pallone-Thune TRACED Act, to combat the robocall epidemic that we believe can be signed into law by the President,” they said in a joint statement. “It’s time to put Americans back in charge of their phones. Our agreement will require telephone carriers to verify calls and allow robocalls to be blocked in a consistent and transparent way, all at no extra charge to consumers. The agreement also gives the FCC and law enforcement the ability to quickly go after scammers. We look forward to finalizing the bill text in the coming days.”

The Pallone-Thune Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act will combine (and reconcile) the TRACED Act, which passed the Senate in May, and the Stopping Bad Robocalls Act, which passed the House in July.

The FCC under chairman Ajit Pai has made cracking down on unwanted calls, that number in the many billions annually, one of his signature issues. That includes clarifying that carriers can block robocalls by default and incentivizing them to add the feature at no extra charge.  

The FCC is under pressure from Congress to help consumers weed out unwanted robocalls--for one thing, legislators keep pointing out that they get such calls during hearings about how to stop them.

“Help is on the way! Thank you to these Congressional leaders for coming together to provide critical new tools to fight back against the robocall criminals scamming consumers and polluting our networks," said USTelecom President Jonathan Spalter. "This is a powerful shot in the arm to our technology driven traceback and verification work and will go a long way in helping take back our phones.”

While most eyes were fixed on another Hill hearing Thursday (Sept. 27), members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee Communications Subcommittee were preparing to get a sobering view of the vaunted cord-cutting, OTT-driven new media marketplace.

Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research was among a trio of witnesses for the hearing, and according to his prepared testimony, the current business model for over-the-top video is more like a bubble that could ultimately burst, or at least deflate. 

Moffett told the committee that while virtual MVPDs like Sling and YouTube TV and DirecTV Now are billed as all about more consumer control and a step closer to the "nirvana" of a la carte, their real appeal is simpler. They cost less, say $40 versus a cable bundle at $100 per month.

Related: Study: Streaming is a Supplement, Not a Replacement for Traditional TV

But the problem with cord cutting, which he suggested was a bit of a misnomer since it is really cord-shifting, is that programming doesn't cost less to produce just because it comes over the top, nor is it cheaper for the aggregator of those channels to buy it, and often it costs more because they are smaller and have less clout.

Both traditional and OTT, in most cases, also generally involve a set-top. So when a cheaper alternative is cheaper for no technology or business reason, beware, he said.

Generally, virtual MVPDs are cheaper because they offer fewer networks, but also, because the services are being sold at a loss. He estimates that the content on YouTube TV and DirecTV Now costs $40 and it is being sold at $40, so with added costs of billing and marketing and others, the service is losing money.

"There’s an old saying among economists that when something is unsustainable, it will eventually stop," he said. 

"Selling a service for a loss isn’t sustainable, even allowing for the fact that companies like Google (owners of YouTube TV) believe the path to monetizing video is not by selling the service to consumers for more than it costs but instead by trying to sell advertising against it," he said. 

As for traditional media having to compete with those new offering, he said, "It has been widely observed that many of the changes in media are about trying to keep pace with Google and Facebook. It will be very hard for traditional distributors to compete with a service provider that is willing to lose money on selling the service."

As the saying goes, something's gotta give. 

Moffett said there are two outcomes, either Google and Facebook will dominate with a targeted advertising model, or vMVPDs will have to raise their prices and the distinction between new and old models won't look so significant. 

As to the vaunted figure of 500 new scripted series in production being a 50% increase in the past few years. "To state the obvious, viewership has not grown by anything like 50 percent. Indeed, viewership of traditional video is declining as traditional media increasingly competes with social media and non-traditional forms of digital video. Massively increasing supply while demand is falling is no more sustainable than an aggregation model that doesn’t make money."

The video bubble he talked about was not necessarily about valuations, but about changing the economics of the media, the natural consequence has not been seen yet, "but it will." Those, he said, will be higher prices and the production of less "top shelf" content. 

Moffett also said the new media model is exclusivity, or what he called "closed media systems."

For example, he said, the Department of Justice was fighting the last war in challenging the AT&T/Time Warner deal over exclusivity issues.

"The age of Closed Media is coming irrespective of what happens in the DOJ’s appeal of [the] decision," he said. “Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have already created their own closed systems. Disney has announced plans to go direct to consumers. HBO is already on the same path. All will be closed systems....And now we have Comcast’s acquisition of Sky in Europe. The very premise of the deal is content exclusivity, and the bid to create a closed system to rival Netflix."

In last week’s Hill hearings with executives from Facebook and Twitter, lawmakers seemed to focus on unique, concrete instances where problems had been reported or uncovered—Russian interference, anti-conservative censoring, encouraging opioid sales. This whack-a-mole style is good for publicity, but if trust in these companies, and peace of mind for their users, is going to be re-established, efforts toward regulation will have to focus much more on principles and hypotheticals rather than specific, undesirable cases. 

Let’s start with the basic problem. In recent years it has become widely known that Facebook and Twitter moderate a substantial portion of what we might call “important” speech in the American public sphere. Hundreds of millions of Americans use these platforms to discuss and share information about topics that, in our concept of democracy, are part of the public sphere through which collective knowledge and opinion inform self-governance. Facebook and Twitter moderate this speech. They do so in the traditional way, removing certain content, such as pornography, but also in a novel and more complex way, by influencing the pace at which messages can obtain attention and be shared with others. This “micro-moderation” is essential to their business models, but it is also impossible for a user to detect. 

Related: Zuckerberg: Facebook Fixes Will Take Years

The importance of the influence they wield through this moderation, combined with the difficulty that users have in identifying it, along with their potential monopoly power due to network effects, means that the government is on the hook for managing the situation. Whether through regulation or some other means, the government and these companies have to find a way to show that these moderation judgments are acceptable—they do the right thing often enough—and transparent— they are sufficiently understandable to be anticipated in advance and evaluated after the fact.

Establishing this acceptability with transparency requires these companies to explain and illustrate their priorities—which kinds of speech are going to be privileged and which will be limited? Unfortunately, the record of well known, past controversies that the Senators and House Members grilled the executives about is not particularly helpful here. These can be (and last week were) explained away as mistakes or misguided, but now amended, efforts. That is, they might illustrate what the company did, but not what the company would do. But the real question is not “what happened” but “what if.” 

“What if” is a part of any policy conversation, but Facebook and Twitter are particularly vulnerable to the fallout from nasty “what ifs” coming true. This is because with their enormous, well connected user bases, they are essentially giant crowdsourcing platforms for discovering hard, controversial cases. At the same time, their use of micro-moderation deprives them of easy bright lines that can be used to justify coarse judgments. 

Consider the case of potential overlap between political speech, a citizen expressing their political opinion with the goal of convincing others, and threatening speech, a statement that makes an individual feel that a mob is being rallied against them. The speaker claims the right to make this statement and the threatened individual claims the need to have it suppressed so that it does not incite others. This kind of conflict is new, and is at the center of many offline controversies (such as on university campuses). But in most contexts, the moderator can count on having a coarse set of options – permit or don’t permit – to apply to one particular incident. This incident will have a particular form—the speech is primarily political or mostly devoid of political content, for example—that helps to lean it one way or the other. This bit of lean, combined with course, binary options, enables a decision to emerge.

Social media companies do not have these luxuries. Among the millions of posts created each day, there are likely to be thousands that sit right on the borderline between the two competing claims. Moreover the moderation decision is not binary. If an individual makes a political speech that is somewhat threatening, but not so much to deserve outright censorship, should the company slow its diffusion for the sake of the potential victims? More specifically, if the company has an algorithm that helps to make certain posts viral, artificially promoting their diffusion, should it deny this threatening message access to this algorithm’s help? If so, isn’t this putting the thumb on the scale of political decision-making, e.g. creating an anti-one party bias? If not, isn’t the company creating a hostile environment?

These are the sort of discussions that Congress should be having with these executives: probing to understand how they would handle specific

situations, all of which are likely to arise, or in fact likely have already arisen, thousands of times, and then evaluating the rationales they provide for these choices. This information could then be used to draw up policies. For example, policies might help tip the scales strongly toward certain kinds of moderation decisions, essentially compelling the companies to make particular judgments in most cases but giving them the cover of complying with the law. Alternatively, they could resolve to stay out of this area, estimating that the unintended consequences of regulation might be too great. But in either case, they’d be basing this decision on an understanding of what Facebook and Twitter are doing all the time, rather than what they did one time.

Drew Margolin is professor of communication at Cornell University. He studies online communications and the role of accountability, credibility, and legitimacy in social networks.