Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

Month: December 2015

Categories
open data Sharing Economy Transparency

THE IMPORTANCE OF OPEN DATA TO 21ST CENTURY REGULATION

THE IMPORTANCE OF OPEN DATA TO 21ST CENTURY REGULATION

In the absence of open data standards, companies like Airbnb can define their own terms for behaving in an “open and transparent” way.

  • In early December, Airbnb made headlines by releasing some data on how people are using the company’s platform in New York City.

    In doing so, the company has provided an object lesson in the critical role that data plays (and will continue to play) in government regulation of private companies in the 21st century, and highlighted how ill-equipped governments are to obtain and use this data.

    AIRBNB AND THE STATE

    Over the past year, the use of Airbnb to rent properties in New York has received intense scrutiny from government regulators because of suspicion that a non-trivial amount of rentals listed on the site were in violation of state or city rules. In late 2014, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman released a report examining Airbnb rentals in New York that concluded that “most short-term rentals booked [through Airbnb’s service] in New York violate the law.”

    The recent data release by Airbnb was meant to make good on a promise by the company in response to the Attorney General’s report to be “open and transparent,” and to underscore its contention that the vast majority of the users of its service do so in compliance with state and local laws.

    From the start, the release of this data was viewed with skepticism by some journalists, activists, and others that closely watch the “sharing economy.” In order to view it, interested parties needed to make an appointment to review the data in person at Civic Hall, where Airbnb is an organizational member. The data was highly redacted, was not published to company’s data website, and those viewing it were not allowed to copy it to review it more closely after their scheduled appointment.

    In the weeks that followed the release, outside reviews of the data seem to contradict Airbnb’s primary claim that most of its hosts are using the service lawfully. Others have cited the need for more detailed information to draw definitive conclusions. Though Airbnb has indicated that it would like to share similar data on usage for other cities, there is no indication that the company will release more detailed information for New York City.

    It seems clear that the ultimate question of whether Airbnb’s service is being used lawfully will be determined by examining data on how people use the service. State regulators and others know this and have used legal and other means to try and get this data. Airbnb also knows this, and it has carefully constructed its limited release of data (and its public outreach about this data release) to assert that they are in compliance with the law.

    But if data is at the heart of government’s ability to regulate Airbnb and other “sharing economy” companies, why are they so ill-equipped to obtain and use it?

    REGULATING THE SHARING ECONOMY

    At its core, the sharing economy—whether defined by the example of Uber, Airbnb, or one of the other standard-bearers of this emerging class of business—represents a change in the way that people consume goods and services that is enabled by advances in technology. This change in consumption results in a challenge to an existing, entrenched market actor (for Uber, the taxi industry; for Airbnb, the hotel industry) that is subject to existing government taxes and regulations.

    The challenge for public officials and regulators is to avoid stifling new innovation that can result in better services but at the same time to ensure the fair and equitable application of rules that have been set up to regulate business operations and protect consumers. This is an issue that can have significant political implications. Striking the proper balance between competing needs can indeed be tricky.

    But this challenge is not a new one for governments—tension between regulators and private interests spans the history of collective governance.

    Supporters of the sharing economy commonly criticize existing government regulations as outdated and ill-suited to support innovation by 21st century technology companies. Reputation systems are often pointed to as a 21st century alternative to traditional government regulation, to ensure that sharing economy firms and similar types of companies act in the best interest of consumers.

    But there are a number of common examples where consumers engage in transactions for which they have an abundance of reputational information where the company providing the services is also highly regulated by government. Consider the example of dining out at a restaurant—never before have consumers had as much information as we do now about the quality and cleanliness of food service establishments. And yet, restaurants and food service establishments are highly regulated by multiple levels of government.

    In addition, recent research specifically examining reputation systems used by technology companies suggests that reputation systems and more traditional central regulation can work beneficially in tandem. A recent study from the Ohio State University examined the reputation system used by eBay in conjunction with a buyer protection program—a centrally managed program to provide protections to buyers and recourse if they are dissatisfied with purchases (an approach strikingly similar to the notion of centralized regulation). The study concluded that:

    “[W]e estimate that the total welfare rises by 2.9% after the introduction of the buyer protection program. This increased welfare demonstrates an efficiency gain by having the two mechanisms, the eBay Buyer Protection and eBay Top-Rated Sellers, in place.” [Emphasis added]

    Sharing economy supporters also claim the the growth of companies like Airbnb, Uber, Taskrabbit and others has led to a fundamental change in the economy, with more people opting to become freelancers who—to paraphrase the words of sharing economy companies—become masters of their own destiny. But another recent study from George Mason University suggests that the freelancer phenomenon began long before the advent of sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber:

    “Our data support the claim that there has been an increase in nontraditional employment, but the data refute the idea that this increase is caused by the sharing-economy firms that have arisen since 2008. Instead, we view the rise of sharing-economy firms as a response to a stagnant traditional labor sector and a product of the growing independent workforce.”

    The George Mason study helps to clarify the role that sharing economy companies can play in a changing economy—as opportunities for traditional employment become scarcer, the sharing economy may play an important role in providing employment for a changing workforce.

    But we should not allow these potential benefits to be offset by other negative consequences that may arise if sensible regulations are not applied sharing economy companies.

    INFORMATION ASYMMETRY

    The exercise of regulating private interests by government almost always involves an information asymmetry. Governments seek to discover the occurrence of specific activities that are subject to regulation and to apply relevant rules and taxes to those activities.

    Prior to the digital age, governments sought to (and still seek to) address this asymmetry by hiring groups of trained employees like auditors, inspectors and agents. The job of these individuals is to investigate certain kinds of activities and transactions to determine if the activity in question falls under the authority of a specific regulation or regulating entity, and then to enforce any applicable rules or taxes.

    With the rise of the internet and the dawn of the digital age, governments have employed a wide range of new tools to help ensure that the activities of private interests comply with rules that have been adopted by elected and appointed bodies. The steady march of technical advancement has also made compliance with government mandated taxes and rules easier and more efficient for businesses than ever before.

    The tension between how technology alters production and consumption patterns, and how these new patterns square with existing government rules is not new.

    In the 1960’s, the rise of mail order retailers began a protracted debate on the application of state and local sales taxes to remote sales—a debate that has raged through the time when internet retailers like Amazon developed and flourished, and that still rages today.

    In the early 2000’s, a new class of business—bolstered by the increasing availability of broadband internet access—began to offer consumers new options for telecommunication services that bypassed the Publicly Switched Telephone Network. In a scenario that is remarkably similar to the sharing economy, these new VoIP companies competed against large entrenched industry incumbents that were heavily regulated by government by offering customers improved service, a better customer experience, and lower prices.

    The tension between the new service being offered to consumers VoIP companies and existing government rules was ultimately resolved by an order from the FCC.

    So while the tension with existing tax and regulatory requirements created by technical advances is not new, and existing government institutions have shown they are capable of resolving these tension to the benefit of consumers, things are a little different when we consider the companies that make up the sharing economy.

    Sharing economy companies self identify as “technology companies”—not dispatch companies (in the case of Uber) or hoteliers (in the case of Airbnb) that happen to make heavy use of internet technologies. They position themselves not as providers of a service, but as enablers or connectors that bring together individuals that want to transact with each other.

    The issue with respect to government regulations as they relate to sharing economy companies is not so much that existing regulations are outdated as some have claimed. Instead, it is that the infrastructure for ensuring compliance with these regulations was not constructed for the 21st century—or, at best, the infrastructure has been minimally and very unevenly built.

    Government regulations need to speak the native language of these companies—in the 21st century, this language is almost always data in JSON or CSV format delivered over HTTP.

    A NEW INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REGULATION

    Consider Airbnb’s recent data release—what if the State of New York, as part of its request to the company to share data, had offered Airbnb the ability to publish data to its open data portal?

    The state could have provided the company with a user account and requested that they publish their data using that account at regular intervals to allow for scrutiny by regulators and other interested parties. They could have provided Airbnb with existing guidelines for ensuring privacy as well as metadata guidelines to help ensure data quality.

    Even if Airbnb didn’t opt to publish data to the state’s open data portal, the request to do so would have helped to better qualify the deficiencies in the data the company actually did release. The state’s portal already contains scores of data sets with detailed information from dozens of agencies. Are technology companies like Airbnb less equipped to publish data on their core business operations than the State Liquor Authority? Really?

    With very few exceptions, government open data portals are one-way vehicles—transporting data unidirectionally from government agencies to external consumers. Governments largely don’t view their open data portals as platforms for comingling data from different data producers, much less as vital instruments for successful 21st century regulation.

    But what if they did?

    With complete enough data, the question of whether an Airbnb host is in compliance with the law is fairly easy to spot. The issue is that in the absence of a standard mechanism for sharing this data openly, companies like Airbnb can define their own terms for behaving in an “open and transparent” way.

    We need to expand the way we think about open data so that it’s not just about agencies publishing data to an open data portal, but instead is an integral way that we collectively help ensure the health and stability of our communities. We need to expand our notion of “government as a platform” to go beyond just building new civic apps to helping ensure efficient compliance with rules that are adopted collectively through democratic processes.

    We’ve started to assemble some of the building blocks for this new infrastructure, but we now need to put the pieces in place.

    For example, some governments publish data on zoning rules as open data. But we need to go beyond simply publishing this data and expose these rules through an interface that allow them to be encapsulated in a transaction. This work has only just begun and is,for now,largely driven by actors outside of government.

    Imagine an infrastructure that would allow companies like Airbnb to instantly determine if a potential short-term rental was authorized under local zoning and rental regulations, and to determine if a rental tax was due on the transaction and the amount.

    We are woefully short of this goal.

    In fact, in jurisdictions that specifically require short-term renters to register with the local government, there is no interface that supports an automated check to determine if a specific property has a permit and is authorized to conduct such a rental. The absence of this essential infrastructure to enforce local regulations may go a long way toward explaining the dismal rate of compliance.

    It seems clear that governments will not be able to successfully regulate these new companies without the infrastructure necessary to do so.

    Building the infrastructure for 21st century regulation will require us to expand our ideas of open data and government as a platform. Checking for compliance with tax and regulatory requirements—by either party in a sharing economy transaction—should be as simple as making an API call.

    Constructing this infrastructure won’t be done overnight, and it probably won’t be inexpensive. But the stakes for state and local governments have never been higher.

Categories
First Post

CLAPPING DOWN

CLAPPING DOWN

Government, accountability, and “covert propaganda,” sort of; Star Wars & the candidates; and more.

  • Government as its own worst enemy: The Government Accountability Office has found that the EPA engaged in “covert propaganda” when it rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Thunderclap to battle public opposition to its clean water rule, Eric Lipton and Michael Shear report for the New York Times front page. While government agencies are allowed to promote their policies as long as their role in doing so is disclosed, the GAO found that using Thunderclap violated the law because as the promoted Thunderclap message spread online across Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, people receiving wouldn’t have known it came from the EPA. “I can guarantee you that general counsels across the federal government are reading this report,” Michael Eric Hertz, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, commented. And that’s not a good thing for everyone who wants government to open up more by using social media.
  • The GAO says (on page 13 of its letter to Senator Jim Inhofe, who requested its investigation into the EPA) the problem with how the agency used Thunderclap is that “While EPA’s role was transparent to supporters who joined the campaign [by signing up for the Thunderclap], this does not constitute disclosure to the 1.8 million people potentially reached by the Thunderclap. To those people, it appeared that their friend independently shared a message of his or her support for EPA and clean water.” This is a truly odd way to think about how information spreads today thanks to the online public sphere: back in pre-internet days, if the Surgeon General said smoking was dangerous to your health, and then some random person used that same phrase in a newspaper story or a conversation over the office water cooler, no one thought that was “covert propaganda.” It was just the effect of an idea spreading, one that happened to come from an authoritative government source.
  • The GAO also slammed the EPA for a blog post about the impact of clean water on surfers and brewers by a communications staffer that including links to two advocacy organizations (the NRDC and the Surfrider Foundation) who were themselves supportive of the clean water rule. Both of those third-party sites included calls to “take action,” including buttons that would take a user through the process of contacting Congress, leading the GAO to conclude that the EPA had violated anti-lobbying provisions of relevant legislation.
  • Both of these rulings by the GAO are likely to chill government communications offices and cause them to pull back from engaging in the online public sphere. Let’s hear it for nitpicky government lawyers. It’s worth remembering that back in 2008, when questions arose about the Department of Defense’s years-long plying of retired military officers with special conference calls, meetings, paid travel and privileged access to senior Pentagon officials, all in service of helping to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration’s war efforts, the GAO found that there was no evidence of any “covert” propaganda effort, since the Pentagon didn’t specifically contract with or pay those retired officers for positive commentary. (The fact that many of these same ex-officers were simultaneously employed by major defense contractors as lobbyists was deemed beyond the scope of the GAO’s investigation, as was the fact that the Pentagon spent millions to carefully track what they said to media outlets.)
  • So, just to be clear: if a government agency gets Americans to voluntarily share its message on social media and doesn’t disclose in every instance of that message’s appearance that it came from the agency, that’s “covert propaganda” according to the Government Accounting Office. But if a government agency gets Americans to voluntarily share its message in news media and doesn’t disclose in every instance that they wined and dined these Americans, who they handpicked because they knew they already shared the agency’s point of view, that’s…just fine.
  • While we’re pissed off at government, department of: The Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle has posted an angry open letter to the National Credit Union Administration, announcing the voluntary liquidation of his Internet Credit Union project, and it’s quite a doozy.
  • Tech and the presidential: It will be interesting to see how the presidential candidates try to insinuate themselves into this week’s big cultural event, the release of the new Star Wars movie, “The Force Awakens.” Already, Ted Cruz is calling on users of his mobile engagement app to step up their volunteering in the hopes of winning tickets to see the film opening weekend. Cruz tells ABC News, “I grew up on Star Wars. I collected all the Star Wars action figures, I had them all in a Darth Vader carrying case and with my friends we would play and fight them back and forth. I had a giant millennium falcon.”
  • By the way, now that we know that everything the Cruz campaign does is shaped by behavioral scientists testing the effects of different messages on targeted audiences, it becomes possible to read his campaign moves in a whole new way. Call it reverse engineering of data targeting. Thus, last week’s New York Times story by Matt Flegenheimer about Cruz’s efforts in Iowa to Make Friends with Ordinary People becomes more understandable. As Flegenheimer reported, “While many candidates stick to their stump speech script, a Cruz performance can appear obsessively calibrated, down to the dramatic pauses deployed identically from event to event. He is folksy by memorization, ticking off tales of college football woe or a drawling West Texas farmer with the precision of mass repetition.”
  • This Des Moines Register story by Jennifer Jacobs suggests that Donald Trump’s ground game in the state may be faltering, though it is using the Ground Game 2 mobile canvassing app.
Categories
First Post

PIG LIPSTICK

PIG LIPSTICK

The rise of homelessness in Silicon Valley; the failings of the Open Government Partnership; and more.

  • Tech and the presidential: Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is now openly bragging about its use of psychographic data for voter micro targeting, as Tom Hamburger reports for the Washington Post. Using data from people’s Facebook profiles along with consumer data, the campaign tailors its outreach to individuals with care. Hamburger writes, “For example, personalities that have received high scores for ‘neuroticism’ are believed to be generally fearful, so a pro-gun pitch to them would emphasize the use of firearms for personal safety and might include a picture of a burglar breaking in to a home.” He also nicely notes this: “Cruz, a critic of excessive government data collection, has been notably aggressive about gathering personal information for his campaign.”
  • Hate search: Using weekly Google search data from 2004 to 2013, Evan Soltas and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz write that they “found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.” They also estimate that “negative attitudes against Muslims today are higher than prejudice against any group in any month since 2004, when Google began preserving detailed data on search volumes.” The only silver lining in all their findings: after President Obama mentioned that Muslims in America include many top athletes and soldiers, searches on those word combinations also spiked.
  • Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, posts on Medium that “Let’s not let fear defeat our values. We must support Muslim and other minority communities in the US and around the world.”
  • Monica Potts’ story for The New Republic on homelessness in Palo Alto is powerful and heartbreaking.
  • What open government? Steve Adler, chief information strategist of IBM, writes that, despite being a “big fan” of the Open Government Partnership (OGP)—a signature international transparency initiative galvanized by the Obama Administraton—the entire project “needs a reboot.” He adds, “We are increasing membership but not increasing open government, and civil society is increasingly cynical about OGP. Many are saying it is a whitewash, lipstick on a pig, giving national governments a nice pretty facade of openness behind which they write laws restricting access to executive emails, forbidding foreign funding of journalism, empowering universal surveillance, and even worse.” And he asks some really good questions, like “Why is an organization dedicated to transparency having secret leadership meetings?”
  • Watching their words: Angie Drobnic Holan, a fact-checker with Politifact, offers some tantalizing evidence that the online fact-checking movement is having an impact on politicians, with some “vetting their prepared statements more carefully and giving their campaign ads extra scrutiny,” and media organizations highlighting fact-checking in their coverage “because so many people click on fact-checking stories after a debate or high-profile news event.”
  • This is civic tech: A boycott app named Bingdela has taken Taiwan by storm, giving Taiwanese a way to vent their anger at a court ruling clearing a major manufacturer of a food scandal, Paul Mazur reports for the New York Times.
Categories
movements poland Protests

IN POLAND, A CITIZENS’ MOVEMENT ACTS AS WATCHDOG OF THE RULING PARTY

IN POLAND, A CITIZENS’ MOVEMENT ACTS AS WATCHDOG OF THE RULING PARTY

People are building a nonpartisan movement in Poland to counter the consolidation of political power by a single party.

“The poster child for European integration seems more like a moody teenager.”

This sentence, from last week’s issue of The Economist, refers to Poland, which was under the Communist Regime until 1989 and only joined the European Union in 2004.

In the past six months, the country went through a significant power shift that saw the populist Law and Justice party take control of the Polish political scene: last May, their candidate Andrzej Duda, a lawyer and former MEP, was elected President. Just a few months later, in October, the party won the absolute majority in the Parliamentary elections, a first for the 26-year old democracy.

But in less than a month, the new government has prompted many people to take to the streets to protest the party’s first, very controversial steps towards controlling the judicial power.

“Poland’s ruling party misunderstood its democratic mandate” is the message spread by the We Are Watching You coalition (in Polish: Patrzymy na Was), an informal, nonpartisan group of citizens, many of whom are active in non-governmental organizations, including Panoptykon Foundation’s Katarzyna Szymielewicz and Jakub Górnicki, of Fundacja ePaństwo, a partner of Personal Democracy Media and the organizer of the Personal Democracy Forum PL-CEE.

The group has been leading protests in the capital, Warsaw, as well as in other cities, calling for democratic standards, human rights, and the rule of law in Poland: the government’s actions, they claim, are seriously endangering the separation of powers in the country.

CHECKS AND BALANCES

The political clash started when the new parliament voted in five new judges of the Polish Constitutional Court (the highest judicial authority of the country) taking advantage of a legal conundrum.

But the critical point was reached when, as reported by Associated Press, President Duda “quickly swore in four of them in the middle of the night before the court itself could rule on the validity of the earlier appointments by the previous government.”

The controversial road that the Law and Justice party (in Polish: Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, abbreviated in PiS) is taking, had been paved by the previous government, led by the more moderate Civic Platform party, that had elected both the previous President and Prime Minister.

At Politico Europe, law professor Maciej Kisilowski explains:

Because of scheduled retirements, as many as five slots on the court—one-third of the total makeup of 15—opened around election time. Three judges retired in early November, a few days before the new parliament convened, but after the election day. The remaining two will step down in early December.
In an aggressively partisan way, Civic Platform passed a law allowing the outgoing parliament to choose all five judges. Last Thursday, the Constitutional Court decided the law was unconstitutional insofar as it permitted the election of two “December” judges. The other three judges, however, were chosen properly and, in early November, should have started their term in office.

On December 3rd, the Constitutional Court ruled that three of those earlier appointments were valid, but two were not.

WHO’RE YOU GONNA CALL? A SUPERCITIZEN!

At the moment, the political opposition to the Law and Justice party is also protesting in streets and squares. We Are Watching You, though, is not built on political partisanship, but rather on civic action, Górnicki tells Civicist.

Jakub Górnicki is a journalist, open data advocate, and longtime civic activist at Fundacja ePaństwo. We spoke via Skype on Thursday morning, before a meeting of the We Are Watching You coalition.

“We are not against this government,” he says, “but against the standards it’s setting.”

Currently, the citizens’ coalition is choosing to organize and disseminate information through social media and not to have leaders.

This appears to be both a strategy and a necessity: given the deeply polarized public debate, which is reflected in the mainstream media, not putting anyone as the face and voice of the protest will make it harder for the government-supporting media to attack people in the coalition and undermine their stances, Górnicki explains.

Instead, they have created the figure of the “SuperCitizen” (in Polish: SuperObywatel) as a voice to share information while emphasizing the civic aspect of their protest.

Who is the SuperCitizen? Here’s how he/she is described on the coalition website:

The SuperCitizen […] draws its power from the Constitution and from human rights. […] She knows what rights are and is not afraid to use them. She avoids political disputes, because she knows that it divides rather than unite, it breaks things, instead than repairing them. For her, the most important things are standards and she expect them to be implemented by all officiating authority or those who are in opposition.

In the video of one of the protests, people shout “Constitution!” and “Democracy!” and wave signs that mean “freedom of expression” and freedom of information.”

The voiceover says “Citizens have to exercise their rights.”

Many members of the coalition, though speaking in a personal capacity, are active in non-governmental organizations and have a long record of defending human rights: therefore, Górnicki explains, they are used to scrutinizing the actions of every government, criticizing if necessary, and always try to create a dialogue with them.

“But the president broke the law and now it seems impossible to talk with the government,” he adds.

The active citizens that form the coalition are also worried about the new course of the ruling party for soon-to-come reforms. In their public statement, they write:

…it only seems to be the beginning of a total makeover of various areas of public and private life. PiS has announced immediate adoption of the new anti-terrorist law. Another change expected within a month will affect public media, focusing their role on promoting national values. PiS is also planning major changes in Poland’s social and educational policy, including rolling back school reform as well as introducing financial benefits for parents with two children or more, the latter involving collection of sensitive data in a central database of all beneficiaries.

It is not clear what’s next.

Currently, a petition on Change.org has about 2,000 signatures—but this might not mean much: even if citizens were able to gather signatures for a referendum on these issues (the law in Poland requires one million signatures from a population of 38.5 million), such referendum would still have to be approved by the Parliament to happen”—something that does not seem likely to happen, given the absolute majority that the Law and Justice party holds.

On Thursday night, when I asked the activists if there were any expected developments or actions set for the weekend, one of them half-jokingly replied: “With the extremely dynamic situation we have here in Poland you never know what’s gonna happen in next few hours.”

On Friday morning, Civicist was informed that the government is refusing to print the Constitutional Court ruling in the official gazette, therefore confirming that it will not acknowledge as legal the decision of the highest court in the country.

The center-left leaning newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reports:

“Yesterday the President of the Constitutional Court President Andrew Rzepliński confirmed to us that Minister Kemp [Beata Kemp is the Justice Minister, elected with the Law and Justice party] sent him a letter in which it informs that the publication of the judgment in the Official Gazette is paused because it was issued by improperly constituted court and is therefore invalid.”

As the only option seems to be taking the protest to the streets again, Górnicki makes clear that We Are Watching You will keep being a strictly civic force, independent from media and political parties: “It’s better for us to build a movement,” he concludes.

Categories
First Post

THE WILD WEST

THE WILD WEST

Using Facebook profiles to target voters, without permission; screens talking back; and more.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, now surging, is using a data analytics firm whose prime product is a database of millions of Facebook users whose profile information was “harvested largely without their permission,” Harry Davies reports for The Guardian. The firm, Cambridge Analytica, which specializes in “behavioral microtargeting,” claims to be able to match Facebook data to existing voter data. Its Facebook database was reportedly obtained by an academic who paid Mechanical Turk users to let him access their Facebook profiles, which allowed him not only to harvest their personal data and likes, but also those of their friends.
  • The ACLU’s chief technologist, Christopher Soghoian, said the Guardian’s findings were “troubling,” adding, ““What it essentially means is there is no one regulating campaigns’ privacy data and security practices. So it means you have a wild west, where the campaigns can do whatever they want and get away with it.” It’s worth noting that in 2012, the Obama campaign built a similar (but much larger) dataset of Facebook users through its “I’m in” app and Targeted Sharing project.
  • A coalition of liberal and Muslim advocacy groups organized by online advocacy group CREDO Action are calling on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to back away from retired General Wesley Clark, a campaign surrogate who recently called for the internment of some American Muslims, Alex Seitz-Wald reports for MSNBC.com.
  • Don’t miss our Christine Capaiuolo’s report for our new “Rethinking Debates” series on how Twitter finally managed to get a real-time comment from someone watching a presidential debate into the actual debate. As Twitter’s director of news Adam Sharp told her, ““For 55 years, we’ve all been yelling at the screens in presidential debates…This is really the first time the screen talked back.”
  • Media and democracy: If, as Craig Newmark of Craigslist likes to say, “the media are the immune system of democracy,” then this article by Marc Levy in the Cambridge Day, decisively debunking an attack on a local Muslim city councillor by Breitbart.com, is a great example. We’re going to need a lot of this kind of journalism, because anti-Muslim hysteria in America has never been greater. Notably, the Breitbart story appeared in the sponsored news feeds of many Cambridge residents, suggesting that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to defend Muslims may need a little work.
  • Related: If you’ve ever doubted the value of a seemingly obscure report by a gadfly good-government group on the political process, read David Howard King’s story in the Gotham Gazette on how the New York Metropolitan Council on Housing’s 2013 report on how real-estate moguls were abusing a giant loophole in the state’s campaign finance laws set off the corruption inquiry that took down Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. The reform battle isn’t won yet, to be sure.
  • This is civic tech: Marcus Westbury and his Renew Newcastle nonprofit, which is credited with catalyzing the turnaround of that once-depressed Australian city, gets a lavish and well-deserved write-up in The New Republic by Greg Lindsay. “What we’ve done is change the software of the city,” Westbury says. “We’ve changed how it behaves. We’ve changed how it responds to people who want to try things, do things, and run their own experiments.”
  • Here’s our Nick Judd, writing the same story on Newcastle and Westbury for techPresident, nearly five years ago.
  • Very belated but still worth noting: this analysis by Alex Hill of Detroitography shows not just the harsh effects of Detroit’s digital divide, but the “promising” value of the Improve Detroit (aka SeeClickFix) smartphone app, which is drawing user submissions from across the city. (h/t Ben Berkowitz)
  • The Knight Foundation announced $1.2 million in funding for CODE2040, which works to close the diversity gap in tech, building on an earlier grant of $400,000 in 2014 as part of its News Challenge cycle on strengthening the Internet. The money will help expand CODE2040’s Fellows Program, which places black and Hispanic software engineering students into internships with top tech companies, and its Technical Application Prep program which prepares students for tech careers through coaching, mentoring, retreats, and workshops.
  • What sharing economy? Uber is lobbying hard to get Ohio and Florida to join Arkansas, North Carolina, and Indiana in classifying its drivers as independent contractors, not employees, as Andrew Hawkins reports for The Verge.
  • Former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, last seen predicting that 2016 would be “the (jeez, I can’t even remember the name of the app) election,” is joining crowdfunding platform GoFundMe as its VP of Communications and Policy. Comparing his experience on the first Obama campaign to the site’s users, he writes, “Ultimately, GoFundMe is all about using technology and social connections to empower people to help people.”
  • Well, not all people. I wonder if Pfeiffer knows about GoFundMe’s refusal to let women use the site to fund abortions, while permitting “pro-life” campaigners to use it to raise money for their causes.
  • Oh, yeah. Remember Meerkat?
Categories
Debates Election 2016 Social Media

How Twitter and CBS Found the ‘Voice of the Crowd’

How Twitter and CBS Found the ‘Voice of the Crowd’

“For 55 years, we’ve all been yelling at the screens in presidential debates…This is really the first time the screen talked back.”

  • This is Christine Cupaiuolo’s first report for the Rethinking Debates project. While the vast majority of stories will be about the ways that debate producers around the world are experimenting with using interactive technology and social media to make these events more meaningful and responsive to public concerns, this story highlights an unexpected breakthrough here in the United States: the first time in which a member of the viewing public was able to talk back virtually to the candidates in real-time.

    Political debate watchers in the United States have been offered more ways than ever this year to view the presidential primary debates and to interact with the host networks and the candidates.

    Yet after six debates—four Republican and two Democrat—and tens of thousands of questions submitted via Facebook and Instagram, real-time opinion meters and polls, streaming Twitter reactions, live coverage on Snapchat, and livestreaming in virtual reality, only one attempt to engage the public broke through the wall dividing candidates and viewers.

    It happened Nov. 14 during the Democratic debate in Iowa, when a real-time comment on Twitter was posed to a candidate. While it took all of eight minutes for debate organizers to select, vet, and read on air a #DemDebate tweet rebuking presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, it could be argued that the lead-up took decades.

    “For 55 years, we’ve all been yelling at the screens in presidential debates,” said Adam Sharp, head of News, Government and Elections at Twitter. “This is really the first time the screen talked back.”

    CBS, host of the first-ever televised presidential debate in 1960, teamed up with Twitter for the event at Drake University, marking the first time the social media platform was an official partner in a U.S. debate (Twitter has advised other networks hosting debates).

    The two media companies started working in tandem over the summer, said Sharp, testing out curation methods during the other networks’ debates and building on ways Twitter has been used in previous election cycles and in other countries.

    Past debates, for example, may have included a counter showing number of tweets per minute. This time around, online viewers saw a graphic cycling through the volume of conversation as well as each candidates’ share of the conversation. Visuals also captured the topics people were tweeting about and debate moments that drove conversation (here are the top moments). Twitter collaborated with Postano, a social visualization and measurement platform, to display data on a huge digital video wall in the spin room.

    Using Curator — a tool Twitter rolled out earlier this year to help media publishers search, filter and curate tweets for display on web, mobile or TV — CBS producers could select and display a scrolling timeline of tweets that ran alongside the candidates on CBSNews.com.

    #demdebate - cbs online

    Photo: @gov

    Photo: @gov

    Photo: @gov

    “That’s where it started, with the data telling a story,” said Sharp.

    As the debate was happening, producers saw a spike around Clinton’s comment linking Wall Street campaign contributions to her work as a senator helping to rebuild downtown Manhattan after 9/11. Sharp said CBS used Curator as well as TweetDeck and Twitter itself to gather perspective on how Twitter users were reacting. Upon noticing that the majority of tweets were highly critical, the search was on for a tweet that would represent the consensus that was forming.

    “It was immediately apparent that this was the moment that was driving conversation, this was the moment people were going to be referring to at the water cooler the next day,” said Sharp. “Finding a tweet that referenced that wouldn’t be just picking a face in the crowd, it was actually picking a voice of the crowd.”

    Then a comment by University of Iowa law professor Andy Grewal surfaced:

     

    “I couldn’t believe the tone-deafness,” Grewal later told the Des Moines Register. “I felt compelled to make an actual critical remark.”

    Grewal had fewer than 200 followers when producers found the tweet, so it wasn’t the most re-tweeted comment when it drew CBS’s attention (it’s now been retweeted more than 2,800 times and liked by more than 3,000 Twitter users). Being an Iowa voter helped.

    “The fact that it came from an independent voter,” added Sharp, “in Iowa City, in his pajamas, who had never live-tweeted an event before, really just highlights, I think, the potential moving forward.”

    Before submitting the comment for air, CBS producers had to quickly vet Grewal, verifying his bio and reviewing past tweets for any sign he might be working for another campaign.

    “That’s where it gets important to have both that algorithmic layer and that human editorial judgment paired together, but neither can exist without the other,” said Sharp. “The reality is, with many millions of tweets about one of these primary debates, a human without help from the algorithm would drown under the volume. The key is, how do you get them at least to the right part of the haystack so they could start poking around a little bit more.”

    The candidates had already moved on from Wall Street contributions and were discussing gun control when the debate moderator, John Dickerson, interrupted them:

    JOHN DICKERSON: Sorry, I’m gonna bring in [CBS News Congressional Correspondent] Nancy Cordes with a question from Twitter about this exchange.

    (OFF-MIC CONVERSATION)

    NANCY CORDES: —about guns but also about your conversation on campaign finance. And Secretary Clinton, one of the tweets we saw—said that I’ve never seen a candidate invoke 9/11 to justify millions of Wall Street donations until now—the idea being that, yes, you are a champion of the community after 9/11. But what does that have to do with taking big donations?

    HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I’m sorry that whoever tweeted that had that impression because I worked closely with New Yorkers after 9/11 for my entire first term to rebuild. And so yes, I did know people. I had a lot of folks give me donations from all kinds of backgrounds, say, “I don’t agree with you on everything. But I like what you do. I like how you stand up. I’m going to support you.” And I think that is absolutely appropriate.

    The tweet was shown on a screen above the candidates as it was read, making it visible to all debate viewers. Reaction online was swift, with praise coming from other media outlets.

    Micah Grimes, social media strategist for NBC Nightly News, tweeted:

    CNN’s Brian Stelter, retweeting Grimes, wrote:

    Grewal’s tweet led to a short exchange involving Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley about Wall Street’s economic and political power. Yet the comment also had a longer-lasting effect, giving the controversy over Clinton’s Wall Street ties more volume and validity in the post-debate narrative.

    It was the level of impact Twitter officials had hoped to achieve going into the debate. Sharp said they wanted to show other news outlets that a Twitter-enabled debate could be “meaningful and relevant.”

    “For every prior debate since August, [CBS] producers have been using these tools to surface tweets around those debates. They have a very good handle of what type of content and what quality they’d be able to raise during their own broadcast,” said Sharp.

    “And now, undoubtedly, producers of future debates know, Oh, I can get a great question from Twitter, and I can get it in real-time. I don’t have to either take something stale that’s weeks old, or something that’s more stunty or kitschy, because that code’s now been broken, if you will.”

    (In other words, there would be no doubt about the appropriateness of the question, the way there was, say, in 1994, when President Clinton was asked “boxers or briefs” during a MTV town hall. Answer: “Usually briefs. I can’t believe she did that.”)

    DISMANTLING THE DEBATE DIVIDE

    Yet we still have a ways to go in U.S. political debates before technological innovation revolutionizes public engagement. Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University and author of “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age,” cited numerous factors that deter innovation—including risk-averse candidates used to controlling everything from podium height to lighting, and news outlets that see themselves as solely responsible for pressing candidates on tough issues and deciding which questions get asked.

    “Of course they are paying attention to what the public is saying and feeding that back to the candidates when it resonates,” said Stromer-Galley. “But if it doesn’t match the politicians’ agenda or the journalists’ agenda, you’re not going to get new kinds of questions, new kinds of voices, new sorts of topics.”

    There’s still something to be said for incremental change, she added. “When you think about it, we had a debate in 1960 and we didn’t have a televised debate again until the 70s. We’ve had debates routinely after that, and the format—again, very slowly—has evolved to include more voices. And now with digital media, the information infrastructure that we live in opens up additional opportunities for the public to be more directly involved.”

    The next Republican debate is scheduled for Dec. 15 in Las Vegas and will be sponsored by CNN and Facebook. The Democrats follow on Dec. 19 in New Hampshire, in a debate sponsored by ABC News, WMUR-TV, and the New Hampshire Union Leader.

    Sharp said Twitter expects to be involved in more debates but wouldn’t provide specifics. Viewers, however, should expect future collaborations with news networks to be equally substantive and gimmick-free.

    “We don’t want to give another excuse to dismiss the voter and centralize access to the candidates,” Sharp said. “By demonstrating that you can have this popular involvement and engagement in a meaningful, relevant way, it actually opens that door for, I think, a broader civic dialogue to be able to take place.”

    Sign up for the twice-monthly Rethinking Debates newsletter for the latest posts and news.

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First Post

TAKING A STAND

TAKING A STAND

White supremacists see website traffic increase; air pollution v. big data; and more.

  • Trump watch: A very big swath of civil society in America is signing onto the We Are Better Than This statement, which decries the “rising tide of hatred, violence and suspicion in America” and “pledges to stand with any community that is targeted by hateful rhetoric and violence.” The statement was initiated by MoveOn.org, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, United We Dream, the Center for Community Change, Demos, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Arab-American Association of New York SEIU and Color of Change. Andrew Rasiej and I are signers on behalf of Civic Hall. Please add your name.
  • White supremacists like David Duke and Stormfront founder Don Black say Donald Trump’s campaign has revitalized their movement, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger reports. Black says he is upgrading Stormfront’s servers to deal with the steady increase in traffic he has seen since Trump began campaigning. “He’s made it ok to talk about these incredible concerns of European Americans today, because I think European Americans know they are the only group that can’t defend their own essential interests and their point of view,” Duke says.
  • An online petition aimed at the British Parliament calling for Trump to be refused entry based on laws against hate speech has received more than 400,000 signatures, well beyond the 100,000 needed for it to prompt a parliamentary debate, Dan Bilefsky reports for the New York Times.
  • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posts that “I want to add my voice in support of Muslims in our community and around the world,” adding that “As a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up against attacks on all communities….If you’re a Muslim in this community, as the leader of Facebook I want you to know that you are always welcome here and that we will fight to protect your rights and create a peaceful and safe environment for you.”
  • Facebook’s head of global product policy Monika Bickert has responded to a Change.org petition calling on its to do more to delete accounts supporting ISIS or praising terrorism, saying “there is no place on Facebook for terrorists, terrorist propaganda, or the praising of terror.” The petition had collected more than 135,000 signatures, as Karissa Bell reports for Mashable.
  • “Darth Trump” is the first political mashup of the presidential season that really hits the mark, in my humble opinion.
  • Samir Chopra points out that part of what is driving the Donald Trump moment is “a media corps that prefers sensation to substance.” As he notes, the Republican primary race has gotten twice as much coverage on TV as the Democratic race, with Trump alone getting more airtime than the entire Democratic field.
  • Nate Silver tweets that Bernie Sanders has slightly more supporters than Trump, but Trump as gotten 23 times as much coverage on the nightly network news.
  • What sharing economy?: Remember that Freelancers Union study claiming that 54 million Americans are freelancers? Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, points out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a much lower estimate of 14.8 million self-employed workers. How to explain the difference? Mishel writes, the Freelancers Union estimate “is of anyone ‘engaged in supplemental, temporary, project- or contract-based work, within the past 12 months’ and even includes people who ‘freelance’ but do not have any 1099 income—stretching this group beyond recognition. In contrast, the BLS estimate reflects those whose primary job is or primary income comes from self-employment.” Why does this matter? Because, as Mishel carefully lays out, the Freelancers study has been used to claim that the gig economy is exploding, with tens of millions supposedly supporting themselves that way. And that doesn’t appear to be the case.
  • Likewise, a new study from Intuit and Emergent Research finds something similar: “the typical on-demand worker is a part-timer, working 12 hours a week via his or her primary platform and collecting 22 percent of their household income from work obtained through online marketplaces or applications that connect providers to customers.”
  • Tooling up: Accela is partnering with APPCityLife, which the companies predict will make it a lot easier for government agencies to create and manage their own mobile apps. Big congrats to both, and we can’t help but notice that it was at Civic Hall that members Lisa Abeyta (for APPCityLife) and Mark Headd (for Accela, along with his colleague Seth Axthelm) met to set the partnership in motion.
  • Paul Taylor, editor-at-large of Governing magazine, predicts that 2016 will be the year of the government API.
  • IBM is using big data to help cities like Beijing fight air pollution, Alex Howard reports for the Huffington Post.
  • Open Knowledge has released the third annual Global Open Data Index, ranking 122 countries by the availability and accessibility of data including government spending, election results, procurement, and environmental data.
  • YouTube is adding a new “Trending” tab to its web and mobile apps that will show popular videos as they start taking off, Harrison Weber reports for VentureBeat.
  • Really brave new world: Don’t miss sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson’s new short story, which takes us into a future without hunger and a very angry Supreme Court. (h/t Gideon Lichfield and This.cm)
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First Post

HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED

HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED

DemTools 2.0; uncovering the inventor of BitCoin; Lord Voldemort v. Trump; and more.

    • This is civic tech: Using the crowdfunding platform LaunchGood, Muslim Americans have raised nearly $120,000 to support the victims of last week’s mass shooting in San Bernadino, Teresa Watanabe reports for the Los Angeles Times. LaunchGood itself is a creation of Chris Blauvelt, a Detroit resident who converted to Islam three months before 9/11, and it has raised $5 million for 473 projects in 39 countries, with Muslim Americans accounting for 80 percent of that money, she reports.
    • The National Democratic Institute (NDI) today is unveiling DemTools 2.0, an upgrade and expansion of NDI’s tools for democracy and civil society, including three new applications designed to “help citizens report problems in their communities, help civic groups manage data, and better prepare governments to manage petitions from their people.” The event will feature keynote remarks by former Vermont Governor Howard Dean and a panel discussion including leaders from the USIP PeaceTech Lab, the White House Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Sunlight Foundation, Amazon Web Services, and NuCivic.Register for the livestream (12 – 2 p.m. ET) or join the conversation on Twitter with #DemTools.
    • Trump watch: 68 percent of Trump’s Republican supporters say they would still back him as a third-party candidate, Susan Page reports for USA Today.
    • Best response to Donald Trump’s racism: Harry Potter book author J.K Rowling, who tweeted, in response to a BBC story that people are calling Trump “Lord Voldemort”: “How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.” That’s been retweeted 176,000 times as of this morning.
    • Brave new world: Americans attracted to ISIS online are finding a seductive “echo chamber” Scott Shane, Matt Apuzzo and Eric Schmitt report for the New York Times. It’s consistent message, they write, is that “the Islamic State is a social movement devoted to protecting Muslims and fighting an unfair global economic system; that it does not discriminate on the basis of race or nationality; that it uses violence in self-defense and in ways that mimic Western films and video games; and that Westerners who join the fight in Syria and Iraq are normal people fighting a just war.”
    • Fast Company’s Sarah Kessler reports on proposed legislation sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) that would require social media companies to report online terrorist activist to the government. In response, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s international director, Danny O’Brien, said: “Social media companies shouldn’t take on the job of censoring speech on behalf of any government, and they certainly shouldn’t do so voluntarily. These kinds of speech restrictions set online platforms on a very slippery slope. Who defines “terrorism”? Does Facebook, for example, intend to enforce its policies only against those that the United States government describes as terrorists, or will it also respond if Russia says someone is a terrorist? Israel? Saudi Arabia? Syria? It’s particularly worrisome that we’re not even talking here about speech that’s actually been found unlawful.”
    • Seventeen consumer organizations led by the Consumer Federation of America have written to the House Financial Services Committee expressing their opposition to the Data Security Act of 2015, arguing that the draft bill would have the effect of weakening existing state protections and eliminating the means of redress currently available to consumers in many states.
    • Andy Greenberg and Gwern Branwen think they’ve figured out who invented BitCoin, as they report for Wired.
    • Showing once again its acumen in skating to where the hockey puck is going, media startup News Deeply is now launching Arctic Deeply, to focus on the economic, environmental and social ramifications of the melting of the Arctic sea ice, Jessica Hullinger reports for Fast Company.
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HATE SPEECH

HATE SPEECH

How the Huffington Post is changing Trump coverage; crowdsourcing anti-corruption in Nepal; and more.

  • Trump watch: Donald Trump’s call to stop allowing Muslims from entering the United States was denounced by most of the Republican field along with the chairmen of the Republican state parties in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, Yahoo Politics Jon Ward reports.
  • The one major Republican presidential candidate who has so far refused to denounce Trump’s proposal is Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose rise in the polls in Iowa may have triggered Trump’s latest blast, as Margaret Hartmann reports for New York magazine.
  • Speaking in South Carolina, Cruz only said this about Trump’s call: “That is not my policy. I’ve introduced legislation in the Senate that would put in place a three-year moratorium on refugees coming from countries where ISIS or al Qaeda can control a substantial amount of territory.” How reasonable.
  • It is also worth noting that until Cruz’s remarks on Saturday, promising to “carpet-bomb” ISIS into “oblivion” and asserting that “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out,” the last major American presidential candidate to suggest using nuclear weapons on one of our adversaries was Barry Goldwater, who ran in 1964. The Republican Senator from Arizona suggested using low-yield A-bombs in North Vietnam, to defoliate forests and destroy infrastructure.
  • In the wake of Trump’s latest shart on the political process, the Huffington Post’s proprietor Arianna Huffington writes that the news site will stop treating him as an “entertainment” topic (if you recall, the site’s editors had made a big deal back in July of putting coverage of his campaign in their entertainment section). Huffington didn’t mince words:

    Now that Trump, aided by the media, has doubled down on the cruelty and know-nothingness that defined his campaign’s early days, the ‘can you believe he said that?’ novelty has curdled and congealed into something repellent and threatening — laying bare a disturbing aspect of American politics. We believe that the way we cover the campaign should reflect this shift. And part of that involves never failing to remind our audience who Trump is and what his campaign really represents.

  • Our borderless world: Speaking at a private fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, former President Bill Clinton made a smart point about Trump’s desire to insulate America from the outside world by building walls and banning immigrants: “Even if Donald Trump builds his wall at the Rio Grande, the Internet will pierce it,” he said, as Gabriel Debenedetti reports for Politico.
  • Related: Could tech companies like Facebook and Twitter do more to counter how ISIS and its supporters use social media? That’s the question at the heart of Nicole Perlroth and Mike Isaac’s excellent front-page story in today’s New York Times.
  • Opining in the New York Times online, Google’s Eric Schmidt offers some interesting ideas for how to insure that the global Internet remains a force for open society: “We should make it ever easier to see the news from another country’s point of view, and understand the global consciousness free from filter or bias. We should build tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media — sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment. We should target social accounts for terrorist groups like the Islamic State, and remove videos before they spread, or help those countering terrorist messages to find their voice. Without this type of leadership from government, from citizens, from tech companies, the Internet could become a vehicle for further disaggregation of poorly built societies, and the empowerment of the wrong people, and the wrong voices.” Not clear from his oped is who “we” are and how “we” decide who “the wrong people” are.
  • Brendan Sasso reports for National Journal that the way Washington may (temporarily) quell the hot debate over encryption and national security is by creating a commission to study the problem.
  • Megan Stiles of the Campaign for Liberty warns that surveillance hawks on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in Congress are trying to push the worst provisions of both their CISA bills to President Obama’s desk before the end of the year.
  • Back to the Internet election: Ever since an obscure Southern governor named Jimmy Carter surged to national attention by winning the Iowa caucuses in 1976, the political class has treated the state as an outsized kingmaker in our crazy-long presidential selection process. But as Emma Roller writes in a smart oped for today’s New York Times, with the campaigns spending little of their money (just 3%) in Iowa, and candidates like Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum dropping out or teetering at the edge despite making strong pushes in Iowa, it now appears “voters are more likely to engage with a candidate on Facebook or Twitter than on a rope line.” This, she says, feeds a campaign process that rewards “going viral” and winning the “media primary” by being as outrageous as possible.
  • Following an online poll of its members, along with the votes of its nine state affiliates and four national organizational partners, the Working Families Party has endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for president. The membership vote was 87.4% for Sanders, 11.5% for Clinton and 1.1% for Martin O’Malley. The party has not released a tally of how many people voted.
  • Democracy for America, the million-member organization that is the follow-on to Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, has announced an online survey of its members on who it should endorse in the Democratic presidential primary.
  • Here’s Twitter’s list of the top ten political tweets (for America) of 2015.
  • Getting under Uber’s hood: Longtime labor reporter Steven Greenhouse’s in-depth feature for The American Prospect on the efforts of Uber drivers to improve their income and working conditions is a must-read. His key point: Uber has relentlessly been squeezing its drivers’ income while continuing to deny that they are employees. (Also, remember when the “gig economy” and where the presidential candidates stood on Uber seemed like a hot issue? Ah, good times.)
  • This is civic tech:Tom Steinberg’s offers a list of future digital institutions that he predicts may eventually get built by governments, building on his earlier post listing the ones that exist today.
  • Writing for Civicist, Eilis O’Neill reports on “What anti-corruption work looks like in rural Nepal.”
  • Congrats to Baratunde Thurston, Civic Hall member and longtime friend of Personal Democracy Media, who is going to be honored at SXSW Interactive 2016 by being inducted into its Hall of Fame.
  • Your moment of zen: If you need some mental floss to clear your head from is beginning to feel like Donald Trump’s daily version of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate, watch “Call to Earth: A Message from the World’s Astronauts to COP21.“
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First Post

OMINOUS TIDINGS

OMINOUS TIDINGS

Politicians want Silicon Valley to “disrupt” terrorism; Donald Trump’s words; and more.

  • Crypto wars: Speaking to the nation from the Oval Office Sunday night, President Obama suggested that among the new steps his administration will take in response to the emergence of home-grown terrorist attacks against Americans is to “urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.”
  • Speaking at the Brookings Institution, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she wants Silicon Valley to do more to “disrupt” or take down Islamic State websites, videos and encrypted communications, David Sanger reports for the New York Times. (Note to TechCrunch Disrupt: don’t think she means you.)
  • Deepa Seetharaman, Alistair Barr, and Yoree Koh report for the Wall Street Journal on how Facebook, YouTube and Twitter already monitor and block some objectionable content but worry about censoring legitimate news.
  • Leaked documents obtained by Le Monde suggest that France’s government is seeking to ban free and/or shared Wi-Fi during a state of emergency and to forbid the use of the Tor anonymous browser, Sebastian Anthony of Ars Technica reports. (h/t Tim Karr)
  • “To this day, there’s hardly any publicly available evidence that the Paris attackers used encrypted communications to plan their attack,” Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation writes in the Columbia Journalism Review. That fact hasn’t stopped journalists, who actually need strong encryption to do their jobs, from parroting government officials claiming that it was time to “ban encryption.”
  • Related: Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project, which has specialized in developing secure communications tools for human rights activists for more than a decade, describes “6 ways law enforcement can track terrorists in an encrypted world,” for Technology Review.
  • Trump watch: The New York Times’ Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman took a close look at the 95,000 words that tripped from Donald Trump’s tongue over the last week, and found “many of them ominous.”
  • Remember net neutrality? Susan Crawford explains how Comcast’s sly promotion of “usage-based billing allows a cascade of practices that will make a mockery of net neutrality.”
  • Related: The FCC defended its new neutrality regulations in court Friday, and while the case will undoubtedly get pushed up to the Supreme Court, observers felt the legal ground to maintain its reclassification of internet service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act was solid, Dante D’Orazio reports for The Verge.
  • Natasha Singer reports for the New York Times on how consumer technology is designed to addict you to constant distractions, and why some in the industry like Tristan Harris of Google (and friend of PDM) are fighting back.
  • This is civic tech: New York City’s Big Apps competition, which just announced its latest round of winners, has come “a long way from the Washington, D.C., local government’s ‘Apps for Democracy’ contest in 2008, which hinted at the promise of opening up data for public benefit, but failed to deliver meaningful long-term social change or services,” Alex Howard of the Huffington Post writes.
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