Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

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Snapchat voters; mapping civic hackers on Github; and more.

  • Anonymous is claiming to have disabled more than 6,000 Twitter accounts tied to ISIS, Elizabeth Weise reports for USA Today. According to McGill University’s Gabriella Coleman, an expert on Anonymous Weise cites, the people participating “include French hackers, military geeks, Syrians who are being harmed by IS, some Tunisians and some Palestinian hackers who live overseas.”

  • At a cybersecurity conference in New York yesterday, FBI director James Comey and Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance reiterated their insistence that encrypted smartphones sold by Apple and other companies were hindering their ability to obtain crucial evidence in serious cases, Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger report for the New York Times.

  • Somewhat confounding that argument, it appears the terrorists suspected of being involved in last week’s attack in Paris used unencrypted smartphones, Dan Froomkin notes for The Intercept.

  • Many of the Democratic-leaning tech moguls who backed President Obama’s Priorities USA SuperPAC in 2012 are holding back from donating to it now that it’s backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Gabriel Debenedetti reports for Politico.

  • Two Clintons, one cup: Bill and Hillary Clinton have raised at least $3 billion for their political campaigns and foundation from roughly 336,000 individuals, corporations, unions and foreign governments over the course of their 41 years in public life, Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Anu Narayanswamy detail in an exhaustive report for the Washington Post.

  • A survey commissioned by Snapchat finds that two-thirds of its mostly youthful American users closely following the presidential election and are likely to vote, Shane Goldmacher reports for Politico. Snapchat is trying to convince more political campaigns to buy targeted 10-second ads and filters aimed at its users.

  • Facebook is starting to test new tools to assist nonprofits with fundraising, Naomi Gleit, its VP of product management, reports.

  • The Awl’s John Herrman has a field day dissecting some new ethnographic research from the Data & Society Institute detailing how Uber drivers are developing their own oppositional culture as they deal with the company and its algorithms of control.

  • Researcher Stefan Baack has built a social network map showing the relationships between civic hackers worldwide as they interact on Github.

  • Here’s a useful overview of the different streams of the Black Lives Matter movement, reported by John Eligon for the New York Times.

  • “Social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses,” Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA, tells the Los Angeles Times. “A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you’re in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago.”

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