Today’s civic tech must-read: Civicist contributing editor An Xiao Mina writing on our “failures of our global imagination.” Read the whole thing. Afterwards, you probably won’t think about the “First World” or the “Third World” in the same way, or how we use our devices.

Tech and the presidentials: When GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker dropped out of the race, none of the other Republican campaigns sought to pick up his digital team, and as Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired, this may be the latest evidence that conservatives are still lagging behind liberals in how much they prioritize tech for their campaigns.

Surging Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is heavily reliant on Facebook, where he has 4.3 million fans, David Drucker reports for the Washington Examiner. “Carson personally takes and answers three questions every night on his Facebook page; the interaction generates an average of 100,000 responses that are shared approximately 10,000 times.”

Doug Watts, Carson’s chief communications counselor, tells Drucker: “…we all came in sharing the ethic of having a social media-oriented—centric—campaign, because we were all totally taken with [President] Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 2008, and of course no Republican has even come close to exercising that kind of a program. And we thought you could.”

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has finally hired a pollster, Maggie Haberman reports for the New York Times. Sanders’ top adviser Tad Devine explains: “He is not a big consumer of polling, so he did not see the need for it, but I think he understands it in terms of targeting media buys and for voter contact that it has value and can save us money because we won’t waste resources by, for example, buying the wrong shows on TV.”

Twitter is partnering with CBS News for the November 14 Democratic Presidential debate, Adam Sharp announces. “Twitter will provide CBS News with real-time data and insights, and will bring live reactions and questions from voters around the country onto the debate stage.”

Spying times: A federal court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation and a number of other organizations, stating that the plaintiffs had not proven that their communications were intercepted by the NSA.

Fight for the Future is charging that Facebook lobbyists on Capitol Hill are quietly supporting the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act while publicly the company claims to oppose it.