Archive: Year: 2014

Responding CNN's Don Lemon thinks that "actual protesters" in Ferguson, "most of them are peaceful," but "bloggers and people who are trying to make a name for themselves" are the people "causing the commotion every day." That is, as the Washington Post's Erik Wemple spotted, "People who want you to follow them on Twitter; or follow their blog; or follow them on livestream." On NewsGenius and on The Guardian, St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch's controversial news conference statement announcing the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson is being annotated line-by-line. Wikipedia's article on the shooting of Michael Brown was viewed nearly 500,000 times yesterday, five times its peak August 18th, a week after his shooting. How John Cornyn's Senate campaign used Facebook for voter targeting...

The following is an edited transcript of an interview that Alex Howard conducted with James Windon, the president of civic engagement startup Brigade, last Wednesday November 19 at the Fusion RiseUp event in Washington, DC. That morning, Brigade had announced that it was partnering with a “carefully curated” set of organizations: Rainforest Action Network, Americans for Tax Reform, the Drug Policy Alliance, Represent.Us, Generation Opportunity, Forecast the Facts, FreedomWorks and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. With more than $9 million in venture funding from Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Brigade has been amassing a staff of more than 50 while remaining quiet about how it plans to launch and grow a new social network for civic engagement. In this interview,...

Sad Reality As noted by many observers, St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch spent a surprising amount of time attacking social media during his press conference last night announcing the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown. "“The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about,” McCulloch said, “following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media.” On Mediate, Matt Wilstein rounds up the responses. It's worth recalling that without social media, and Twitter in particular, the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson police's hyper-militarized response might never have become a national news story in...

All Against All Sharing economy critic Tom Slee explains why Uber represents "a future," not "the future" and goes into great detail why Canada, his home country, should reject the kind of jobs, accessibility and city its model would bring if adopted. Most critically, he details how Uber has vastly overstated the earnings of its drivers, and argues that if Canadian cities like Toronto bless Uber's entrance into their market, they will also be also allowing "bad labour practices to intrude further and further into Canada's workplaces." For the opposite point of view, here's venture capitalist Mark Suster of Los Angeles explaining why he loves Uber (IN CAPS). In addition to solving his professional need for faster taxi pickups, he writes, "It's...

Power Frames In the Harvard Business Review, Jeremy Heimans of Purpose and Henry Timms of the 92nd Street Y explain how to understand the differences between "old power" and "new power." They write: Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures. New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it….New power models are enabled...

Creeping In the wake of BuzzFeed's report on Uber executive Emil Michael's threat to journalists, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) has written a tough letter to Travis Kalanick, the company's CEO. Franken notes that Uber's privacy policies "do not in any clear way match or support" what the company has been saying in the wake of Michael's reported statements. He asked Kalanick to address several key questions, including how he explained Michael's failure to heed Uber's privacy policies, why customers aren't told about "internal reasons" for sharing their information with third-parties, why they aren't asked to affirmatively consent or opt out of such information sharing, whether customers are notified if their data is inappropriately access, and whether any disciplinary actions have ever...

Ubermenschens Embattled Uber executive Emil Michael publicly apologized yesterday to Sarah Lacy on Twitter. Also on Twitter, his boss, Travis Kalanick, condemned Michael's remarks as showing "a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals." BuzzFeed's Johana Bhulyan and Charlie Warzel report that the general manager of Uber NY, Josh Mohrer, is being investigated by the company for abusing the company's internal "God View" tool, which shows the locations of Uber cars and customers. Mohrer had accessed Bhulyan's records and shown them to her while she was preparing an earlier story. Journalist Ellen Cushing reports that while working on a cover story on Uber for San Francisco magazine, she was warned by current and former employees...

Uber Falles A top executive at Uber recently suggested at a dinner of top NY media types that the company spend "a million dollars" to hire opposition researchers to dig up personal details on its journalistic critics, specifically mentioning Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily, reports Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed. Lacy is justifiably outraged, particularly at Michael's threat to dig up dirt on her family. The executive in question, Emil Michael, Uber's senior vice president of business, later issued a statement denying that his remarks reflected his "actual views." The company denies conducting opposition research on journalists. This story, by Sarah Lacy on October 22nd, decrying Uber's "asshole culture" of entrenched sexism and misogyny (most recently exemplified by an...

Differences Independent SuperPACs aren't allowed to coordinate with campaigns, but according to this story by Chris Moody for CNN, anonymous public Twitter accounts were used to enable the sharing of sensitive information like polling data among Republican campaigns and groups. As one campaign finance expert, Paul Ryan, commented, "It's a line that has not been defined. This is really on the cutting edge." Anonymous has taken over two Twitter accounts belonging to the racist Klu Klux Klan organization, Violet Blue reports for ZDNet. Venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban are sparring on Wilson's AVC blog over whether, as Wilson writes, net neutrality is needed to protect the Davids (upstart innovators) from the Goliaths (incumbent giant internet service providers), or if it will...

Wednesday in London, as part of the annual Open Up? conference hosted by the Omidyar Network, I had the opportunity to interview Alan Rusbridger, the longtime editor of The Guardian newspaper, about the impact of Edward Snowden's revelations of massive government surveillance programs in the United States and United Kingdom. To my surprise, he was much more optimistic about the impact of the stories published in his paper and elsewhere, like the Washington Post and New York Times, than I expected. And he laid out an extraordinarily ambitious agenda of unfinished work that Snowden has prompted. Even though the sense of urgency and outrage over the NSA and GCHQ's dragnet surveillance may have subsided, he argued that "under the surface…an awful...