Letters

Global digital rights organization Access Now has posted an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg “regarding Internet.org, Net Neutrality, Privacy and Security” signed by 65 organizations from 31 countries or regions around the world.

Related: The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jeremy Gillula and Jeremy Malcolmhave posted a strong critique of Internet.org, saying it is “not neutral, not secure, and not the internet.”

New America’s Kevin Bankston has organized a letter to President Obama signed by many top tech firms including Apple, Google and Microsoft, and three of the five members of Obama’s surveillance review group calling on the government to stop demanding the weakening of communications encryption, Ellen Nakashima reports for The Washington Post.

The State Department is aiming to have its review and public release of 55,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails done by January 2016, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports. Twelve staffers are working on the review.

The Republican National Committee is charging that Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, deceived Rep. Trey Gowdy, who is leading the Benghazi select committee, when he said that she did not use a second email address, “hrdo17@clintonemail.com,” citing newly reported emails released by the New York Times showing her use of it.

People are critical of Hillary Clinton on Twitter, and Politico’s Annie Karni is ON IT.

Of the $11.7 million that Hillary Clinton made from 51 paid speeches since January 2014, more than one-quarter came from the tech sector, Matea Gold, Rosalind Helderman and Anu Narayanswamy report for The Washington Post.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has long been popular online, and as Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reports, the reason is that he has the “quirky sharing” style of writing his own, often long, observations and quotations. Talk about the “view from nowhere” style of journalism: at no point in his well-reported story does Corasaniti consider the possibility that Sanders’ Facebook posts get hundreds of thousands of likes and often vault to the front page of Reddit because the ideas in them—questioning America’s huge military spending, making Election Day a national holiday, criticizing free trade agreements—are actually popular.

It’s worth noting that if you went to the New York Times’ website’s politics page this morning to try to find Corasaniti’s story, which got plenty of column inches in the print paper, you’ll have trouble—it’s buried by the Times’ web editors in a “More headlines” section underneath several Hillary Clinton stories, including a listicle entitled “5 Things You Might Not Know About Hillary Clinton.” (In case you’re thinking that the Times is just doing this for clicks, consider the fact that since announcing his presidential candidacy, Sanders’ Facebook interactions have zoomed higher, three and four times higher than Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul—online publishers should take note.)

The total number of Facebook interactions garnered by the UK’s Conservative Party in the run up to the May elections there, as compared to the total collected by the Labour Party appears to mirror their actual vote ratio within +/- one percent, Mark Shephard of the University of Strathclyde reports.

Politico’s Nancy Scola (yes, that’s her new full-time gig) takes a deep dive look at how the US Digital Service is working to build a pipeline of tech talent to serve across government, using patriotic recruiting themes borrowed from the military. She notes that the hundreds of people coming in are limited to two-year postings, and thus “how much any of the Administration’s digital push will outlive his presidency, no one knows.”

Related: White House CTO Megan Smith says that, pending approval from administration lawyers, she hopes to “reach out to every campaign and make sure that everybody who’s running knows about the work we’re doing,” to ensure that whoever is the next president, they’ll keep the government’s new tech teams at the US Digital Service and 18F going, NextGov’s Mohana Ravindranath reports.

The President of the United States has his own new Twitter account @POTUS, and as this visualization shows, the news spread fast yesterday. Here’s more than you could possibly want to know about it, courtesy of Michael Shear of the New York Times.

Former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer adds some background to the news, explaining on Medium why it wasn’t enough for Obama to communicate through the @WhiteHouse Twitter account.

Can an agency Twitter account be equated to a paid lobbyist? The head of the National Association of Home Builders thinks so. He, along with other industry heads, is criticizing the EPA for using social media, in conjunction with the Sierra Club and Organizing for Action, to promote its proposed clean water rule, report Eric Lipton and Coral Davenport for the New York Times. The effort, which was led by a former Obama 2012 media operative, Thomas Reynolds, used Thunderclap to reach 1.8 million people, along with blog posts and other social media. But it’s not clear the EPA broke the federal anti-lobbying statute, which prevents government agencies from urging the public to pressure their elected representatives, since the campaign—which was pushing against industry efforts to #ditchtherule, was aimed at getting people to submit public comments to the agency about it.

In The New Yorker (yes!), technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci reflects on how the rise of the internet changed her life as a young woman growing up in Turkey.

The city of Boston is tracking tweets and users who mention the city’s @notifyboston account, reports Jordan Graham for the Boston Herald. According to the city’s chief digital office, Lauren Lockwood, “We use Twitter like a lot of places do, to push information to people but importantly to listen to them. We also look at sentiment analysis to try to figure out what’s happening out there and what people are saying and how people feel.”

Longtime readers know what I think of “sentiment analysis.” I think it’s amazing! (Can you tell what sentiment I’m expressing?)

An academic study by Nicholas John and Shira Dvir-Gvirsman of slightly more than 1,000 Jewish-Israeli Facebook users found that during the 2014 Gaza war, people were more likely to unfriend or unfollow someone the further that user positioned themselves on either the left or right, and most of the people they disconnected from were weak ties, not close friends or family.

Writing in The Atlantic, danah boyd and Alex Rosenblat argue that requiring police to where body cameras may create more problems than it solves.