Political Twists

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina makes her presidential bid official with a tweet this morning. Her online footprint: 357,000 Twitter followers and only about 43,000 on Facebook.

Former colleagues of Fiorina at HP say she mishandled the company’s $25 billion acquisition of Compaq and put her own self-promotion first, report Rory Carroll and Rupert Neate for The Guardian. “She put herself ahead of the the interests of the company and I fear she would do the same as president,” Jason Burnett, a member of the Packard Foundation’s board of trustees, told them.

The editorial board of the San Jose Mercury News, which watched Fiorina’s first bid for public office when she ran for Senate in 2010, says “She takes the Silicon Valley motto that it’s ‘OK to fail’ a tad too literally.”

On Facebook, retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is also making his presidential candidacy official. His online footprint there is bigger than Hillary Clinton’s at 1.2 million; he also has 326,000 followers on Twitter.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders raised $1.5 million in the first day after his presidential campaign announcement, with an average donation of $43, Greg Sargent reports for the Washington Post. Sanders’ money quote: “Can I raise a billion dollars? Probably not. But the question is, can I raise enough money to run a grass roots campaign and utilize millions of people? I think we can raise that kind of money.”

So far Hillary Clinton’s campaign hasn’t released any details of its early fundraising haul. This story by Glenn Thrush and Anna Palmer in Politico describes the complications involved in putting together a billion-dollar-plus fundraising machine, complete with the competing desires of growing a large, “flat” structure of many maxed-out individuals giving $2,700 and the much more traditional approach of empowering mega-donors on the East and West coasts and revving up the Priorities USA Action Super PAC.

Sanders has long been a critic of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, reports Dustin Volz for National Journal.

Reporting from London on this week’s upcoming national elections in Britain, Ben Smith of Buzzfeed contrasts the way Britain’s conservative print titans are bashing Labor Party challenger Ed Miliband with the love being lavished on him by the Internet’s meme-makers and the million-plus YouTube views his interview with radical Russell Brand has earned.

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Given that TV and radio advertising are prohibited in British elections, it makes sense that all the parties contending for power in the United Kingdom are using social media to rally voters, as Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura details for The New York Times. Her story doesn’t offer much info on what the campaigns are doing with email or with voter targeting, which as readers know from the American elections, are where real differences in capacity may matter.

Even, a prototype app to help low-wage workers with unsteady cash incomes better manage their money, gets a lush write-up in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine from Anand Giridharadas. It’s a somewhat odd choice for a story given that there are many other early stage start-ups with similar goals that aren’t based on quite as shaky a premise. But they aren’t backed by Khosla Ventures or founded by an already successful app maker, Jon Schlossberg, whose developed Unlock to help end “the agony of typing in a password every time you awaken your laptop.”

The ACLU’s new “Mobile Justice CA” cellphone app enables users to automatically record and send video of their encounters with the police to the organization, Jon Wiener reports for The Nation.

WikiLeaks has relaunched a “beta version” of its leak submission system, something it has been without for four-and-a-half years, Andy Greenberg reports for Wired.

Hello, Big Orwell: China is planning to assign all of its citizens a “social credit” rating based on everything from their financial and criminal records to their social media behavior, report Fokke Obbema, Marije Vlaskamp and Michael Persson for Volkskrant. Says Johan Lagerkvist, a Chinese internet specialist based in Sweden, the system is “very ambitious in both depth and scope, including scrutinizing individual behavior and what books people read. It’s Amazon’s consumer tracking with an Orwellian political twist.” (h/t Cathy O’Neill)