Love Wins

Without ever quite calling it “Black Twitter,” the New York Times’ Michael Barbaro and Jonathan Martin do a pretty solid job of describing how the online efforts of that influential network have influenced the sudden shift in how South Carolina politicians are approaching the debate over the Confederate flag. On Twitter, they note, “the debate was not even close. About 77 percent of those mentioning the issue favored the flag’s removal, 20 percent expressed neutrality and 3 percent defended its place on the capitol grounds, according to Two.42 solutions, a company that analyzes data and opinion.”

Not Black Facebook: New hiring data from Facebook showing essentially no progress in hiring a more diverse group of employees was critiqued by Mike Isaac in the New York Times. He also quote Catherine Bracy of Code for America (and Civic Hall member): “If these companies can create self-driving cars and bring internet to the entire world, it’s not that hard to hire more than one black woman per year. It’s not enough to say you care about it.”

If you changed your Facebook profile to a rainbow background this weekend, you’ll want to read this piece by MIT graduate student Nathan Matias who asks in the Atlantic if the company’s “Celebrate Pride” campaign, which encouraged millions of users to color their profile in rainbow shades in honor of Pride and the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, wasn’t also another internal behavioral experiment. And he cites lots of precedent for why that isn’t a far-fetched question.

Speaking of pride, on Twitter, Ethan Roeder, data director for the Obama ’08 and ’12 campaigns, makes an interesting connection between marriage equality and the current Republican presidential field’s tech chops: He asserts: “No amount of Koch cash can attract top tech talent when not a single R pres candidate supports gay rights. Sorry fellas. ‪#LoveWins‬”

Speaking of cash: Judging from fresh campaign finance filings by ActBlue, the meta-conduit for many Democratic campaigns, Sen. Bernie Sanders has raised at least $8.3 million online through June 17, Derek Willis reports for the New York Times.

Your crock pot has a lobbyist? “Internet of Things” companies like FitBit and Belkin, along with bigger tech firms active in the space, are starting to bulk up on Washington lobbyists, reports Tony Romm for Politico. FitBit, for example, has hired Heather Podesta + Partners, while Belkin has hired the Franklin Square Group.

Notably, Congress’ actual things aren’t connected to the internet, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico. And that “air gap” is deliberate, keeping the building’s high-tech environmental systems more secure by design.

Insecure by design? Many company “privacy” policies actually don’t protect customer data at all in the event the company gets sold or goes bankrupt, Natasha Singer and Jeremy Merrill report for the New York Times.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, billionaire Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, argues that today’s “hacker elite” are poised to disrupt the traditional world of philanthropy. Having just set up his own $600 million foundation, he offers some lessons to his peers “lest we assimilate into the stodgy institutions of the past and lose our edge.” On the one hand, Parker admirably urges hacker philanthropists to avoid creating their own bureaucracies, to make big bets, to be ready to be political, and to try to be humble about the odds of success. On the other hand, he gives us this: “Perhaps if [Andrew Carnegie] had lived to see the internet, he would have funded Wikipedia instead. We will never know, but the foundation that bears his name carried on funding libraries even after the internet made them obsolete.” Libraries are obsolete? Tell that to the millions of people who go their local library because they can’t afford high-speed broadband!

A new research paper by Columbia University’s Tim Wu, Harvard’s Michael Luca and the Yelp data team argues that Google has degraded its search results in order to favor its own properties, Larry Dignans reports for ZDNet.

Ontario’s 211 system, which is already a leader in compiling community resource data from more than 40 local organizations, is “evolving into an open platform,” Greg Bloom reports on his OpenReferral.org site.

In rural Modesto, California, a small claims court has found in favor of the owner of a low-flying hexacopter drone that was shot down by a neighbor, Cyrus Farivar reports for ArsTechnica. It was flying over its owner’s property at the time of the shutdown.