Weaponization

Sean Parker’s $9 million civic start-up Brigade is starting to come out of stealth mode, giving select users early access to its mobile app, reports Greg Ferenstein for The Guardian. If you happened to be a user of the Accord app over the last few months, you were actually playing with the stealth version of this first version of Brigade.

Politico’s Nancy Scola, the Washington Post’s Ana Swanson, and Mashable’s JP Mangalindan also report on Brigade’s launch.

All three stories describe how the Brigade app works to get users to share lots of granular information about their political views, inviting them to collect supporters for their views, and nudging them to debate micro-issues. They also note how the app builds on top of existing social graph data that Brigade has from its acquisition of Facebook Causes and Votizen—which apparently enables it to infer political associations between users even before they share their opinions on issues (one friend of mine got my message asking them to be a “supporter” that noted we have similar views on climate change, elections and government, even before he had shared a single view of his own on the app). Not explained: How the platform will make money—but one can imagine a number of options, including selling names of likely supporters to campaigns and cause organizations.

Journalists from the New York Times and BuzzFeed had a suspiciously easy time listening in on a call for donors to Jeb Bush’s Super PAC, where they overheard its director Mike Murphy says that he wanted to “weaponize” its fundraising numbers and that “Any extra buck you can give before June 30 is a weapon for us, in that report when we give some heart attacks to people in July. It’ll effect some of their decisions, it’ll bum out their donors, and it’ll hurt their money, which cuts off their oxygen, and frankly we want to choke ‘em all out.”

Sasha Issenberg takes a close look at the data analytics experts at the top of three leading Republican presidential campaigns, those of Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush, to glean some insight into how each candidate hopes to master the possibilities of today’s data-driven campaigning in order to win their party’s nomination.

Former Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn is leaving Microsoft to form a private equity fund, CEO Satya Nadella tells the company employees in this memo.

The FCC is fining AT&T $100 million for slowing the mobile data speeds of customers with unlimited data plans and not notifying them of the practice, Todd Shields reports for Bloomberg Business.

Nicole Levy of Capital New York breaks the news that Upworthy, once the fastest growing social site on the web, down to 20 million from 50 million unique visitors per month, is shifting its focus to producing original content, laying off six people in the process and hiring five new writers.

John Herman of The Awl takes note of Upworthy’s news and explains what’s really going on: Facebook has changed its algorithm to favor Facebook-native video, undercutting Upworthy’s success in making YouTube video go viral.

The California Labor Commission has ruled that an Uber drivers should be classified as an employee, not as an independent contractor, Mike Isaac and Natasha Singer report for the New York Times. While the decision only applies to one worker, it could trigger a much larger wave of similar claims and rulings, they note, forcing the company to pay their business expenses.

The Capital Area Food Bank is using mapping and open data to visualize gaps in the region that aren’t being served well, reports by Terrence McCoy for the Washington Post.

Ukrainian activists are growing frustrated with Facebook’s failure to stop pro-Russian trolls from triggering the suspension of their accounts by making spurious complaints that the company’s algorithm takes at face value, Dmitry Volchek reports for Global Voices Online.