Archive: Year: 2015

Catalysts There will be a Democratic presidential primary: independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has announced formally that he is running for president. Compared to Hillary Clinton, he enters the field with a much smaller digital footprint: 294,000 Twitter followers (and that's to his official Senate account—his official personal campaign account has just 11,600) to her 3.45 million; and 301,000 likes on Facebook compared to her 787,000. Still, Sanders' economic populist message may give him surprising traction—for years he has successfully appealed to many of his state's more conservative and independent voters despite being an avowed socialist. It will be interesting to see if the mainstream media, which has essentially anointed Clinton the Democratic nominee, gives Sanders a fair shake, and also...

Bubbling More people say they regularly get news about politics and government from Facebook than from CNN or Fox News, the new Pew Research Center annual journalism survey reports. 48% of adults surveyed said they got such news from Facebook in the last week, compared to 44% for CNN, 39% for Fox, and just 9% from Twitter. Another more surprising finding from the survey: 24% of adults say they use Google Plus vs just 21% for Twitter. Facebook users are more likely to say they get political news from that service than Twitter users (62% vs 40%). So-called "consistent liberals" are somewhat more likely to say they get news from Facebook or Twitter, compared to "consistent conservatives." Complicating the "filter bubble" theory,...

Rising BaltimoreUprising.org is one hub for information about the protests against police violence in Baltimore. This data journalism story from last September's Baltimore Sun catalogues the many cases where the city has paid out settlements to residents beaten by police. Riots in Baltimore yesterday began with word spreading on social media of a "purge," according to The Baltimore Sun's Justin Fenton and Erica Green, a reference to a movie where crime becomes legal. Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos connects the dots in a very different way, in a series of tweets summarized here on USA Today. The key lines, after he condemns the riots: ...

Targeted Digital humanitarians are responding "in full force" to this weekend's huge earthquake in Nepal, Patrick Meier reports. So far, despite the efforts of new Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to charm Silicon Valley, tech company security experts seem to be resisting the US government's desire for weakened encryption systems, David Sanger and Nicole Perloth report for the New York Times. A newly declassified government report suggests that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping and bulk data program was largely ineffective at thwarting terrorism, Charlie Savage reports for the New York Times. See if you can parse these two quotes, that literally follow each other, from Steven Levy's fascinating interview with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, who is building a personalized geo-location layer for the Internet: Crowley: "We can...

Overreaching It looks like last year's successful campaign to defend net neutrality just claimed a collateral win: as Jonathan Mahler writes in the New York Times, regulators attitudes toward the proposed, now sunk, Comcast-TimeWarner merger were shaped by fears that the combined company would be too big. "At the end of the day," he writes, "the government’s commitment to maintaining a free and open Internet did not square with the prospect of a single company controlling as much as 40 percent of the public’s access to it. " Harold Feld of Public Knowledge goes deep on why the FCC balked at the Comcast-TimeWarner deal. House Speaker John Boehner tells Bloomberg's Mark Halperin that the House might subpoena Hillary Clinton's personal email server if...