Pokes

Life in Facebookistan: Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-SD) has written to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, demanding answers to questions about how the company’s Trending Topics feature is curated and asking for details about what steps the company is taking to investigate claims that it is subject to political manipulation.

Writing on his Facebook page, Harold Feld, the VP of Public Knowledge, drily commented, “We will now savor the irony that conservatives who attacked Net Neutrality as “the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet” now want a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. How can FB be censoring conservative perspectives when there is all that competition in the social media space? And wouldn’t it be irrational and contrary to their economic interests to discriminate like that?”

What Feld is actually saying is that, like Comcast or Verizon, Facebook is an internet monopolist, or close to one, and if you are concerned about its power to pick winners and losers or artificially create scarcities to charge rent for, or bias the news, you should be concerned about the big internet service providers too.

Those of us with long memories may find it ironic that Senator Thune is complaining about Facebook possibly biasing the news, considering that as a candidate for Senate back in 2004, his campaign paid several local conservative bloggers to inject a frenzy of dubious factoids and thinly-sourced opposition research into state media. As Jan Frel reported for PersonalDemocracy.com back then (yes kids, that’s what we called it before techPresident or Civicist), these bloggers—whose payments from Thune were not disclosed until after the election—successfully raised questions about the political leanings of the state’s main newspaper. Thune later bragged about how useful those biased bloggers were for his campaign; now as a Senator, of course, he’s an enemy of media bias.

Conservative writer Katrina Trinko of The Daily Signal is angry that Facebook curators reportedly suppressed attention to topics like the controversy involving IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused of inappropriately targeting conservative groups for audits.

Nilay Patel of The Verge helpfully points out that Facebook’s Trending Topics box is hardly the most important driver of its users’ attention—that would be its mobile News Feed, which doesn’t include trending topics.

Kate Losse, the author of The Boy Kings, a really excellent memoir of her days at early Facebook, writes for Fusion that the real news curators at Facebook are the engineers who write its algorithms and who decided, say, that party photos of friends were of greater social importance than, say, religious texts. And given that the company refuses to be more transparent about the decisions baked into its news algorithms, she points out that we can’t really evaluate the merit of its news judgments.

This is civic tech: Welcome to SuperPublic, a new co-working space in San Francisco “where federal, state and city government come together to address policy and regulatory issues and work with academia and the private industry,” that will be run by the City Innovate Foundation. Kudos to our friend Peter Hirshberg and the rest of the team there for getting this off the ground!

MySociety director Mark Cridge welcomes London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, and calls on him to supplement his promise to “lead the most transparent, engaged and accessible administration London has ever seen” by embracing civic tech.

France’s Atelier.net visited Civic Hall and offers this report (warning: translation).

What sharing economy? Uber has struck a deal with a branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union to allow the creation of an association of its drivers in New York, Noam Scheiber and Mike Isaac report for the New York Times. The deal creates a process for drivers to meet with Uber officials and a way for them to get union officials to represent them in appeals of company decisions, but it does not enable them to bargain collectively over the terms of their relationship with Uber. Abdoul Diallo, the founder of a competing effort to organize drivers in NYC, said the new organization sounded “bogus.”

Trump watch: One of Donald Trump’s California delegates is one William Johnson, a prominent white nationalist who heads the American Freedom Party, as Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones reports. The Trump campaign blamed the selection on a “database error.”

Tech and politics: Hackers are trying to break into the servers of the U.S. House of Representatives in order to encrypt files and force users to pay ransoms to access their contents, Jenna McLaughlin reports for The Intercept. As a result, parts of the House internet network are under lockdown.

Brave new world: GPS tracking devices placed on electronics waste left at official recycling sites around the U.S. by the Basel Action Network, which fights toxic exports, discovered that a third of the equipment tracked was sent overseas, most likely in illegal ways, Elizabeth Grossman reports for The Intercept. MIT’s Senseable City Lab mapped the results.