Razor’s Edge

BBC Media Action also just published a very useful report on how refugees access and use information.

Tech and politics: Caitlin Dewey and Abby Ohlheiser report for The Washington Post on some of Donald Trump’s most devoted online supporters, including Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart Tech, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, two African-American women YouTube vloggers named Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, and meme-maker Richard Flint, whose photoshopping of Hillary Clinton’s face with a six-pointed Jewish star and a pile of money recently drew attention for its anti-Semitic overtones.

Security researchers from Avast Software set up fake WiFi networks around the Republican convention to show how easy it would be to hack attendees’ accounts, reports Paul Szoldra for Tech Insider.

Cutting to the core: Veteran news blogger Josh Marshall suggests that the best way to understand any of the Trump campaign’s moves is to apply “Trump’s Razor,” a variation on Occam’s Razor that says “the stupidest scenario is always to be preferred.”

The Revolution will be…continued? Now that Bernie Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, he is planning to keep his “political revolution” going with a new organization called “Our Revolution” that will help recruit, train and fund progressive candidates, reports Nicole Gaudiano for the Burlington Press. It’s going to be run by 27-year-old Shannon Jackson, who started out as Sanders’ driver in 2009.

And the winner is: With Hillary Clinton set to announce her Vice President nominee this Friday, I offer this prediction, using the Wikipedia edits bellwether method that accurately forecast Paul Ryan as the GOP VP candidate in 2012 and Sarah Palin in 2008. Based on the names currently being floated, and the number of edits to their Wikipedia page in the last week, Clinton is going to pick retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis. His page has been edited 18 times in the last seven days, compared to 14 times for Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, 12 edits on former Virginia governor Tim Kaine’s page, and just ten for Senator Elizabeth Warren and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro. (If total edits since the beginning of June were the metric, the clear frontrunner for the VP pick would be Warren, whose page has been edited 173 times since then, far more than any of the other likely candidates.)

Twitter abuse: After Leslie Jones, one of the co-stars of the Ghostbusters remake, quit Twitter due to all the racist abuse she received there, Jack Dorsey, the company’s CEO, reached out to her to promise to do a better job handling such behavior, reports Jackie Strauss for The Hollywood Reporter. Among the accounts now suspended for violating Twitter’s terms of service, which prohibit the targeted abuse of individual users: Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right journalist, who led the attacks on Boggs.

Changing tech: NPR’s Alina Selyukh reports on why social justice advocates like Catherine Bracy of Oakland’s TechEquity Collaborative aren’t buying the excuses made by giant tech companies like Google and Facebook for their failure to hire more minorities.

Turkey broth: Wikislaks has published nearly 300,000 emails leaked to it from inside the ruling party of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reports Andy Greenberg for Wired. In response, Turkey has blocked access to WikiLeaks, Amar Toor reports for The Verge.