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Tech and politics: Writing for BloombergBusinessweek, Sasha Issenberg and Joshua Green go deep inside the “sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign” that Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has quietly built to bolster the GOP presidential candidate. As they report, Kushner and Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager, are hoping to use this apparatus to power a continued Trump movement, whether or not he wins the election.
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Among their findings: The Trump team spends $100,000 a week on internal polling and knows they’re behind. But “Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the ‘Leave’ side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.”
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Instead of trying to register and mobilize more of the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees that are at the heart of Trump’s current support, his campaign is actively trying to shrink the electorate. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior official told Issenberg and Green, aimed at depressing idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.
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By Election Day, they report, “the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million.”
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Working with Rock the Vote, Tinder has launched “Swipe the Vote,” an issue-matching tool that will enable users in 15 countries to see which American presidential candidate they most closely align with. The tool does not include third-party candidates. (What’s up with that?)
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The kids are alright: Sasha Obama snapchatted her Dad explaining the meaning of social media at the family dinner table and took a picture of herself looking bored, the President told talk show host Jimmy Kimmel Monday.
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This is civic tech: Open data projects are helping to power efforts to challenge police misconduct, Alice Speri reports for The Intercept. At the center of her story: the Cop Accountability Project, “a database created by New York’s Legal Aid Society that pools civil rights lawsuits, criminal court decisions, and a variety of other public and private sources like attorney notes and social media content to compile misconduct profiles on nearly 9,000 New York City officers.” She also profiles the Chicago-based Invisible Institute’s Citizens Police Data Project, and North Carolina’s Open Data Policing NC effort.
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Check out the Civic Charter, a global framework for people’s participation, launched by a network of civil society organizations earlier this month. It starts, “We, the people have the right and the duty to participate in shaping our societies…”
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Inside Philanthropy, which tracks “who’s funding what and why,” an indispensable resource produced by our friend and Civic Hall member David Callahan, just rolled out a spiffy new website.
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Life in Facebookistan: Three top computer scientists tell Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed that it is very hard to filter fake news out of Facebook’s Trending News without using human editors—something the company recently eliminated.
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Related: Timothy Lee at Vox explains why the echo chamber effect of people’s Facebook News Feeds leads to greater political misunderstanding. He writes:
[News Feed is] a sampling of stories heavily skewed toward the kinds of stories your friends and family like to share. And many stories are produced by amateurs with no real expertise in the topics they write about. So stories that are inaccurate but confirm people’s biases (like “the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media are conspiring to rig the polls”) are more likely to show up in people’s Facebook feeds than stories that reach an accurate but banal conclusion on the same subject. The result: Partisans can feel like they’re very well informed on a particular subject because they’ve read dozens of stories about it. What they often don’t realize is that thanks to social media’s filter bubble, they’re only hearing stories from one side — and that these one-sided stories may all be based on the same mistaken reasoning or may all be ignoring the same inconvenient evidence.
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