Moving Fast and Breaking Things

This is civic tech: Russian emigre writer Masha Gessen has some very good advice for how small-d democrats need to think and act when living under an autocracy.

Are you an ally of democracy and an opponent of bigotry? Wear a safety pin to signal others. Alex Abad-Santos explains on Vox.

Civic Hall founder Andrew Rasiej reflects on the recent Code for America Summit and Trump’s election and argues that the civic tech field needs to get real about power and how it can be abused. He writes:

THERE IS NO GREATER THREAT to the future promise of technology for the public good than the possibility that President-elect Trump will wield his mastery of destructive politics not on Twitter, on Facebook, or through the media in general, but from the Oval Office itself. Let’s hope that the responsibility of the office will temper his most negative traits and that he will surround himself with reasonable and experienced people. Our system of democracy owes him an opportunity to do that. But if not we have to do everything we can to fight for what is right for everyone, not for what is best for ourselves or our industry or collective businesses.

Here’s a cri de couer about how to fight Trumpism without yielding to anger by Tim O’Reilly, the tech guru who coined the term Web 2.0 and who chairs Code for America’s board.

Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech, guest posts on Civicist with an open letter to her members and their allies about how they are dealing with the election.

Trump watch: It’s one thing for Trump as candidate to lash out at the media and protesters. Now, here he is doing it on Twitter as President-elect. At 9:19pm last night: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

This morning at 6:14am, Trump tweeted “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!”

For what it’s worth, both of those tweets came from Trump’s Android account, which is generally believed to be his personal phone. Tweets from his iOS account appear to be staff-written. My read: watch what he does, not only what he says.

One of Trump’s top potential picks for the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark, tweeted late yesterday night, “These temper tantrums from these radical anarchists must be quelled. There is no legitimate reason to protest the will of the people.”

“We’re about to find out just how sturdy a document the U.S. Constitution is and whether its crucial First Amendment is any kind of defense against executive power run amok,” writes Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

The American Civil Liberties Union homepage is a work of simple brilliance today.

If you remember Jeff Tiedrich’s SmirkingChimp.com, one of the earliest sites that built the “net roots” community in the early aughts, it’s back with a new name: SmirkingTrump.com. And it needs some cash to stay afloat.

Here is a collection of tweets “about racist episodes POC [people of color] are facing now that Trump is our President Elect,” curated by Insanul Ahmed. Be careful, this is full of triggers.

The hubris of big data-driven politics: Anecdotal evidence suggests that in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina, the Clinton campaign’s vaunted data-driven GOTV operation was sending canvassers to remind Trump supporters to vote. “Anywhere from five to 25 percent of contacts were inadvertently targeted to Trump supporters,” write Becky Bond and Zack Exley, two senior Bernie Sanders digital campaigners, on the Huffington Post. They add:

This is a big deal because when voters are engaged by a volunteer they are significantly more likely to cast a ballot in an election. To make matters worse, because Republicans had a non-existent ground game in many areas this cycle, this powerful reminder from a Clinton volunteer to get out and vote might have been the only personalized GOTV communication these Trump voters received. The campaign’s text messaging GOTV effort may have been the worst offender. Volunteers reported as many as 30 percent of the replies they received from voters they were urging to get out were Trump supporters. Voter targeting is not a new idea, but over the past few cycles electoral field organizing has become intoxicated by the concept of using “big data” to microtarget voters.

Read the whole thing. And then if you are in NYC and want to dig in deeper, come to Civic Hall this Tuesday for a 12:30pm book talk with Exley and Bond.

Ada, the Clinton campaign’s secret voter analytics algorithm, ran 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump looked like, reports John Wagner for the Washington Post. Which in the end probably lulled people into trusting a computer rather than their own eyes and ears.

Writing for Civicist, Dave Karpf calls foul on the Trump campaign’s data analytics team trying to claim credit for his victory, calling their work “wishcasting,” not forecasting.

This NPR story by Aarti Shahani on civic engagement social networking app Brigade purports to be about how its users foreshadowed the unexpectedly large number of Democrats crossing party lines to vote for Trump, but to my jaundiced eye the real news is that after two years and more than $9 million in funding from Sean Parker, the app only has 200,000 verified voters. What a sad waste of money. [Update: The original post stated that Brigade only had 200,000 verified users, when in fact Brigade’s Andrew Noyes clarified by email that they have 200,000 users who connected their account to their voter file and pledged to vote. “We have many more users than that,” Noyes wrote, although he declined to say precisely how many additional users or active users in all.]

Matt Lira reviews how the various Republican party committees optimized their use of Facebook.

More than 1.6 million people have signed this petition on Change.org calling on Electors to ignore their states’ votes and to make Hillary Clinton President. This, in my humble opinion, is a terrible idea. In general, settled political institutions and processes make it harder for dictatorial behavior; eliminating them makes it easier. Plus, put the shoe on the other foot if you are thinking of signing this petition: how would you feel if it was Trump supporters doing this to try to undo a Clinton victory?

Silicon Valley tech VC Sherwin Pishevar continues his deeply deluded push for California to secede, tweeting this morning that “‪NewCalifornia.com will become home of states rights movement. Pushing states’ rights & sovereignty over centralized Federal power.” Not only is this stupid and counterproductive, Pishevar’s tweet suggests that he has no idea what the words “states rights” and “sovereignty” have meant in American history.

Life in Facebookistan: The “move fast and break things” people at Facebook are promising, yet again, to do more to “prevent false or misleading content from appearing,” reports Damon Beres for Mashable.

Or maybe they aren’t. As Casey Newton reports for The Verge, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg vehemently denied that his platform, which dominates news consumption in America today, had any impact on the election. Speaking at the Techonomony conference to curator David Kirkpatrick, the sixth richest man in the world, said “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way—I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.” He insisted that fake news was posted about both candidates, not recognizing that fake news from rightwing sites was posted twice as frequently as from the left.

Here’s what liberal Facebook and conservative Facebook look like, side by side, courtesy of Jon Keegan of the Wall Street Journal.