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This is civic tech: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is leading a $30 million round of investment in Change.org, along with investors Bill Gates and Sam Altman. In a post explaining his investment, which is coming from his personal funds, not his Greylock VC fund, Hoffman says the platform is “a crucial democratizing force in this era of growing civic participation.,” noting that it has attracted “nearly 200 million users in 196 countries,” since its founding a decade ago. Hoffman’s investment comes with a shake-up of Change’s board—Nancy Lublin, the founder of Crisis Text Line (another Hoffman investee) will become chairman and three veterans of the tech industry—Allen Blue, a LinkedIn co-founder; Joe Greenstein, founder of InnerSpace and Flickster; and Sarah Imbach, a longtime Hoffman colleague at LinkedIn and PayPal—are joining the board as well.
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Life in Facebookistan: A new longitudinal study of American Facebook users found that, over a recent three year period, the more people used the platform, the less healthy and less satisfied with their lives they were, Susan Pinker reports for The Wall Street Journal. Real world, face-to-face social contact leads to better physical and psychological health, by comparison.
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Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman and Sara Spary have identified at least 30 websites that specialize in helping people make up fake news stories and spread them on Facebook.
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Upworthy founder Eli Pariser, who coined the term “the filter bubble,” says in an interview with Jessi Hempel of Backchannel that our problem is less “fake news” and more “is the truth loud enough,”
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Trump watch: A longitudinal study of Donald Trump’s decades on-air interviews that compared his speech patterns to those in question-and-answer sessions since his inauguration by Sharon Begley, senior science writer of the Boston Globe’s StatNews, found a “striking and remarkable” deterioration, with lots of evidence of “apparent trouble formulating complete sentences” in his more recent appearances. She notes that while the change in his speech patterns may be deliberate, to connect with his supporters, the deterioration was apparent as early as 2013, well before he was a declared candidate for president. “Trump exhibited all the changes in speech that psychologists and neurologists pay attention to when assessing whether someone is experiencing cognitive decline,” Begley notes in a follow-on Facebook chat about her article.
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The Trump administration is moving to eliminate a Labor Department civil rights division that monitored discrimination by federal contractors, Juliet Eilperin, Emma Brown and Darryl Fears report for The Washington Post.
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In the wake of a racist attack in Portland that led to the death of two men who tried to intervene, the county chairman of the Republican Party has suggested that local rightwing militia groups be deputized to provide security at public events held by the GOP, Jason Wilson reports for The Guardian. The GOP chairman, James Buchal, says he thinks such steps are needed because “there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are Nazis.”
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Attend: ARGO (Advanced Research in Government Operations), a new organizational member of Civic Hall, is hosting a breakfast meeting this Wednesday to share some of its civic data science work and get feedback. To find out more about ARGO’s work, read this post by co-founder Patrick Atwater.
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