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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand made news speaking at the Friday morning session of Personal Democracy Forum when she declared, “Has [President Trump] kept any of [his] promises? No, fuck no.” She also got attention for repeating something that she had previously said in print only, admonishing her fellow Democrats that “If we’re not helping people, we should go the fuck home.”
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As the Washington Post’s Kristine Phillips pointed out, this is not unusual language for Gillibrand. She herself commented later that she “might need to put some cash in the swear jar tonight!”
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Senator Cory Booker, who also gave a keynote talk at the end of the conference Friday, also made some news fulminating against the slogan “this is not normal” that many of us have used to describe the Trump era, as Will Bredderman of the NY Observer explains.
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Here’s a fun visualization of the social network implicitly formed by the 2500+ Twitter users who mentioned #PDF17 in one or more tweets during the conference last week, created by Marc Smith using NodeXL.
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Tech and politics: A new poll sponsored by Mozilla finds super-majorities across the political spectrum favor net neutrality, distrust internet service providers, and believe “equal access to the internet is a right.”
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The UK Labour Party, which did very well in last week’s elections, “tweeted more, posted more, and was shared more than all of its rivals,” Giles Turner and Jeremy Kahn report for Bloomberg in a look at the role of social media in the election.
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What sharing economy? Uber’s board, advised by an internal investigative report by former Attorney General Eric Holder, is recommending a shake-up of the company’s top management, but as Mike Isaac reports for The New York Times, CEO Travis Kalanick’s “outsize voting power…when aligned with board allies, essentially gives him the right to ignore” any of Holder’s recommendations.
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Politico’s Nancy Scola reports on how former AOL chairman Steve Case has become Washington’s “tech whisperer.”
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Google’s former associate general counsel, Daphne Keller, argues in a New York Times op-ed that the burden of policing content online should be on the courts, not big platform companies.
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Your moment of zen: Little girls (and boys) reactions to Wonder Woman.
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