Power Problems

This is civic tech: Our Jessica McKenzie reports on how thousands of volunteers working with the Planetary Response Network and the website Zooniverse are pooling their energies to help analyze satellite images of hurricane-battered Caribbean islands.

Related: The New Tropic reports on how, as Hurricane Irma approached Florida, hundreds of volunteers coordinated their efforts via Slack.

That group, IrmaResponse.org, has sent an open letter to the people in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands offering their help, but saying they “won’t jump in without your permission.” The letter is well-intentioned, given the long history of imperialism, but it’s not clear how the people of Puerto Rico are supposed to respond, given that the whole island is now without power.

The city of Coconut Grove, Florida, is having success using NextDoor.com to crowdsource information about downed power lines, Maria de Los Angeles reports for the Miami New Times.

SeeClickFix CEO Ben Berkowitz reports on his company’s third annual user summit, which focused on how to build trust using civic tech.

At Saturday’s 311 DataJam here in NYC, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer (a proud Civic Hall member) and BetaNYC will unveil “BoardStat,” a new data tool for community boards and anyone interested in analyzing 311 data at the local level. RSVP here.

That event is just one of many taking place this Saturday as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Stephen Downs, the CTO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, offers the first of three posts on how we can “build health into the OS,” arguing that on the most fundamental levels—where we live, how we move from place to place, how food is produced, distributed, prepared and eaten, and how we are entertained—present-day American society makes it very hard for people to be healthy.

Life in Facebookistan: Why has Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg been traveling around the United States since this election visiting with ordinary Americans? Not because he is considering a run for president, but because “People trust people, not institutions,” he tells Max Chafkin and Sarah Frier of Bloomberg Business Week, and right now his company is facing a trust crisis.

He also tells them that he was disappointed that only 5 percent of the company’s users—100 million people—said in a user survey that they use Facebook to connect with groups they find meaningful. He told employees, “It’ll take years,” he says, “but if we can get to a billion more people in meaningful groups online, that will reverse the decline in community membership and start strengthening the social fabric again.” Other changes that have flowed from that decision: Facebook product managers have been told to treat group administrators as a “constituency,” like advertisers and app developers, that the company should develop tools for. (Facebookistan has constituents, folks!)

Nicco Mele, the director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (and a longtime friend of Civic Hall), told Business Week, “Facebook doesn’t appear to have a coherent view of its role and its power. This is a great place for the government or other organizations to step in and set guidelines,” he says.

One more nugget from that Business Week story: The boy king didn’t like a January story by Sarah Frier that reported that he employs a dozen content moderators as well as communications managers, photographers, video producers and even Morgan Freeman, who are all responsible for maintaining his personal Facebook page. Why? Because it implied that he wasn’t being “authentic.”

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has announced some updates to the company’s targeting policies, saying that she was “disgusted and disappointed” — disgusted that users had identified themselves as Jew-haters and disappointed that the company’s targeting platform had offered that identity as an option for advertisers. In response, Facebook is tightening enforcement to “ensure that content that goes against our community standards cannot be used to target ad,” adding more human review, and inviting more reports of potential abuses.

Daniel Sieradski, an orthodox Jewish peace activist, responded, “sure thing sheryl. the thing is, people like me have been reporting vile hate speech on facebook forever only to be ignored or told no violation of facebooks terms was found. why should we suddenly believe you now?” As an example, he posted the response he got from Facebook last week after reporting the page “Holohoax-Exposing the Holocaust” for hate speech.

The personal Facebook pages of President Trump and Vice President Pence are running targeted ads, only visible to people they aim to reach, aimed at reassuring supporters that “WE WILL BUILD A WALL (NOT A FENCE) ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES,” reports Craig Silverman for BuzzFeed. The fact that Facebook allows politicians to micro-target and hide ads aimed at particular voters, and thus deceive the public, is apparently not a violation of the company’s ever-evolving “community standards.” (Seriously, how is this increasing “authenticity” if it allows politicians to speak out of both sides of their mouths without any transparency?)

Betsy Woodruff reports for The Daily Beast on complaints from Rohingya activists in Burma and in the west that Facebook has been removing their posts documenting the ethnic cleansing taking place against their people. In one case she cites, the company’s censors took down a poem describing refugees fleeing from the Burmese military, supposedly for violating the company’s “community standards.”

Suspected Russia propagandists used Facebook last year to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies, The Daily Beast’s Ben Collins, Gideon Resnick, Kevin Poulsen and Spencer Ackerman report.

“The far right, once hemmed in by its own parochialism, has manufactured a worldwide online battlefield anyone with internet access can step into.” That’s the central point of Jesse Singal’s chilling op-ed for The New York Times on the rejuvenation of neo-Nazism, built on an undercover report from the British anti-racist group Hope Not Hate.”

President Trump is considering making VC Peter Thiel (who is still an honored member of Facebook’s board of directors because Mark Zuckerberg believes in diversity) the head of his Intelligence Advisory Board, according to Adam Ciralsky’s report in Vanity Fair.

Buying gasoline on Amazon? Would you like some fertilizer and detonators with that? A Channel 4 UK report found that the online retailer’s “frequently bought together” algorithm automatically suggests bomb-making ingredients, leading Amazon to announce that it is reviewing its systems. As Amie Tsang reports for The New York Times, similar results can be found in the United States.

You know what? You can also purchase The Anarchist Cookbook on Amazon, and if you Google for “fertilizer bomb” you will get accurate search results. Methinks there needs to be a limit to blaming tech platforms for reflecting human ingenuity and vileness.

Crypto-wars, continued: WhatsApp is resisting an effort by the British government to force it to create a backdoor allowing authorities to read requested messages, Colin Daileda reports for Mashable. “I think they have to be commended for actually pushing back against this kind of request,” commented Danny O’Brien, the international director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Food for thought: What if maps showed us how much time it would take to get from point A to point B, instead of distance? Mapbox’s Peter Liu shows some early results of an effort to do just that.