December 08, 2017
- Life in Facebookistan: Ninety-seven percent of Filipinos who are online have Facebook accounts. Since getting elected, President Rodrigo Duterte, a ruthless authoritarian whose death squads’ extralegal war on drug users have killed more than 7,000, “has turned Facebook into a weapon,” reports Lauren Etter for Bloomberg—with no sign that the company cares about his policies. The relationship between Facebook and Duterte started with a team of Facebook staff that trained each of the country’s presidential candidates on using the platform, but as Etter writes, “After Duterte won, Facebook did what it does for governments all over the world—it began deepening its partnership with the new administration, offering white-glove services to help it maximize the platform’s potential and use best practices.”
- At the same time, Duterte’s online army has been “methodically taking down opponents,” using a range of trolling tactics and threats of violence, while Facebook has ignored entreaties from independent journalists who have been mercilessly targeted from its platform. Meanwhile, as Etter notes, “in November, Facebook announced a new partnership with the Duterte government. As part of its efforts to lay undersea cables around the world, Facebook agreed to team up with the government to work on completing a stretch bypassing the notoriously challenging Luzon Strait, where submarine cables in the past have been damaged by typhoons and earthquakes. Facebook will fund the underwater links to the Philippines and provide a set amount of bandwidth to the government. The government will build cable landing stations and other necessary infrastructure.” TelecomAsia estimates the value of the bandwidth Facebook is giving the Duterte government at “roughly $96 million a year.” That should help fund some more death squads. (I guess this book never made it onto Zuck’s reading list.)
- As far as I know, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t mention this deal at Facebook’s recent “social good” summit in New York, where he touted his company’s new mission: “We have a responsibility to do more in the world.” At least this new cable deal with the Philippines is indeed “bringing the world closer together.” (Try not to vomit as CNN’s Kaya Yurieff strokes Zuckerberg with gentle questions about his “utopian idealism.”)
- Bro culture: Here’s one way that Silicon Valley is solving its gender imbalance: companies are paying local modeling agencies to send female (and also some male) models to holiday parties to “chat up attendees,” Sarah Frier reports for Bloomberg. They’re known as “ambiance and atmosphere models” and they get paid between $50 and $200 an hour to mix and mingle, after getting the names of employees to pretend they’re friends with and signing NDAs.
- But her emails! “In just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election,” write Duncan Watts and David Rothschild in a long story for Columbia Journalism Review (that for a journalism outlet, oddly buries the lede). Seriously, New York Times, it’s time for some soul-searching!
- From Trump’s election to #MeToo, there’s been a sea-change in American attitudes toward sexism. As Amanda Marcotte reports for Salon, a new study of public opinion shows a big jump in the percentages of Americans who believe sexism is a big problem and agree that the country would be better off with more women in office.
- This is civic tech: Fight for the Future, “a scrappy 10-person nonprofit that has helped lead the opposition” to the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality, gets a glowing profile in the New York Times by Cecilia Kang.
- Related: Here’s a close look at the connection between broadband access and inequality in Detroit, reported by Chastity Pratt Dawsey of the Detroit Journalism Cooperative. (h/t Maya Wiley)
- Civic tech “is the intersection of local government and technology, including the people working in both groups.” That’s how Julie Zeglen of Generocity breaks it down based on conversations with people active in Philadelphia’s civic tech scene.
- The Omidyar Network’s Olena Boystun explains the thinking behind the foundation’s recent investments in Ukraine’s Social Boost and its 1991 Civic Tech Center. The center “will operate as a membership-based co-working space with a number of accelerator and mentorship support programs, as well as an event space with a schedule tailored to the needs of a community of civic tech professionals.” It’s no coincidence that this sounds like Civic Hall, which ON has backed since our opening in 2015.
- Apply: The Workers Lab is looking for proposals for its 2018 Innovation Fund, which is focused on new ways to build power for workers in the workplace, workforce development, and approaches that address automation. The deadline for grants, which are up to $150,000 for 12 months, is January 12.