Disparaging Things

This is civic tech: Here’s mySociety’s 2017 annual report. They’ve been at this civic tech thing for 14 years!

Fiskkit, a fact-checking platform, is raising money on IndieGogo to build a “troll filter.”

Civic Hall organizers-in-residence Rhize.org is raising a bail fund to support nonviolent youth activists in Uganda who were arrested Saturday.

Welcome to “e-Estonia: a coordinated governmental effort to transform the country from a state into a digital society,” as Nathan Heller reports for The New Yorker. “The normal services that government is involved with—legislation, voting, education, justice, health care, banking, taxes, policing, and so on—have been digitally linked across one platform, wiring up the nation.”

But his emails! The Trump administration and Robert Mueller are squabbling over whether the special counsel properly obtained thousands of emails written during the transition, with Trump campaign lawyer Kory Langhofer claiming they were privileged. In fact, they were on government servers and produced using government computers, and thus came with no such expectation of privacy, Chris Geidner reports for BuzzFeed.

EPA staff who have spoken up privately about their concerns about the direction of the agency have had their emails scoured by a Republican opposition research firm, Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman report for The New York Times.

Life in Facebookistan: On Friday, the company’s director of research, David Ginsberg, and research scientist Moira Burke, posted an extraordinary discussion of the negative effects of social media and shared “some insights into how the research team at Facebook works with our product teams to incorporate well-being principles.” As Farhad Manjoo noted in The New York Times, they made a startling admission—using Facebook can indeed be bad for you, especially when you are just reading and not interacting with other people. As a result, the company is “working to make Facebook more about social interaction and less about spending time.” Ironically, their first moves seem mostly about making Facebook less interactive, with adding new features to let users more easily avoid people they don’t want to interact with, such as avoiding seeing an ex’s posts.

Researcher J. Nathan Matias, founder of the new nonprofit CivilServant, explains on Medium how you can audit your own Facebook NewsFeed, showing how he determined that using a colored background while sharing short poems increases user engagement.

He and research partner Audrey Chebet are recruiting women and their trusted allies to test effective responses to online harassment on Twitter. (For more details, read this post, which Matias asks that you NOT share via social media.)

Remember Reid Hoffman’s claim that addiction to Facebook was no more worrisome to addiction to sugar? Just in time for the new Star Wars move: SugarWars.com.

Media matters: Twitter is rolling out new rules that will suspend accounts affiliated with hate groups, reports Recode’s Tony Romm, who says this may lead to a purge of “alt-right” users.

Wired’s Erin Griffith reports that most tech bros in Silicon Valley haven’t really gotten the message that the world no longer admires them.

As an example, she notes a recent post from Sam Altman, the supposed good guy at YCombinator, who wrote that real innovation requires that we tolerate people with terrible ideas. Actually, what he wrote is “it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics.”

Your moment of zen: Original Jedi warrior Mark Hamill schools Sen. Ted Cruz (himself a Star Wars fan) over who is the real Darth Vader of net neutrality.