Flares and Messenger Pigeons

This is civic tech: Here’s a report by Rob Miller on Smart London Camp 2018, an unconference held on Saturday hosted by the city’s chief digital officer Theo Blackwell.

Laura James of DotEveryone explains how the group is working to get engineers focused on building more ethical tech.

Lorelei Kelly asks a good question: Where’s the 18F for Congress? She writes, “When it comes to technology, the Senate might as well use flares and messenger pigeons to communicate. The House is more advanced. It’s more like a blinking VCR.”

Life in Facebookistan: Amanda Taub and Max Fisher report for The New York Times on how sectarian violence in Sri Lanka was fueled by Facebook, which has displaced local media and then “ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact.” The company employees few content moderators who speak Sinhalese, and when people use the site’s flagging tool to report content inciting people to attack Muslims, they were told the content did not violate Facebook’s standards, Taub and Fisher report.

From last October to this March, when in six countries including Sri Lanka Facebook tested moving news out of users’ News Feeds into a separate section, the reduction of professional news content seen by users may have actually helped fuel the spread of more hateful content, a Sri Lankan media analyst told the Times.

Must-read: Siva Vaidhyanathan in The New Yorker on why “techno-fundamentalism” isn’t going to save Facebook. Here’s the most critical point: “No system is deft enough to respond to the rapidly changing varieties of cultural expression in a single language, let alone a hundred. Slang is fleeting yet powerful; irony is hard enough for some people to read. If we rely on A.I. to write our rules of conduct, we risk favoring those rules over our own creativity. What’s more, we hand the policing of our discourse over to the people who set the system in motion in the first place, with all their biases and blind spots embedded in the code. Questions about what sorts of expressions are harmful to ourselves or others are difficult. We should not pretend that they will get easier.” (Note: Vaidhyanathan will be one of the anchor keynoters at Personal Democracy Forum 2018.)

Susan Crawford in Wired on why Facebook is not a utility. She writes: “It is an app. It may be a dominant app. It may even be exercising monopoly power unfairly. But it is not a utility, and muddying the definitional waters this way will only help the real utilities—like Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink—avoid genuine oversight.”

The Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong compares how Uber and Facebook each have responded to their company’s scandals of the past year, and finds Uber looking a lot better.

Paula Goldman and Mike Kubzansky of the Omidyar Network’s newly founded Tech and Society Solutions Lab explain why they are partnering with several other leading foundations to support academic research into the role Facebook plays in elections.

If you are trying to build an alternative to Facebook, VC Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH incubator is offering $100K each to seven teams (who are willing to give him 6 percent of their companies in exchange).

Brave new world: With a billion Indians now in the country’s Aadhaar national ID system, technology lawyer Mishi Choudhary outlines for the BBC the reasons why privacy and security advocates have deep concerns. Among them: beneficiaries being denied benefits because of flawed data and the sale of citizen profiles to commercial enterprises.

Researchers who specialize in artificial intelligence are making salaries over $1M in some cases, even at nonprofits like OpenAI, Cade Metz reports for The New York Times.

Electric scooters are starting to clog city streets, Nellie Bowles and David Streitfeld report for the Times, following a trend of start-ups like Uber that deploy first and deal with regulators later.

The Justice Department is investigating whether AT&T and Verizon have colluded to prevent customers from easily switching wireless providers, Cecilia Kang reports for the Times.