Fun Adventures

This is civic tech: Last year at Personal Democracy Forum, our friend Emily Jacobi of Digital Democracy gave an inspiring talk about their work with Waorani communities of the Curaray river-basin in Ecuador, and how they had developed an ingenious and indigenous new mapping technology to help defend their ancestral lands—the most biodiverse place on Earth—from extractive industries. Unfortunately the Ecuadoran government recently announced a new oil block in the heart of the Waorani territory, and working with the group Amazon Frontlines, the Waorani are fighting back and calling for help. Take a few minutes to understand their story, and add your voice.

Crypto-wars, continued: The FBI has overstated the number of encrypted phones that it can’t crack by a factor of five or six, Devlin Barrett reports for The Washington Post.

Amazon is now in the surveillance business, selling a facial recognition system called “Rekognition” that it is selling to government agencies, Matt Cable and Nicole Ozer report for the ACLU. They write, “Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon.” And you thought Amazon just was the world’s largest online store.

Life in Facebookistan: Members of the European Parliament had tough questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, but he managed to avoid some of the hardest ones, The Washington Post’s Tony Romm reports.

As Paris Martineu reports for The Outline, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook isn’t planning on deleting all the data it has on non-users. But since legislators were forced to ask their questions in sequence and they all piled up over an hour before the boy king responded, many questions simply were unanswered or got his patented “I’ll make sure we follow up and get you answers” non-answer.

Meanwhile, in the “our shit doesn’t stink” department, Facebook is expanding its effort to fight revenge porn by calling on users in Australia, Canada, the US and UK to send it their nude pictures so the company can better identify future uploads of them to spot and delete them, Charlie Warzel reports for Buzzfeed.

The Weather Channel is ending its seven-figure deal with Facebook to create news feed videos, with its global head of content remarking, “this was a fun adventure, it was not a business,” Sahil Patel reports for Digiday.

Indian journalist Rana Ayyub describes, in a New York Times oped, how followers of the country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, have weaponized social media to viciously attack female journalist like her. As she writes, Modi “has repeatedly talked about changing Indian lives through technology. Four years into his term, his followers have indeed found a vigorous use for technology: curtailing criticism and normalizing hatred and misogyny.”

Bad reporting by young, white reporters given the Internet beat may have helped add fuel to the alt-right, as those reporters treated the rise of racism online as something they were more used to dealing with and downplaying, namely, trolling, Laura Hazard Owen of NiemanLab writes, summarizing Whitney Phillips’ new report “The Oxygen of Amplification” for Data & Society.

The Mueller investigation is taking a close look at an Israeli firm, PSY Group, that pitched its services to superPACs and other political entities during the 2016 election, offering to infiltrate target audiences with fake but elaborately crafted social media personas and spread misinformation, Michael Riley and Lauren Etter report for Bloomberg.