Sugar Plantations

This is civic tech: Here’s a nice reframing of the Sidewalk Labs Toronto controversy, written by Chris Rattan for NowToronto. The issue is who will own and control the data collected by the “smart city” currently being planned by this Google subsidiary; the emerging idea is government should own it, not a private company, so it can be democratically controlled.

Pittsburgh is teaching kids to be tech problem-solvers, starting with inviting young students to design a better hall-pass, Kim Lyons reports for Technical.ly.

Apply: The U.S. Conference of Mayors is running a “Civic Tech Pitch Application.” The deadline is May 31. First place is $10,000.

Cyberwar watch: The FBI has seized an internet domain that controlled a half-million hacked routers and storage devices that could be used for a cyberattack, Kevin Poulsen reports for The Daily Beast. The network of hacked computers was, according to the FBI, created by Fancy Bear, the same group that has been linked to the 2016 DNC hacking.

Mogul madness: Will Evans of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal program is defending his and Alyssa Jeong Perry’s story on Tesla’s problematic labor and safety practices against an online rant from Elon Musk, the company’s owner. We’ll leave the last word on this to Columbia University’s Emily Bell.

Unopen gov: What if the White House hosted a roundtable on “leveraging data as a strategic asset” and no reporters will included? Well, that actually happened, as Alex Howard helpfully points out.

Media matters: A federal judge has ruled that President Trump cannot block critics from engaging him on his official Twitter account, John Herrman and Charlie Savage report for The New York Times. The ruling could impact public officials across the country who used social media platforms to interact with the public.

Election security: Congress isn’t paying nearly enough attention to the security of America’s voting systems, Karen Tumulty reports for The Washington Post.

Life in Facebookistan: The company announced today three new initiatives related to the problem of fake news, as Wired’s Nicholas Thompson reports: a call for academic proposals to study the problem, the launch of a public education campaign involving the company’s homepage, and the release of a video called “Facing Facts” offering an inside look at the people who run News Feed. As Thompson writes, the video shows that the company is trying to fix problems it knows it helped create:

The question for Facebook, though, is no longer whether it cares. The question is whether the problem can be solved. News Feed has been tuned, for years, to maximize our attention and in many ways our outrage. The same features that incentivized publishers to create clickbait are the ones that let false news fly. News Feed has been nourishing the sugar plantations for a decade. Can it really help grow kale, or even apples?

Here’s a list of good questions for Mark Zuckerberg that Tristan Harris, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, wrote up for The Guardian. My favorite, which is almost never asked of the boy king: “What changes, if any, do you think Facebook needs to make to its governance system to avoid any such mistakes in the future?”

For everyone wondering what to do about the power of Google in search and Facebook in social, Ben Thompson’s latest post in Stratechery on the difference between platforms and aggregators offers useful food for thought.

Gambling? We’re shocked, shocked! The Justice Department is investigating whether the price of Bitcoin is being illegally manipulated, Matt Robinson and Tom Schoenberg report for Bloomberg.