Policy Formations

This is civic tech: Our colleague Matt Stempeck writes for DotEveryone that when a tech company brags about how many users it has compared to how few engineers it has, that ratio shouldn’t make the platform more investment worthy, it should be taken as “evidence of irresponsible tech.”

The National Day of Civic Hacking is coming up August 11, and Code for America has a handy list of local events here.

Related: Code for America is raising money to expand its “Clear My Record” model for the auto-expungement of eligible criminal records.

Gynuity Health Projects is testing whether it’s safe to let women take abortion pills in their own homes after taking a screening test and consulting with a doctor virtually. As Mahana Ravindranath and Renuka Rayasam report for Politico, the nonprofit group is hoping to get FDA approval for the procedure, which could strengthen access to abortion via telemedicine.

Rick Rojas reports for The New York Times on New Jersey’s experiment in providing state funding to local journalism efforts (a project developed in large degree thanks to the folks at Free Press).

Tech and politics: Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has a bunch of interesting policy ideas for how to reign in the big tech platforms, David McCabe reports for Axios. Among the more interesting ideas floated: making platforms liable for deep fake or other manipulated content that defames or harms users, requiring platforms greater than a certain size to make anonymized activity data available to independent researchers, giving the FTC privacy rule making authority, regulating “dark patterns” (interfaces designed to trick users towards taking action they might otherwise take under informed consent), requiring auditable algorithms, requiring platforms to tell users what their data is worth, and treating certain technologies, like Google Maps, as “essential facilities” (meaning the owner can’t use them to extract preferential terms and conditions from other users). Not mentioned: breaking up the biggest companies or blocking them from buying more of their competition.

Russell Berman reports for the Atlantic on how Collective PAC and its Black Campaign School are working to change who runs for office and wins in a country where 90 percent of all elected officials are white.

At least one in 117 votes cast in Wisconsin in 2016 was miscounted, thanks to the use of outdated voting machines and human error, Grigor Atanesian of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reports in the Capitol Times. Though investigators did not uncover evidence of election tampering, watchdogs are still concerned that local registrars are resisting calls to run post-election audits to ensure that mistakes are caught and corrected.

Life in Facebookistan: Ben Thompson of Stratechery explains why Facebook isn’t disappearing anytime soon, far from it.

In Brazil, where, in advance of October elections Facebook has removed a network of 196 pages and 87 accounts that it says had violated its authenticity policies, right wing movement leaders are protesting, Daniel Funke reports for Poynter.

Information disorder: YouTube search results for many A-list celebrities have been corrupted by conspiracy theorists peddling pedophilia rumors, Ben Collins reports for NBC News.

Brave new world: If GPS fails, everything goes down. Paul Tullis reports for Bloomberg News on just how dependent the global economy has become on the global position system’s 31 satellites.

Privacy activist Emma Best has published more than 11,000 messages from a private Twitter direct message group that @WikiLeaks participated in, apparently using it to coordinate attacks on its opponents (including journalists and ex-WikiLeaks staffers). The messages are lightly redacted to protect third parties, she notes. Best told Motherboard’s Joseph Cox that “The idea was that the attitudes and behavior of WL [Wikileaks] behind closed doors is relevant, especially their coordination of PR, propaganda and troll ops through assets that are public supporters but not publicly known to take cues from WL.”