Web of Sameness

Tech and politics: Donald Trump may be a master of Twitter, but Hillary Clinton gained more Twitter followers during her party convention compared to Trump during his, George Washington University’s PEORIA Project reports. Writing for Medium, GWU professor Michael Cohen notes that Trump gained 159,536 followers while Clinton gained 191,767. For Clinton that was a 2.4% increase over her starting base nearly 8 million compared to Trumps 1.6% increase on nearly 10 million. Clinton’s tweets were retweeted 741,000 times compared to 470,000 for Trump, during their respective conventions. She also had more total engagement with her followers. Cohen’s hypothesis, which is shared by his colleague Michael Cornfield, is that during the convention Clinton gained more Sanders followers than Trump gained followers from all his Republican rivals.

Longtime blogger Andrew Sullivan, temporarily back in the pundit saddle at New York Magazine, tells Jennifer Schuessler of The New York Times that “coming back to the web, I’m struck by how so many outlets are doing so many similar things. It feels to me that before, where we had a bunch of very different voices, in a kind of diverse cacophony, it’s now one big algorithmic wave of sameness. You go from one site to another, and they’re all chasing the same stories, the same quick hot takes.”

This is civic tech: Reporting on Code for America’s ongoing effort to restructure its volunteer Brigade program, Jason Shueh of GovTech focuses on the question of whether the local civic tech groups can sustain themselves without stipends from CfA.

Joe Mitchell of the UK’s Democracy Club is traveling around Europe this summer exploring the civic tech scene, and here’s his report on why Paris’ scene is “thriving.”

Brian Glick of ComputerWeekly.com reports on how senior civic servants in the UK want to break up its path-breaking Government Digital Service (which predated and inspired similar efforts like the U.S. Digital Service) and restore power to IT department heads.

Best wishes to Minerva Tantoco, New York City’s first Chief Technology Officer (and a regular visitor to Civic Hall), who is leaving the De Blasio administration to join Future/Perfect Ventures as a senior advisor. Her accomplishments as CTO include helping launch CS4All—the City’s plan to provide computer science education to every public student—to developing the first-ever comprehensive set of guidelines for the Internet of Things.

What sharing economy? “It is a sad day when, in response to the filing of a commercial lawsuit, a corporate defendant feels compelled to hire unlicensed private investigators to conduct secret personal background investigations of both the plaintiff and his counsel. It is sadder yet when these investigators flagrantly lie to friends and acquaintances of the plaintiff and his counsel in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to obtain derogatory information about them.” That’s what Federal District Judge Jed Rakoff said about Uber’s hiring of a private investigator to try to dig up dirt about Yale researcher Spencer Meyer, who has filed a lawsuit against the giant company alleging price fixing, Sam Biddle reports for The Intercept.

Is libertarian Trump supporter and Facebook board member Peter Thiel into parabiosis? (That’s the theory that getting regular infusions of a younger person’s blood plasma will help an older person live longer.) Jeff Bercovici of Inc. has the story.

A new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology finds that ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft have had no effect on drunk driving in America, despite claims made by the companies, at least partly because drunk people don’t want to pay the cost of a ride, Ankita Rao reports for Vice’s Motherboard.

Crypto-wars, continued: Moxie Marlinspike, the anarchist coder who is bringing strong encryption to the masses, is profiled by Andy Greenberg in Wired. “I actually think that law enforcement should be difficult,” Marlinspike says, “And I think it should actually be possible to break the law.” Edward Snowden uses Signal, the software Marlinspike wrote, along with a billion WhatsApp users.