Arguments

Good luck to our longtime friend Mindy Finn, a veteran Republican digital strategist who just announced that she is running for Vice President with independent Evan McMullin, continuing her #NeverTrump efforts from earlier this year. In addition to her work for the RNC and NRSC, in 2012 she ran Twitter’s politics and advocacy sector. Here she is speaking at Personal Democracy Forum 2011, along with Anthea Watson of Google, about the power of open voting data.

Cathy O’Neil, Civic Hall member and author of the fantastic new book Weapons of Math Destruction, gets profiled in The New Yorker by Sheelah Kolhatkar. Here’s her talk from PDF 2015, where she previewed the themes of her book.

Black Girls Code got a Cameo in hit TV show Empire Wednesday, Colm Gorey reports for Silicon Republic.

EU Parliamentarian Marietje Schaake, another longtime friend, castigates YouTube for mistakenly taking down an anti-torture video she posted, writing that the experience was a “clearer reminder than I could have imagined of why we need to address the role of algorithms, free speech, and access to information.”

Related: Writing on the Ford Foundation’s blog, David Robinson of Upturn explains why foundations need to pay attention to the ethics of big data.

Arguing that tech is too big and culturally salient to be reformed by conventional measures (and most politicians don’t understand the issues at stake anyway), Anil Dash says that what’s needed is “direct, networked action” that can force needed changes.

With DDOS attackers now using things like internet-connected CCTV cameras, digital video recorders, home routers and other embedded computers, security analyst Bruce Schneier argues that government has to step in and force Internet of Things manufacturers to drastically upgrade their devices’ security.

If you feel like the presidential election has taken over your mind, Adam Haslett argues in The Nation that this is because “In an era of social atomization and online living, when we have so few points of civic attachment in the vast middle ground between domestic life and the imperial presidency, the candidates—as the phenomenon of Barack Obama made abundantly clear—have become repositories for feelings that have nowhere else to go.”

New data shows that medical specialties appears to be self-sorting along political lines, Margot Sanger-Katz reports for the Upshot.

Meet @arguetron, a Twitter bot built by Sarah Nyberg that, as she puts it, “baits internet bigots into fighting with it for hours.”

Bonus link: @Thinkpiecebot, built by Nora Reed, in case real think pieces aren’t good enough.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing tough new rules to protect the privacy of broadband users.

As Shiva Stella of Public Knowledge comments, the proposed rules would “protect the confidentiality of browser history, application history and other ways in which broadband providers gain windows into the private lives of their subscribers. The rules would also, for the first time, impose clear requirements for broadband carriers to protect subscriber personal information and require carriers to notify subscribers impacted by a data breach.”

Life in Facebookistan: Facebook is working to bring its controversial “Free Basics” program to the United States, Brian Fung reports for the Washington Post.

And here’s Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Oculus Connect conference, talking about “building a software platform that puts people first.” Unfortunately, I’m old enough to remember when “putting people first” meant actually improving people’s lives.