Archive: Category: TechPresident

Catalysts There will be a Democratic presidential primary: independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has announced formally that he is running for president. Compared to Hillary Clinton, he enters the field with a much smaller digital footprint: 294,000 Twitter followers (and that's to his official Senate account—his official personal campaign account has just 11,600) to her 3.45 million; and 301,000 likes on Facebook compared to her 787,000. Still, Sanders' economic populist message may give him surprising traction—for years he has successfully appealed to many of his state's more conservative and independent voters despite being an avowed socialist. It will be interesting to see if the mainstream media, which has essentially anointed Clinton the Democratic nominee, gives Sanders a fair shake, and also...

Bubbling More people say they regularly get news about politics and government from Facebook than from CNN or Fox News, the new Pew Research Center annual journalism survey reports. 48% of adults surveyed said they got such news from Facebook in the last week, compared to 44% for CNN, 39% for Fox, and just 9% from Twitter. Another more surprising finding from the survey: 24% of adults say they use Google Plus vs just 21% for Twitter. Facebook users are more likely to say they get political news from that service than Twitter users (62% vs 40%). So-called "consistent liberals" are somewhat more likely to say they get news from Facebook or Twitter, compared to "consistent conservatives." Complicating the "filter bubble" theory,...

Rising BaltimoreUprising.org is one hub for information about the protests against police violence in Baltimore. This data journalism story from last September's Baltimore Sun catalogues the many cases where the city has paid out settlements to residents beaten by police. Riots in Baltimore yesterday began with word spreading on social media of a "purge," according to The Baltimore Sun's Justin Fenton and Erica Green, a reference to a movie where crime becomes legal. Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos connects the dots in a very different way, in a series of tweets summarized here on USA Today. The key lines, after he condemns the riots: ...

Targeted Digital humanitarians are responding "in full force" to this weekend's huge earthquake in Nepal, Patrick Meier reports. So far, despite the efforts of new Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to charm Silicon Valley, tech company security experts seem to be resisting the US government's desire for weakened encryption systems, David Sanger and Nicole Perloth report for the New York Times. A newly declassified government report suggests that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping and bulk data program was largely ineffective at thwarting terrorism, Charlie Savage reports for the New York Times. See if you can parse these two quotes, that literally follow each other, from Steven Levy's fascinating interview with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, who is building a personalized geo-location layer for the Internet: Crowley: "We can...

Overreaching It looks like last year's successful campaign to defend net neutrality just claimed a collateral win: as Jonathan Mahler writes in the New York Times, regulators attitudes toward the proposed, now sunk, Comcast-TimeWarner merger were shaped by fears that the combined company would be too big. "At the end of the day," he writes, "the government’s commitment to maintaining a free and open Internet did not square with the prospect of a single company controlling as much as 40 percent of the public’s access to it. " Harold Feld of Public Knowledge goes deep on why the FCC balked at the Comcast-TimeWarner deal. House Speaker John Boehner tells Bloomberg's Mark Halperin that the House might subpoena Hillary Clinton's personal email server if...

Ownership Taking a page from the Obama '08 and '12 campaign handbooks, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is launching a broad organizing effort aimed at signing up volunteers in all fifty states. It's being led by Marlon Marshall, the deputy national field director of Obama '12 and a founding partner in the 270 Strategies consulting firm. As in the Obama campaigns, the Clinton team is promising that volunteers will "own a piece of this campaign" by getting involved. If their role is anything like that of volunteers for Obama, the piece they own will be sort of like the tail-light of the car, nothing near the steering wheel or dashboard. (For more on Marshall, see this profile by Juliet Eilperin in the...

Bush League It looks like the bulk of John Ellis (Jeb) Bush's still unannounced presidential campaign, currently raising unlimited amounts of money under the banner of his Super PAC Right to Rise, is going to stay there, at least through the primaries, reports Thomas Beaumont for the AP. Once he officially declares, he can no longer coordinate with the PAC, but that will hardly matter since a close confidant of Bush's, Mike Murphy, will run it. According to Beaumont's report, Right to Rise would handle everything from TV ads and direct mail to data gathering, online targeting, phone banking, GOTV and efforts to maximize early voting and absentee balloting. All without disclosing who is paying for it. But remember, as Bush...

Glass Half Full A new survey report from the Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the Knight Foundation and released this morning, finds that a slight majority of the public believes more transparency and open government data can help journalists cover government better and make government more accountable. Skepticism about the government's overall ability to do the right thing appears to drive public attitudes, with only 45% saying that open government data can result in better decisions by government and 53% disagreeing. Partisan identities also strongly color opinion about this issue, with Democrats far more optimistic about government transparency efforts and Republicans far more skeptical. Very few Americans think federal, state, or local governments are sharing data effectively (they are right!),...

Zucked Up Tackling the rising tide of criticism in India of its "zero rating" policy offering free access to Facebook and a few other sites through select Internet service providers and telcos, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded with an oped in the Hindustan Times that he alsoposted on his wall in defense of his Internet.org project. In it, he argues that "universal connectivity and net neutrality can and must coexist," adding "if someone can't afford to pay for connectivity, it is always better to have some access than none at all." Responding to a handful of comments to his Facebook post, Zuckerberg notes "It's too expensive to make the whole internet free." So far, Indian travel website Cleartrip, the Times of India...

Mugs Sasha Issenberg, the leading reporter covering data-driven campaigns, rolls out a big story for Bloomberg Politics on Mitch Stewart of 270 Strategies, who has been leading Ready for Hillary's list-building efforts on behalf of the now official Clinton campaign. Its harvest, he reports, was 2.4 million pledges to help her candidacy plus 4 million prospective voters to target. Stewart confirms something online organizers have been dealing with for years--email list open rates have dropped (see the 2014 M&R Benchmark study). It used to be that an open rate of 16-18 percent was considered healthy. Now he says to Issenberg, "What you want for an issue advocacy or non-profit entity, the average is about a 13 percent open rate." He adds, "What...