Archive: Category: TechPresident

Ubermenschens Embattled Uber executive Emil Michael publicly apologized yesterday to Sarah Lacy on Twitter. Also on Twitter, his boss, Travis Kalanick, condemned Michael's remarks as showing "a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals." BuzzFeed's Johana Bhulyan and Charlie Warzel report that the general manager of Uber NY, Josh Mohrer, is being investigated by the company for abusing the company's internal "God View" tool, which shows the locations of Uber cars and customers. Mohrer had accessed Bhulyan's records and shown them to her while she was preparing an earlier story. Journalist Ellen Cushing reports that while working on a cover story on Uber for San Francisco magazine, she was warned by current and former employees...

Uber Falles A top executive at Uber recently suggested at a dinner of top NY media types that the company spend "a million dollars" to hire opposition researchers to dig up personal details on its journalistic critics, specifically mentioning Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily, reports Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed. Lacy is justifiably outraged, particularly at Michael's threat to dig up dirt on her family. The executive in question, Emil Michael, Uber's senior vice president of business, later issued a statement denying that his remarks reflected his "actual views." The company denies conducting opposition research on journalists. This story, by Sarah Lacy on October 22nd, decrying Uber's "asshole culture" of entrenched sexism and misogyny (most recently exemplified by an...

Differences Independent SuperPACs aren't allowed to coordinate with campaigns, but according to this story by Chris Moody for CNN, anonymous public Twitter accounts were used to enable the sharing of sensitive information like polling data among Republican campaigns and groups. As one campaign finance expert, Paul Ryan, commented, "It's a line that has not been defined. This is really on the cutting edge." Anonymous has taken over two Twitter accounts belonging to the racist Klu Klux Klan organization, Violet Blue reports for ZDNet. Venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban are sparring on Wilson's AVC blog over whether, as Wilson writes, net neutrality is needed to protect the Davids (upstart innovators) from the Goliaths (incumbent giant internet service providers), or if it will...

Wednesday in London, as part of the annual Open Up? conference hosted by the Omidyar Network, I had the opportunity to interview Alan Rusbridger, the longtime editor of The Guardian newspaper, about the impact of Edward Snowden's revelations of massive government surveillance programs in the United States and United Kingdom. To my surprise, he was much more optimistic about the impact of the stories published in his paper and elsewhere, like the Washington Post and New York Times, than I expected. And he laid out an extraordinarily ambitious agenda of unfinished work that Snowden has prompted. Even though the sense of urgency and outrage over the NSA and GCHQ's dragnet surveillance may have subsided, he argued that "under the surface…an awful...

Security Insecurity Pew Internet's...

Sentimental BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith has a bold post up declaring 2016 "The Facebook election" and touting his site's semi-exclusive access to Facebook sentiment data on how Democratic and Republican users say about the emerging field of presidential candidates. "The data will be granular enough to see trends among and between states, between men and women inside states, and among age groups," he writes. I think he's absolutely right that "the viral, mass conversation about politics on Facebook and other platforms has finally emerged as a third force in the core business of politics, mass persuasion" and that "the way people share will shape the outcome of the presidential election"--but it could also be that the way campaigns micro-target...

Boosts Before we get to the news of the world, here's our own scoop: Personal Democracy Media is proud to be launching a big new project called Civic Hall, a year-round community center and event space for civic tech in the heart of Manhattan's Silicon Alley. Details here. In the Washington Post, Matea Gold and Sean Sullivan break down the RNC's vastly improved voter contact program, which reached 35 million people. In at least eleven states, the Republican vote total was bigger than in 2012. By contrast, the biggest Democratic voter contact operation, run by the DSCC's Bannock Street Project, hit 10.2 million doors. Continuing the mid-term post-mortems, Andrew Bleeker of Bully Pulpit Interactive writes that the press overstated the role of tech...

Downplaying According to this report from Pew Research, the national vote share for Republicans versus Democrats in 2014 was pretty similar to 2010, with the same demographic divides. This despite hiring many of the Obama 2012 campaign's best digital strategists and spending $60 million to help maximize the turnout of the Obama base. So what about the role of tech in election 2014? Darren Samuelson of Politico got a bunch of interesting answers. Among them: says Stu Trevelyan of NGP VAN, "It was not enough, and never will be, except in close races." Also downplaying the importance of tech and data to the Democrats' midterm losses, Amelia Showalter, former digital analytics director for Obama 2012: "All of these are tools that help...

Voters Speak Big listening, GOP version: In AdAge, veteran digital marketing reporter Kate Kaye covers how the Republican National Committee made intensive use of Sprinklr, a social analytics platform, paying for customized real-time analyses of online chatter that was fed to several Senate campaigns. She writes, "Depending on what identifiable data people associate with their social accounts, Sprinklr can match what they do in social media with the GOP's data, which includes information about previous interactions someone might have had with the party, such as donating or signing an online petition." As of 11:00pm ET last night, 6.7 million people had used Facebook's voter megaphone to tell their friends that they were voting. An interactive map posted by Facebook show that participation...

Big Bad Data Facebook is pushing its "voter megaphone" out to all of its more than 150 million adult users in the United States, and here at techPresident, we're asking for your help tracking how the tool is deployed. Why big data is bad for political prognostication: In the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Thomas Gilbert and Andrew Loveridge have an absolutely brilliant critique of the new data-driven journalism exemplified by "explainers" like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver. They write, The real problem with our media wasn’t that it was bad at predicting elections (although it was)—it’s that it spends so much time on predicting elections at all, as opposed to moderating and shaping a national debate on what is at stake...