Archive: Category: TechPresident

Today is Election Day in the United States, and along with the many efforts by campaigns and advocacy groups to get out their voters, Facebook is taking a big step to push people to the polls. As I reported last week for Mother Jones, for the first time in six years, Facebook says it is rolling out its "voter megaphone"--a banner across the top of each user's page like the one shown above--to all of its users above the age of 18 in the United States. That's somewhere upwards of 150 million people, if all goes according to plan. While other tech giants, notably Google and Microsoft, have put resources into making it easier for people to find their polling...

Nudges Darren Samuelsohn has a nice round-up in Politico of the ways that campaigns on both sides of the aisle are using tech in 2014, focusing on fundraising, targeting, GOTV, social media monitoring and video tracking. Most interesting: we are definitely in the age of individual voter targeting: Samuelsohn reports that "even if someone tries to erase their online web history by turning off the cookie function, campaigns are using their databases to find a targeted person’s home and then message them through the specifically-assigned address for each device on an internet network." Joe Rospars, the founder and CEO of heavyweight Democratic web firm Blue State Digital and the Obama campaign's main digital strategist, has written a cri de couer to his...

Scary Monsters Facebook has finally opened up about the experiments it was conducting in 2012 on its users' voting behavior, as I detail today in this story for Mother Jones. We're far from #1: "Downloading a high-definition movie takes about seven seconds in Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Bucharest and Paris, and people pay as little as $30 a month for that connection," writes Claire Cain Miller for the New York Times. "In Los Angeles, New York and Washington, downloading the same movie takes 1.4 minutes for people with the fastest Internet available, and they pay $300 a month for the privilege." This is from "The Cost of Connectivity," a new report from the Open Technology Institute. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is planning...

System-Gaming Don't miss Simon Van Zuylen-Wood's excellent and detailed look in National Journal at how a bevy of tech entrepreneurs have been trying, so far with limited success, to hack Capitol Hill and fix what ills Washington. The feature is built around a close-in profile of "video-game tycoon and budding campaign finance reformer" Jim Greer and his CounterPAC, but it also reveals the reasoning behind libertarian Peter Thiel's quirky investment in Lawrence Lessig's MayDay PAC and nicely captures the contradiction between the massive investments major tech players are making in political lobbying and the against-the-grain efforts of some independent tech money to game the system for good. He writes: …when the tech world does inch successfully into the realm of politics and...

Gimme Shelter Must-read: Sarah Jeong in Forbes on the connection between intimate partner violence and surveillance technology. "As women's shelters across the country have learned," she writes, "privacy tools are not just for journalists, whistleblowers, spies and criminals." This two-minute video from Hollaback shows how much street harassment a woman walking through New York City experiences in a single day. (I'd share the original link but the page appears to be down.) The actress who volunteered to be in Hollaback's videa is now getting rape threats online, and the organization is fighting back by asking supporters to report the threats to get them deleted, reports Sheila Anne Feeney for Newsday. Cops in California and elsewhere are illegally seizing and sharing naked photos from the...

Tribes Edward Snowden on his life in Russia, as interviewed by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen of The Nation: he's often recognized in computer stores. And regarding his questioning of Vladimir Putin about Russian surveillance practices: "Yeah, that was terrible! Oh, Jesus, that blew up in my face." Also, here is Snowden on how the Internet has made politics more polarized: What we’re seeing now, or starting to see, is an atomization of the Internet community. Before, everybody went only to a few sites; now we’ve got all these boutiques. We’ve got crazy little sites going up against established media behemoths. And increasingly we’re seeing these ultra-partisan sites getting larger and larger readerships because people are self-selecting themselves into communities. I...

Inventions The deal between the Data Trust, the RNC's voter data arm, to begin sharing voter files with i360, the Koch brothers analytics house, did not come easily, reports Jon Ward for Yahoo! News, in an in-depth article on the state of Republican tech efforts. He writes, "Too many Republican consultants and state parties still see data as an asset to be hoarded, rather than a tool that gains power and value the more it is shared with and used by like-minded allies." Wait, isn't sharing = socialism? Speaking of GOP tech: In case you haven't had this story targeted to you already on your Twitter feed, here's Steven Freiss' feature profile of Vincent Harris, who now must be referred to as...

Spoilers Tough words on the GOP's 2016 digital gap from one of its own, South Carolina consultant Wesley Donahue. Speaking to Darren Samuelsohn of Politico, Donahue said, "There is a massive talent gap. Half those [presidential campaigns] will have digital staff that don't know what the hell they're doing. They'll end up with some dude who plays on Facebook all day, which somehow makes him a digital expert." New York City councilman Ben Kallos, the most tech savvy elected official we know (he posts his draft legislation on GitHub!), is profiled as "The Agile Politician" in Fast Company Labs by Jay Cassano. (We see what you did there.) Our Sarah Lai Stirland reports on the most tech savvy candidate for statewide office...

Hot Spots At Tsinghua University in Beijing, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg did a half-hour public Q&A in Mandarin, the language of his wife Priscilla Chan, which he has been studying. He noted that Facebook, which is banned in China, is working closely with Chinese companies to reach global audiences through its advertising platform. Noting how relaxed Zuckerberg was speaking in Mandarin, tech writer Steven Johnson tweeted, "I think this will turn out to be one of those threshold moments we talk about 20 years later." Neelie Kroes, the departing EU digital commissioner, has given a parting speech warning that "analogue Europe" is holding back "digital Europe" with its fears, reports Mike Masnick of TechDirt. Johana Bhulyan is sticking to the Uber labor beat,...

Reminders Despite paying lots of lip service to the need for vastly improved voter data integration, the national GOP remains stymied in its efforts as the 2014 elections approach, reports Patrick O'Connor for the Wall Street Journal. Reading between the lines of his solid story, it looks like Andy Barkett, the engineering whiz who came from Facebook to be the RNC's CTO, was stung by the depth of infighting between competing GOP political technology vendors. Here's a new wrinkle for an old GOTV technology: in North Carolina and New Mexico, Planned Parenthood is asking voters to record a phone message to themselves, reminding them to vote on Election Day, reports Bethany Blakeman for Campaigns and Elections. They are also testing using recorded...