Mother knows best; Racial profiling made easy; Corporate users, customer losers; Facebook & Google's common market; Your emotional responses are a data goldmine
We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here's What Happened. - Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery (Mother Jones)
Racial Profiling Via Nextdoor.com - Sam Levin (East Bay Express)
For Whom the First Amendment Matters - Tim Karr (Medium)
Facebook’s Internet Drone Team Is Collaborating with Google’s Stratospheric Balloons Project - Tom Simonite (Technology Review)
Monetize Your Dissent - Jacob Silverman (The New Republic)
We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here's What Happened.
By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery
October 8, 2015
Mother Jones
Today we are happy to announce a monumental legal victory for Mother Jones: A judge in Idaho has ruled in our favor on all claims in a defamation case filed by a major Republican donor, Frank VanderSloot, and his company, Melaleuca Inc. In a decision issued Tuesday, the court found that Mother Jones did not defame VanderSloot or Melaleuca because "all of the statements at issue are non-actionable truth or substantial truth." The court also found that the statements were protected as fair comment under the First Amendment.
This is the culmination of a lengthy, expensive legal saga that began three years ago when the 2012 presidential primaries were in full swing. On February 6, 2012, we published an article about VanderSloot after it emerged that his company, Melaleuca, and its subsidiaries had given $1 million to Mitt Romney's super-PAC. The piece noted that VanderSloot had gone to unusual lengths to oppose gay rights in Idaho, and that Melaleuca had run into trouble with regulators.
Racial Profiling Via Nextdoor.com
By Sam Levin
October 7, 2015
East Bay Express
Nextdoor.com, a website that bills itself as the "private social network for neighborhoods," offers a free web platform on which members can blast a wide variety of messages to people who live in their immediate neighborhood. A San Francisco-based company founded in 2010, Nextdoor's user-friendly site has exploded in popularity over the last two years in Oakland. As of this fall, a total of 176 Oakland neighborhoods have Nextdoor groups — and 20 percent of all households in the city use the site, according to the company.
On Nextdoor, people give away free furniture or fruit from their backyards. Users reunite lost dogs with their owners. Members organize community meetings and share tips about babysitters and plumbers. But under the "Crime and Safety" section of the site, the tone is much less neighborly. There, residents frequently post unsubstantiated "suspicious activity" warnings that result in calls to the police on Black citizens who have done nothing wrong.
For Whom the First Amendment Matters
By Tim Karr
October 7, 2015
Medium
Free speech matters to the hundreds of millions of Internet users who exercise this right every time they connect with others online. But if you ask some of the lawyers working for the companies that sell you Internet access, they’ll insist that it’s more important to protect the free speech rights of phone and cable giants like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. In a convoluted twist, they argue that the First Amendment gives these same companies the right to block, throttle and degrade the communications of everyone using their services.
Did you get that? The First Amendment gives Comcast the right to censor you.
Facebook’s Internet Drone Team Is Collaborating with Google’s Stratospheric Balloons Project
By Tom Simonite
October 6, 2015
Technology Review
Facebook and Google compete intensely for your time online and for the ad dollars of corporations. But now the two companies are collaborating on efforts to use balloons and drone aircraft to expand Internet access to the four billion people that don’t have it.
Documents filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission show that both companies are pushing for international law to be modified to make it easier to use aircraft around 20 kilometers above the earth, in the stratosphere, to provide Internet access.
Monetize Your Dissent
By Jacob Silverman
September 18, 2015
The New Republic
Last summer, Facebook published the results of a study of “emotional contagion,” which examined whether certain emotions can be induced in people—in this case, almost 700,000 Facebook users—and then be observed moving across the network. In essence, Facebook wanted to know if the company can make users feel happier or sadder, simply by altering the mixture of content they see, and if those emotions were “contagious,” transmissible through users’ Facebook interactions.
For Facebook’s data scientists, the answer was yes on both counts. But the study’s conclusions were highly disputed, and the larger controversy concerned issues of consent, experimentation, and the opaque ways in which Facebook’s algorithms filter information and influence our lives, perhaps even guiding us toward desired behaviors. After all, if Facebook could induce a little more positivity in its users—believing this would make us more pliable, more amenable to brand messaging—why wouldn’t it do so? We may think that we are immune to these kinds of subtle influences, but Silicon Valley behaviorists—not to mention every advertising firm in the country—would disagree.