January 2016

Wikipedia turns 15

Wikipedia, the online, crowd-sourced encyclopedia that has become the source of all facts for many, turns 15 on Jan 15. The free site was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It was meant as a place where anyone with knowledge of a topic could write it up and make it available to the world, without ads or traditional gatekeepers. The site quickly caught on, to the detriment of traditional encyclopedias and other printed sources. Today it is often the first place online users go for information.

Wikipedia’s brilliance was that it was non-profit and crowd-sourced. Eventually its editing model became a problem, as people with an axe to grind realized they could change entries and effectively re-write the truth for millions of readers This came to be known as “edit warring.” It could be as harmless as an ongoing debate over the proper spelling of Caesar Salad to back-and-forth changes to articles about President George W. Bush, circumcision and global warming, according to research by scientists at Oxford University. Wikipedia instituted stronger editing guidelines to curb some of the worst abuses, which also had the effect of limiting participation. "The controversy and excitement that surrounded the service in the early days has passed,” said Aleksi Aaltonen, a professor of information systems at Warwick University in Coventry, United Kingdom. "If Wikipedia can maintain its success, it will be remembered as a gift of an open internet that is now under attack from many directions. It may even turn out to be an example of a new type of social and perhaps more humane way of organizing production. We have already seen similar models of production used in open-source software development,” he said.

NSA claims to meet privacy safeguards

The National Security Agency is adequately protecting Americans’ civil liberties and privacy as it shifts to a new intelligence collection program, it claimed in a transparency report. Two months after the NSA abandoned its controversial collection of phone records, the spy agency claimed to have satisfied eight separate principles to protect people’s privacy.

“The government has strengthened privacy safeguards by, among other things, ending the collection of telephone metadata in bulk,” the agency claimed, “and having telecommunications providers, pursuant to court orders, hold and query the data.” Phone metadata are records about which two numbers are involved in a call, when it occurred and how long the call lasted. The records do not contain information about what was discussed in the conversation. Under the former system, the NSA collected phone records from millions of Americans and then combed through them to search for individual numbers it believed were connected to a terrorist or foreign government.

Donald Trump drives social media conversation

Donald Trump is not only leading the field in the polls, he is also driving the social media conversation during the Republican presidential debate. In the first hour of the debate on Jan 14, Trump led 33 percent of the Twitter conversation, according to data from the social media company. Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) followed, with 25 percent of the conversation, then Dr Ben Carson, at 11 percent, and Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Jeb Bush tied at 10 percent. The billionaire GOP front-runner also gained the most Twitter followers during that hour, followed by Sen Rand Paul (R-TX), Sen Cruz, Sen Rubio and Gov Chris Christie (R-NJ). Sen Paul did not qualify for the main-debate stage and boycotted the undercard debate. Instead, he invited supporters to join him in an online Facebook town hall during the earlier bout.

Since the debate started, Democratic presidential candidates Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Hillary Clinton have also seen big Twitter growth — more than all GOP candidates except Trump, Sen Paul and Sen Cruz. On Facebook, Trump was the most-discussed candidate overall. Sen Cruz was second, followed by Sen Rubio, Dr Carson and Gov Christie.

Why Spin Is Good for Democracy

[Commentary] Between the State of the Union address and the Jan 14 Republican debate, and with the primary season around the corner, this week may well mark “peak spin” for the 2016 campaign. For many, this blizzard of January spin prompts a yearning for a more authentic politics, free of Washington cant. Yet all the distortion involved in modern spin, the thrust and parry of competing arguments are vital to democracy, and a big part of what gets us interested and engaged in the first place.

The whirlwind of spin this week also shows that, in a democracy, spin is almost always met with abundant counterspin. A lot of it may be vacuous, but we’re not — despite our frustrations — in a totalitarian society of Orwellian Newspeak. The theatricality and combativeness on display in the Spin Room — and the animated chatter ricocheting across the TV studios and Twitter feeds — are more likely to pique citizens’ political interest than are antiseptic or Olympian declarations that purport to tell us all we need to know. Instead of trying to banish spin from the kingdom of politics, we’d be better off nurturing in ourselves and our neighbors the critical sense that allows us to question and evaluate spin — and maybe, just once in a while, to know when to enjoy it.

[David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers]

Network Newscasts Were All-Trump, All The Time In 2015

[Commentary] Donald Trump didn't announce his candidacy until mid-June of 2015, but still managed to be covered as the second biggest news story for all of 2015 on the network evening newscasts. Between ABC's World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, Trump's campaign captured 327 minutes of airtime, according to television news analyst Andrew Tyndall (ABC: 121, CBS: 84, NBC: 122 minutes, respectively). That figure doesn't include the network newscasts' coverage of the Republican debates, which garnered an additional 123 minutes of airtime.

Context: ABC's evening news broadcast produced almost as much Trump coverage in 2015 as it did for the Ebola panic in 2014. How does Trump's 327 minutes compare to other candidates this year and to coverage for previous campaign cycles? Trump's figure is off the charts. Over the last decade, the networks' evening newscasts have never showered a presidential campaign with the kind of attention they gave Trump one year before the White House vote even takes place. More context: Trump received 327 minutes of evening network airtime one year before the general election campaign. In 2012, during the general election campaign, President Obama's re-election run garnered just 157 minutes of airtime.

How Twitter quietly banned hate speech in 2015

Seven years ago, Twitter began its rise to prominence by billing itself as a space where people could speak freely because nobody was censored. The company's rules enshrined this ideal, promising "we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances." But in 2015 all of that changed.

There were changes in Twitter's rules here and there before 2015, usually to make it easier for the company to ban people engaging in spam and fraud. But as more high-profile Twitter users began to experience abuse and harassment firsthand, the company began to reverse its earlier policies. Writing for Motherboard, legal analyst Sarah Jeong offers a short history of how Twitter's rules changed over the year. Without ever touching the language in its rules page, Twitter began to add links out to other documents that explained the "limited circumstances" that could lead to censorship. In March, the company banned revenge porn. In April, they banned any speech that could incite terrorism, or violence against people "on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, or disability." Essentially, writes Jeong, they banned hate speech.

With Gridlock in Washington, Lobbyists Turn to Statehouses

Days are busy for a new army of lobbyists and interest groups swarming state capitals around the US. Businesses and industries seeking relief from the gridlock of Washington are taking to the states such issues as gun regulation, minimum wages and energy. The wheeling-and-dealing atmosphere is generating the kind of jobs that helped turn Washington (DC) into one of the wealthiest areas in the US.

While the November national election has focused attention on the US Capitol and White House, a string of legislative boomtowns are sprouting in state capitals from Raleigh (NC) to Madison (WI) to Albany (NY), fueled by national businesses and organizations seeking more local influence. Data from National Institute on Money in State Politics, a nonpartisan research group, indicate that between 2006 and 2012 the number of interest groups and organizations, including unions, represented by lobbyists in the states grew by more than 6,200, about 12%. Google, for example, employs lobbyists on issues that span telecommunications to computers in schools. From 2006 to 2014, Google expanded the number of states where it employs lobbyists from two to 28.

Our privacy is losing out to Internet-connected household devices

[Commentary] It's called the Internet of Things and, judging by all the connected gadgets and appliances unveiled at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, it's about to strip you of what little privacy you have left. Taken piecemeal, there's much to recommend about the idea of controlling household devices via voice control or smartphone apps. It's cool having your heater or clothes dryer monitor how much power you're using, or having your fridge alert you that you're low on milk. Put it all together, though, and you have a steady stream of data about your personal behavior that can be combined with other information to provide marketers, insurers and others with extremely intimate portraits of the life you lead when you think no one's watching.

Jeb Bush Proposes Putting NSA in Charge of Civilian Data, Cybersecurity

At the tail end of the Jan 14 Republican presidential debate, dominated by personal feuds and mutual condemnation of the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush made a stunning proposal: Put the National Security Agency in charge of civilian data and cybersecurity. The proposal, which represents a major expansion of the intelligence agency's role, shocked some observers on Twitter, with some calling it akin to a "police state."

When asked by Fox Business moderator Neil Cavuto about Apple CEO Tim Cook's strong opposition to White House requests for a backdoor to encryption, Bush said that he would have meetings with executives in Silicon Valley to get them to change their minds. "What if Tim Cook is telling you ‘no, Mr. President’?" Cavuto asked. Jeb replied: "You keep asking." Bush also suggested offering tech companies "liability relief so that if they share data, they're not fearful of a lawsuit." And he went further, alarming some observers when he said about cybersecurity: "We should put the NSA in charge of the civilian side of this and we need much more cooperation with our private sector."

The government wants Silicon Valley to build terrorist-spotting algorithms. But is it possible?

[Commentary] Government types are freaked out about the role of technology in how groups like ISIS recruit members and plan attacks. They think the heads of tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Google can do more to help them keep the world safe. And so counter-terrorism officials got tech executives to spend a day with them in San Jose (CA) recently.

Among the topics on the agenda were consumers’ access to encrypted communications that aren’t easily intercepted by the government (a horse that’s so beaten to death that it’s been zombified) and a new idea posited by the policymakers: some kind of technological system that could detect, measure, and flag “radicalization.” A terrorist-hunting algorithm isn’t a completely off-the-wall idea. Financial companies have proposed scanning Facebook postings to help determine people’s credit worthiness. There are already products for police departments that dole out “threat scores” to individuals based on scanning public social media activity and looking for key words; one police department’s use of a “beware algorithm” was recently revealed by the ACLU of Northern California. But this proposal that tech companies might give their own users “radicalism scores” is more novel, and comes on the heels of the San Bernardino (CA) shootings, after which law enforcement discovered that one of the shooters had posted to Facebook advocating jihad.

Benton

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