Robinson Meyer

Twitter announced new and stricter rules banning bigoted content and hate groups from its platform. It also said it would begin enforcing its anti-hate and violence rules more stringently than it has in the past. But “context matters when evaluating for abusive behavior,” warns Twitter, and they have included two big exceptions in the new policy.

Imagine the Earth at night—the vast and curving darkness, splotched with rivulets of light. It is a gorgeous sight, and a familiar one. Today, this image often plays as a beautiful cliché, a pre-metabolized testament to human invention and connectedness, as likely to appear in Koyannisqatsi as in a Kia commercial. For economists, though, this spectacle is more than a symbol: It is a powerful data set.

For the last few decades, and almost since astronauts first captured images of the nocturnal Earth, researchers have recognized that “night lights” data indirectly indexes the wealth of people producing the light. This econometric power seems to work across the planet: Not only do cities glow brighter than farmland, but American cities outshine Indian cities; and as a country’s GDP increases, so does its nighttime luminosity. Two years ago, a Stanford professor even used night lights data to show that North Korean leaders were passing the costs of international economic sanctions down to farmers and villagers. As foreign governments imposed sanctions, Pyongyang became brighter and light from the hinterlands waned. Night lights, therefore, appear to be an incredible resource. So much so that in countries with poor economic statistics, they can serve as a proxy for a regional wealth survey—except no one has to go house to house, running through a questionnaire. Yet research has also shown this not-a-survey will remain inexact: To a satellite at night, a few well-lit mansions and a dense but poorly lit shantytown can look nearly the same.

Remember MOOCs, or massive open online courses? Now, as another school year lurches into gear, those companies have a meek record.

Udacity tried replacing intro courses at San Jose State; it ended in failure. So why has the promised boom in educational technology failed to appear -- and why was the technology that did appear not very good?

Paul Franz, a language arts teacher in California, suggests that education is too complex to tackle by tech alone.

When news of Facebook’s attempt to emotionally manipulate its users has emerged, debate quickly focused on the experiment’s ethics. Lauren McCarthy, though, kept thinking about the experiment itself. But as discussion went on, she found that “no one was talking about what the study might mean. What could we do beyond the ethics?”

Now, she has a preliminary answer. McCarthy has made a browser extension, Facebook Mood Manipulator, that lets users run Facebook’s experiment on their own News Feeds.

Just as the original 2012 study surfaced posts analyzed to be either happier or sadder than average, McCarthy’s extension skews users’ feeds either more positive or more negative -- except that, this time, users themselves control the dials.

Unlike the Facebook study, which only surfaced posts judged happier or sadder, McCarthy’s software also lets people see posts that use more “aggressive” or “open” words in their feed. The extension, in other words, lets users reclaim some control over their own feed. It lets users discover what it’s like to wrestle with their own attentional algorithm -- as subtle, or as stupid, as it can sometimes be.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed new rules to regulate broadband Internet providers. Many supporters of an open web don’t like these rules. The agency’s suggested regulations, they say, will either sacrifice a key tenet of the Internet -- network neutrality, a storied and contested idea -- or prove ineffectual.

They say the agency must re-categorize broadband Internet providers, so that they become utilities -- common carriers. It’s obvious, obvious, they say, that the FCC categorizes broadband incorrectly in the first place.

Turns out a member of the nation’s highest ranking court made their case for them almost a decade ago. That judge’s name? Antonin Scalia, who wrote that the FCC’s interpretation of the law around “information services” was “implausible.” With its decision to regard cable broadband as an information service, the agency had “[established] a whole new regime of non-regulation, which will make for more or less free-market competition, depending upon whose experts are believed.” In ruling that broadband was an information service, the FCC “had exceeded the authority given it by Congress.”

Judge Scalia based his argument on an interesting analogy: “If, for example, I call up a pizzeria and ask whether they offer delivery, both common sense and common “usage,” […] would prevent them from answering: ‘No, we do not offer delivery -- but if you order a pizza from us, we’ll bake it for you and then bring it to your house.’ The logical response to this would be something on the order of, ‘so, you do offer delivery.’ But our pizza-man may continue to deny the obvious and explain, paraphrasing the FCC and the Court: ‘No, even though we bring the pizza to your house, we are not actually “offering” you delivery, because the delivery that we provide to our end users is “part and parcel” of our pizzeria-pizza-at-home service and is “integral to its other capabilities.”

The United States discreetly supported the creation of a website and SMS service that was, basically, a Cuban version of Twitter, the Associated Press reported. ZunZuneo, as it was called, permitted Cubans to broadcast short text messages to each other.

At its peak, ZunZuneo had 40,000 users. And what government agency made ZunZuneo? It wasn’t the Central Intelligence Agency. No, it was the US Agency for International Development, USAID, working with various private companies, including the DC for-profit contractor Creative Associates and a small, Denver-based startup, Mobile Accord. T

he company’s not in the discreet social network game anymore; now it surveys countries in the developing world by SMS. As I started piecing together Mobile Accord’s past -- and that of the State Department that encouraged and hired them -- I found that a project like ZunZuneo wasn’t out of the ordinary at all. As ludicrous as the phrase ‘fake Cuban Twitter’ might sound, projects like ZunZuneo were meant to be a major focus of US diplomacy. If it sounds like a risible plan, now -- as it does to some commentators and, apparently, at least one Democratic senator -- that only shows how much has changed since the Arab Spring was still blooming.

The story of ZunZuneo foreshadowed, too, developments that would come. Who did ZunZuneo benefit most of all, eventually? Cubacel: The Cuban government’s state-run mobile monopoly which owned the physical infrastructure through which ZunZuneo messages traveled. USAID, in trying to harass the Cuban government, wound up financially supporting it.