Google's Astroturf Amicus

Haley Fuchs and Brendan Bordelon at Politico:

As Google awaits a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could dramatically upend portions of its business model, a group of prominent online content creators and a nonprofit for authors have rushed to its defense.

In January, a number of prominent internet influencers and the nonprofit Authors Alliance filed an amicus brief defending the tech giant in Gonzalez v. Google. The case, which is slated for oral arguments on Tuesday, could weaken — or even upend — the company’s treasured liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And those same protections, the creators wrote, are vital to them too.

Left unmentioned in the brief was that the parties behind it had direct financial ties to Google. The group that funded the brief, a nonprofit advocate for startups called Engine, is funded in part by Google. And at least one of the content creators who signed on to the amicus brief has said that employees from YouTube, a Google subsidiary, invited them to sign onto the brief. In addition, the firm representing the creators and Authors Alliance — Keker, Van Nest & Peters — represents Google in other litigation.

Tech Beats Antitrust Push

 Emily Birnbaum at Bloomberg:

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year. The Senate included a narrower trio of antitrust bills in the end-of-year spending package. That legislation will give more money and resources to the country’s top antitrust regulators, marking the first time Congress has voted to expand antitrust enforcement measures in decades. But those provisions will not make the sweeping changes to the law that some advocates hoped for.

The Newspaper Crisis

Newspapers were on the decline even before COVID-19 Now things are much worse as advertising has dried up. Meg James at The Los Angeles Times:

The print industry’s demise has larger implications, Doctor and others say. Without reporters keeping tabs on city halls, state agencies and community organizations, there would be little accountability. Researchers have found that newspapers remain the nation’s most comprehensive, fact-based source of information.

The industry’s collapse has been driven by the exodus of longtime advertisers, who have shifted their money to internet giants Facebook and Google, leading to a precipitous revenue decline. Ad revenue to U.S. newspapers peaked in 2005 at $49.4 billion; it’s now less than a third of that amount, according to Pew Research Center.

Responding to the crisis, Facebook in late March announced $25 million in emergency funding for local news through its Facebook Journalism Project. “The news industry is working under extraordinary conditions to keep people informed during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when journalism is needed more than ever, ad revenues are declining,” Facebook said, adding that it would also spend $75 million to buy newspaper ads.

On Wednesday, Google Inc. announced its own $100-million journalism fund “to deliver urgent aid to thousands of small, medium and local news publishers globally.”

The need is great. Small dailies and alternative weeklies are among the most threatened. They rely on local businesses for advertising, rather than big-dollar national advertisers.

In Southern California, the alternative OC Weekly shut down in December and the LA Weekly has absorbed deep cuts and management turmoil. The Orange County Register’s parent, Southern California News Group, furloughed newsroom employees. And the Feather River Bulletin in Quincy, Calif., stopped printing this month — after 153 years.

The Los Angeles Times, which was thrown a lifeline in 2018 when biomedical billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the paper along with the San Diego Union-Tribune, also is feeling financial pain. The paper has spent 18 months rebuilding its newsroom and expanding its online offering only to be walloped by the virus.

...

On Thursday, the company folded three of its community newspapers — the Burbank Leader, the Glendale News-Press and the La Cañada Valley Sun — because they were losing money. The Glendale paper was a pioneer, publishing since 1905. The Valley Sun popped up in 1946 as the postwar building and population boom began to reshape California.

Losing the News

A report from PEN America:

As local news outlets are gutted and shuttered, reporters laid off, publication schedules cut, and resources tightened across the country, Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions sounds the alarm about the existential threat facing local watchdog journalism and proposes big-picture solutions for its revitalization.

Key conclusions:

•  As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.
• With the shift to digital, the business model for for-profit local journalism has collapsed, as circulation patterns have been upended and tech giants, notably the digital duopoly of Google and Facebook, have siphoned the majority of advertising revenue for content paid for and produced by news outlets.
• Local newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations are being bought and consolidated by hedge funds and media conglomerates and often subjected to relentless cost cutting—leading to coverage that is more national, less diverse, and, in some cases, more politically polarized.
• Newspapers have been hit the hardest, losing over $35 billion in ad revenue and 47 percent of newsroom staff over the past 15 years. Over 1,800 newspapers have closed, leaving more than three million people with no newspaper at all, and more than at least a thousand have become “ghost newspapers,” with little original reporting.
• Because newspapers still provide the majority of original local reporting in communities, their evisceration robs the American public of trusted sources of critical information about health, education, elections, and other pressing local issues.
• Many of the communities traditionally underserved by legacy local media—communities of color, low-income communities, and communities in rural areas—are those most affected by its decline. Finding meaningful, scalable solutions to the local news crisis presents an opportunity to revamp the industry to better represent, reflect, and serve all Americans.
• Across the country, existing and emerging outlets are building out new revenue streams, experimenting with digital-first and nonprofit models, and collaborating rather than competing to better serve communities’ pressing information needs. But in the face of market failure, adaptation and innovation alone cannot address the crisis at the needed scale.
• Philanthropic funding must expand dramatically to make a dent at the local level. Only a small fraction of philanthropic funding for journalism supports local news, and that funding is concentrated on the coasts and a handful of other states and often bypasses smaller and midsize outlets, as well as ethnic- or minority-led ones.
• Legislators and regulators must ensure that technology companies fairly compensate local outlets for the journalism they produce, which including levying an ad revenue tax on platforms like Facebook and Google to fund local watchdog reporting.
• The Federal Communications Commission must roll back recent decisions that enable media consolidation and cost-cutting and clarify and enforce the requirement that media broadcasters produce programming that serves the public interest.
• Given the scope and scale of the problem, a solution is unlikely without dramatically expanding public funding for local journalism, through either reform and expansion of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the creation of a new national endowment for journalism. PEN America is calling for a new congressional commission—a Commission on Public Support for Local News—to assess the viability of these options and recommend a path forward.

More Media Cuts

Many posts have described the economic woes of the media industry.

Gerry Smith at Bloomberg:

In a dark two-week stretch for publishing, more than 1,700 media jobs were eliminated at newspapers and online media companies through buyouts and layoffs.

On Friday, McClatchy Co. offered voluntary buyouts to 450 employees, while Vice Media Inc. said it will cut 250 jobs. Last week, BuzzFeed began laying off about 200 employees, while the media unit at Verizon Communications Inc., which includes the Huffington Post and Yahoo, planned to slash about 800 positions. Gannett Co. let go more than 20 people last week at its newspapers.

It’s the latest round of downsizing in an industry that’s grown accustomed to it. From 2008 to 2017, newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped 23 percent to 88,000 from 114,000, according to Pew Research Center. Most of those losses happened at newspapers, whose readers have steadily moved online, hurting once-lucrative print-advertising sales.

Emily Bell at The Guardian:

The primary mistake most digital publishers made was to imagine that platform companies, and particularly Google and Facebook, had any serious interest in helping them sustain their businesses. The amount of data large platform companies collect and control enables them to offer far more efficient advertising than any publisher, and the business of making online content profitable is rigged against anyone who wants to run even a sparsely resourced newsroom with experienced reporters.

[Buzzfeed founder Jonah] Peretti’s memo to staff after the layoffs was instructive about what would be needed to be sustainable: “We can build a profitable media businesses on top of Facebook and YouTube,” he writes, “but only when the content we make is high quality, with massive scale and relatively low production costs.”

Whatever this content might be it is unlikely to be in-depth investigative reporting, which is neither cheap to produce nor generally something that attracts “massive scale”. If BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital publishers who suffered despite a booming advertising market cannot make the social web work for them, it is likely that those who do will not be reliant on advertising.

John Gramlich at Pew:

Around four-in-ten U.S. adults (43%) get news from Facebook, according to a survey conducted in July and August 2018. The share of U.S. adults who get news through Facebook is much higher than the shares who get news through YouTube (21%), Twitter (12%), Instagram (8%), LinkedIn (6%) and other platforms. Among U.S. adults who get news from Facebook, women are more likely than men to do this (61% vs. 39%), as are whites when compared with nonwhites (62% vs. 37%).

Russian Interference

AT WP, Craig Timberg and Tony Romm write that reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee analyze Russian interference in American politics.

The research -- by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm -- offers new details on how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for meddling in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.

...
The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups -- Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans -- got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.

The report also offered some of the first detailed analyses of the role played by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook, in the Russian campaign, as well as anecdotes about how Russians used other social media platforms -- Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest -- that have gotten relatively little scrutiny. The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft’s Hotmail service and Google’s Gmail.

AXIOS HAS THE TEXT OF THE REPORTS. 

News Does Not Benefit Much from the Digital Ad Bonanza

The shift of advertising from print to digital is hurting newspapers.  But it is not helping online news as much as one might think.

Michael Barthel at Pew:

Total digital advertising revenue has jumped 25% in 2017 across all types of digital outlets, not just news, according to eMarketer. This has been especially true of mobile advertising revenue, which totaled $61 billion in 2017, roughly equal to the totalamount of digital advertising revenue just two years prior, in 2015 ($60 billion) – and which goes hand in hand with Americans’ increased use of mobile for news. However, news organizations seem to share little in this bonanza – 52% of all digital display advertising revenue goes to just two companies: Facebook and Google.

Facebook Lobbying

Peter Overby at NPR:

You hire a lot of lobbyists who are well-connected," said Lee Drutman, who studies lobbying at the think tank New America. He laid out how the companies work Washington.

Facebook opened its D.C. office when it was five years old — and already worth billions. It routinely hires lots of top-tier, veteran lobbyists, as does Google.

The current lobbying environment is ideal. Many lawmakers still don't fully grasp the technology. Congress long ago defunded its in-house technology office, which could have taught them.

Facebook reported its 2017 lobbying cost at nearly $12 million. Google spent even more: $18 million.

Drutman said it's important to "spread a lot of money around."

Some of the money goes to think tanks, where experts can shape policy debates on Capitol Hill. For one example, New America, where Drutman works, has had grants from both Google and Facebook.

Then there's campaign money. As Drutman put it, "People get that warm glow of 'This company's a good friend to my campaign.'"

Facebook's PAC and employees made political contributions totaling $4.5 million in the 2016 cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. For Google's parent company, Alphabet, the total was nearly $8 million.

"Then you go in and you make your case," Drutman said. "Google and Facebook have become so central in our economy, it's not surprising that they have become tremendous players here."

Note the part where the Senator asks the corporate CEO to have the CEO's lobbyists (not the Senator's staff) write the regulations. That's how corporate power works in Washington these days. Only usually, it's not this blatant. pic.twitter.com/Evycgaoqt8

— Lee Drutman (@leedrutman) April 14,  

Digital Media Crash

At TPM, Josh Marshall explains why there is a digital media crash:  too many publications for the amount of available funding.

This has been a fact for more than two decades. It is driven by the extremely low costs of entry in digital publishing which makes it very difficult to set up the kinds of de facto monopolies that existed for big city newspapers for most of the second half of the 20th century.

Then came the platform monopolies: Google, Facebook and a few others. Over the last five years or so but accelerating rapidly in the last 24 months, they’ve gobbled up almost all of the growth in advertising revenue and begun to engross a substantial amount of the existing advertising revenue as well.

Let’s try a very simple visualization of what I’m describing. Remember, there are too many publications relative to advertising revenue. So let’s imagine there are 30 publications and 25 revenue seats. The publications fight like hell to secure one of the seats. Then the platform monopolies came along and sat down in maybe 5 or 10 of the 25 seats. You can see the problem. The competition of 30 publications competing for 15 seats gets insane. A bunch of the publications are going to die or be forced to find another way to fund themselves.

Now, here’s the too little discussed part of the equation. A huge, huge, huge amount of digital media is funded by venture capital. That’s not just to say they had investors at the start but in effect a key revenue stream of many digital publications has been on-going infusions of new investment.

Much of that investment has been premised on the assumption that scale – being huge – would allow publications to create stable and defensible business models. There are a lot of moving parts to the strategies. But it essentially comes down to this idea: get big enough and you can solve the chronic problem of over-supply of publications in your favor through sales at volume and being able to command stable, premium advertising rates. But that hasn’t happened. Just as one fact point, The Wall Street Journal reported today that Buzzfeed is going to miss its revenue target this year by as much as 20%. That’s a lot.

Short Attention-Span Country

Stef W. Knight reports at Axios:

If it feels like the Trump presidency has been hit by non-stop scandals and crises from day one, it's probably because it has been. The Google News Lab looked at the search trends for stories about 40 of the biggest news events of Trump's presidency from Jan. 20 until Sept. 1. You can see how we've all jumped from one four-alarm news fire to another:

Inequality: Rochester and Cupertino

Neil Irwin writes at NYT that companies such as Kodak once employed a large number of less-skilled workers and paid them well.  Companies such as Apple employ fewer and pay them less well.

Apple, Alphabet (parent of Google) and Facebook generated $333 billion of revenue combined last year with 205,000 employees worldwide. In 1993, three of the most successful, technologically oriented companies based in the Northeast — Kodak, IBM and AT&T — needed more than three times as many employees, 675,000, to generate 27 percent less in inflation-adjusted revenue.

The high-tech companies pay less for less-skilled labor, in part by contracting out.

[A]cross a range of job functions, industries and countries, the shift to a contracting economy has put downward pressure on compensation. Pay for janitors fell by 4 to 7 percent, and for security guards by 8 to 24 percent, in American companies that outsourced, Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University found in a 2010 paper.

These pay cuts appear to be fueling overall inequality. J. Adam Cobb of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Ken-Hou Lin at the University of Texas found that the drop in big companies’ practice of paying relatively high wages to their low- and mid-level workers could have accounted for 20 percent of the wage inequality increase from 1989 to 2014.

At one time, Kodak was the center of civic life in its headquarters city of Rochester, NY.  Apple and Cupertino?  Not so much:

“We definitely feel a sense of pride to be the home of Apple,” said Savita Vaidhyanathan, the mayor of Cupertino. “But they consider themselves a global company, not necessarily a Cupertino company.” She said she has never met Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive. “We would have a hard time getting an audience with anybody beyond upper-middle management,” she said.

Google Muscles Think Tanks

Previous posts have described how interest groups try to buy influence with think tanks.

At The New York Times, Jonathan Taplin writes that the New America Foundation just fired scholar Barry Lynn.

What horrible, dangerous act had Mr. Lynn committed? He wrote a piece for New America’s website in support of the $2.7 billion fine the European Union levied against Google for antitrust violations in June. That post fit perfectly with the work of the Open Markets initiative he lead, which has been one of the strongest voices in Washington calling for more antitrust scrutiny of our economy. It’s the platform Mr. Lynn, Matt Stoller and Lina Khan have used to call for regulatory scrutiny of the tech monopolies like Google, Amazon and Facebook as these companies increasingly come to dominate our economy. But Google’s financial power at New America was apparently such that it could close the group down. Though Ms. Slaughter denies the connection between Google’s funding and her decision, the implication seems clear. A firm whose motto was “Don’t Be Evil” has no interest in being called a monopoly by a think tank it funds.

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The Wall Street Journal’s report found that since 2009, Google had directly funded 100 papers written by academics and 100 papers that came through think tanks funded by Google. These papers make their way to the congressional committees and regulatory agencies that are charged with overseeing Google’s business, like the Federal Trade Commission.

Subsidizing Research, Influencing Opinion

Previous posts explained how interest groups (including foreign ones) buy the favor of think tanks. They also subsidize individual academics, too.Brody Mullins and Jack Nicas report at The Wall Street Journal:

Google operates a little-known program to harness the brain power of university researchers to help sway opinion and public policy, cultivating financial relationships with professors at campuses from Harvard University to the University of California, Berkeley.

Over the past decade, Google has helped finance hundreds of research papers to defend against regulatory challenges of its market dominance, paying $5,000 to $400,000 for the work, The Wall Street Journal found.

Some researchers share their papers before publication and let Google give suggestions, according to thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Journal in public-records requests of more than a dozen university professors. The professors don’t always reveal Google’s backing in their research, and few disclosed the financial ties in subsequent articles on the same or similar topics, the Journal found.

The Platform Press

From the Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center:

The influence of social media platforms and technology companies is having a greater effect on American journalism than even the shift from print to digital. There is a rapid takeover of traditional publishers’ roles by companies including Facebook, Snapchat, Google, and Twitter that shows no sign of slowing, and which raises serious questions over how the costs of journalism will be supported. These companies have evolved beyond their role as distribution channels, and now control what audiences see and who gets paid for their attention, and even what format and type of journalism flourishes.
Publishers are continuing to push more of their journalism to third-party platforms despite no guarantee of consistent return on investment. Publishing is no longer the core activity of certain journalism organizations. This trend will continue as news companies give up more of the traditional functions of publishers.

This report, part of an ongoing study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, charts the convergence between journalism and platform companies. In the span of 20 years, journalism has experienced three significant changes in business and distribution models: the switch from analog to digital, the rise of the social web, and now the dominance of mobile. This last phase has seen large technology companies dominate the markets for attention and advertising and has forced news organizations to rethink their processes and structures.

Findings

• Technology platforms have become publishers in a short space of time, leaving news organizations confused about their own future. If the speed of convergence continues, more news organizations are likely to cease publishing—distributing, hosting, and monetizing—as a core activity.
• Competition among platforms to release products for publishers is helping newsrooms reach larger audiences than ever before. But the advantages of each platform are difficult to assess, and the return on investment is inadequate. The loss of branding, the lack of audience data, and the migration of advertising revenue remain key concerns for publishers.
• The influence of social platforms shapes the journalism itself. By offering incentives to news organizations for particular types of content, such as live video, or by dictating publisher activity through design standards, the platforms are explicitly editorial.
• The “fake news” revelations of the 2016 election have forced social platforms to take greater responsibility for publishing decisions. However, this is a distraction from the larger issue that the structure and the economics of social platforms incentivize the spread of low-quality content over high-quality material. Journalism with high civic value—journalism that investigates power, or reaches underserved and local communities—is discriminated against by a system that favors scale and shareability.
• Platforms rely on algorithms to sort and target content. They have not wanted to invest in human editing, to avoid both cost and the perception that humans would be biased. However, the nuances of journalism require editorial judgment, so platforms will need to reconsider their approach.
• Greater transparency and accountability are required from platform companies. While news might reach more people than ever before, for the first time, the audience has no way of knowing how or why it reaches them, how data collected about them is used, or how their online behavior is being manipulated. And publishers are producing more content than ever, without knowing who it is reaching or how—they are at the mercy of the algorithm.

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Visit www.towcenter.org/pnp for the full report.

Farenthold Exposes Trump: Or, How to Do Investigative Reporting

At The Washington Post, David Farenthold tells how he exposed Trump's lies about his charitable giving.  It is a short intro on how to do investigative reporting. He combined old-fashioned document-hunting and phone-calling with 21st-century crowdsourcing.

He said that the story reminded him of his 2014 report about the federal government’s giant paperwork cave -- a huge facility where hundreds of federal employees still used paper files to compute federal retiree benefits.

In reporting jargon, I’d tried the front door: I asked to tour the mine. OPM said no. So then I went looking for windows. I sought out ex-employees, who had firsthand knowledge of the place but weren’t beholden to OPM’s desire for secrecy.

I found them. By piecing together their recollections, I got the story that the government didn’t want me to find.

Now Trump himself was the abandoned limestone mine.

If he wouldn’t tell me what he had given away, I’d try to find the answer anyway — by talking to charities with firsthand knowledge of what he had given.

He learned that Trump had illegally used $20k in Trump Foundation money to buy a portrait of himself.

I kept looking, posting details of my search to Twitter. Soon I had attracted a virtual army, ready to join the scavenger hunt. I had begun the year with 4,700 Twitter followers. By September I had more than 60,000 and climbing fast.

He did not find the specific portrait he was looking for. Then the story took a turn.

“Google ‘Havi Art Trump,’ ” said a strange voice on the phone one day, calling from the 561 area code. Palm Beach, Fla.

I did.

The Google search revealed a new portrait of Trump. This one was four feet tall, painted by Miami artist Havi Schanz. After a phone call, I confirmed that Trump had purchased it in 2014 at a charity auction run by the Unicorn Children’s Foundation. Once again, he had the Trump Foundation pay the bill.

I needed to find that portrait. I turned to my Twitter followers, putting out a photo of the new $10,000 portrait.

That was at 10:34 a.m.

By early evening I knew where it was.

“The Havi Painting was at Doral National in Miami, you can see two separate pics that tourists have taken of it,” wrote Allison Aguilar.

I’ve never met Aguilar. I learned later that she is a former HR manager who is now a stay-at-home mother in Atlanta, writing short stories on the side. Days before, looking for the $20,000 portrait, she had scoured the website for Trump’s golf resort at Doral, in Florida, scanning more than 500 user-generated photos of the resort’s rooms, restaurants and golf course.

About halfway through, she had spotted another portrait in a photo, hanging on a wall at the resort.

Then she saw my tweet, saying that I was now looking for that portrait, too.

“Oh, now that I’ve seen,” Aguilar remembered thinking.

The TripAdvisor photo she found was dated February 2016.

Was the portrait still there?

The answer was provided by another stranger.

Enrique Acevedo, an anchor at the Spanish-language network Univision, saw my tweet that night, broadcasting that Aguilar had traced the portrait to Doral. Acevedo realized that Doral was just a few blocks from the Univision studios. He booked a room for that night.

“I used points,” Acevedo said. “I didn’t want to ... spend any money on Trump’s property, so I used points.” After his newscast ended, Acevedo checked in and started quizzing the late-night cleaning crews.

“Have you seen this picture?” he asked. “They said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s downstairs.’ ”

Bingo. Acevedo found the $10,000 portrait, paid for with charity money, hanging on the wall of the resort’s sports bar.

Russian Fake News

Many Americans are gullible about fake news. Our enemies and their enablers have noticed. Craig Timberg reports at The Washington Post:

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.

“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

Inequality and Invisibility

Kate Allen reports at The Financial Times:

There is nothing remarkable about 23726 Long Valley Road — except that it does not appear to exist.

Estate agents’ advertisements show that the high-end Californian home — six bedrooms, pizza oven, pool — is situated in a gated community on the edge of Los Angeles. Yet prospective buyers searching online to check out the neighbourhood are wasting their time — none of the area’s 648 homes appear on Google Street View.

All that online maps show of the area are street routes and names — what could perhaps be an outline plan for a future housing development. But anyone looking for a kerbside view of the property will find no evidence of it.

The community’s name gives a clue why: it is called Hidden Hills. What the area’s occupants — who reportedly include Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez — value above all is privacy. That includes banning Google’s photography vehicles from entering (and declining to talk to the FT; a spokeswoman for the area’s management company said it had a policy of not giving interviews to the press).

Academics have long used the names “hidden communities” or “invisible communities” to denote areas with high concentrations of deprivation and social marginalisation. Yet some of the world’s most privileged people are choosing to hide from the public eye to protect their homes from burglars and other forms of unwelcome attention.

Upstairs in America

"Upstairs, Downstairs" is the future of American politics and life.

At The Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin writes:

But if the highly affluent are thriving, the super-rich are enjoying one of the brightest epochs since the days of the robber barons. These people, according to a study by economists Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua D. Rauh, are the top 0.0001 percent of 311.5 million U.S. individuals. In constant 2011 dollars, their wealth has grown seven-fold since 1992—from $214 billion in 1982 to $1.525 trillion in 2011. This at a time when most Americans have endured little or no real income growth.

They find that the share who grew up wealthy has actually declined.

But origins are not the only thing that has changed in this era of oligarchy. So too have the industries that create the wealth—largely represented by the shift toward technology and finance—and, not surprisingly, where that wealth tends to concentrate. These shifts are already changing not only our economy, but also the outlines of political power, as industries friendlier to Democrats, notably tech and finance, supplant those, notably energy, that have long been associated, particulary in the last decade, with the Republicans.

...
Perhaps more surprising has been the shift in the location of the rich. Despite the rise of the tech oligarchs, the biggest gainers over the past decade have not occurred in California but in New York, Florida and Texas. This reflects not only the power of Wall Street and the investment class (some of whom have decamped to Florida), but the growing diversification of the Texas economy.

...
Ultimately what will make “the sovereigns of cyberspace,” to quote author Rebecca MacKinnon, so dominant is precisely what made John D. Rockefeller so rich: control of markets. Google, for example, accounts for over 60 percent of Internet searches. It and Apple control almost 90 percent of the operating systems for smartphones. Similarly, over half of American and Canadian computer users use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social media site.

And soon, they, like the old Wall Street elites or the energy barons, may be able to regard the government as yet another subsidiary. They will benefit greatly from the likely electoral victory of the Democrats, who are increasingly dependent on tech contributions, while the old economy oligarchs already in retreat, in energy, manufacturing, and real estate, fade before them.

Ultimately what will make “the sovereigns of cyberspace,” to quote author Rebecca MacKinnon, so dominant is precisely what made John D. Rockefeller so rich: control of markets. Google, for example, accounts for over 60 percent of Internet searches. It and Apple control almost 90 percent of the operating systems for smartphones. Similarly, over half of American and Canadian computer users use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social media site. 

And soon, they, like the old Wall Street elites or the energy barons, may be able to regard the government as yet another subsidiary. They will benefit greatly from the likely electoral victory of the Democrats, who are increasingly dependent on tech contributions, while the old economy oligarchs already in retreat, in energy, manufacturing, and real estate, fade before them. Perhaps more surprising has been the shift in the location of the rich. Despite the rise of the tech oligarchs, the biggest gainers over the past decade have not occurred in California but in New York, Florida and Texas. This reflects not only the power of Wall Street and the investment class (some of whom have decamped to Florida), but the growing diversification of the Texas economy. Perhaps more surprising has been the shift in the location of the rich. Despite the rise of the tech oligarchs, the biggest gainers over the past decade have not occurred in California but in New York, Florida and Texas. This reflects not only the power of Wall Street and the investment class (some of whom have decamped to Florida), but the growing diversification of the Texas economy. Perhaps more surprising has been the shift in the location of the rich. Despite the rise of the tech oligarchs, the biggest gainers over the past decade have not occurred in California but in New York, Florida and Texas. This reflects not only the power of Wall Street and the investment class (some of whom have decamped to Florida), but the growing diversification of the Texas economy. Perhaps more surprising has been the shift in the location of the rich. Despite the rise of the tech oligarchs, the biggest gainers over the past decade have not occurred in California but in New York, Florida and Texas. This reflects not only the power of Wall Street and the investment class (some of whom have decamped to Florida), but the growing diversification of the Texas economy. 

"Honorary Expenses"

Many posts have discussed the ways in which interest groups use charitable contributions to curry favor from lawmakers and executive officials, or at least buy protection.

Tony Romm reports at Politico:

Some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies are quietly funneling money to minority groups in Washington, including those affiliated with black and Hispanic lawmakers — a move that comes as the firms face growing criticism about the lack of diversity in their workforce.

The donations, known as "honorary expenses," fund events like dinners and cocktail receptions where members of Congress and federal regulators are the guests of honor. The leader of the pack is Google, which spent a record of more than $490,000 on such expenses last year — devoting most of it to minority groups like the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, according to newly filed federal ethics reports.

Apple chipped in $1.2 million for an awards gala for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and Uber wrote a $10,000 check to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the disclosures show. It marked the first time either Apple or Uber reported any honorary expenses.

The recent uptick in these donations coincides with growing political pressure on the tech industry over diversity, as companies struggle to address complaints that their employees are largely white and male. The debate has taken root in Washington, including with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which sent a delegation to Silicon Valley in August to demand that the industry recruit more African-Americans.

Social Media v. Deliberation

 At Politico, Nicholas Carr writes:

When we go on Facebook, we see a cascade of messages determined by the company’s News Feed algorithm, and we’re provided with a set of prescribed ways to react to each message. We can click a Like button; we can share the message with our friends; we can add a brief comment. With the messages we see on Twitter, we’re given buttons for replying, retweeting and favoriting, and any thought we express has to fit the service’s tight text limits. Google News gives us a series of headlines, emphasizing the latest stories to have received a cluster of coverage, and it provides a row of buttons for sharing the headlines on Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook. All social networks impose these kinds of formal constraints, both on what we see and on how we respond. The restrictions have little to do with the public interest. They reflect the commercial interests of the companies operating the networks as well as the protocols of software programming.

Because it simplifies and speeds up communications, the formulaic quality of social media is well suited to the banter that takes place among friends. Clicking a heart symbol may be the perfect way to judge the worth of an Instagrammed selfie (or even a presidential snapshot). But when applied to political speech, the same constraints can be pernicious, inspiring superficiality rather than depth. Political discourse rarely benefits from templates and routines. It becomes most valuable when it involves careful deliberation, an attention to detail and subtle and open-ended critical thought—the kinds of things that social media tends to frustrate rather than promote.

Over the next year, as the presidential campaign careens toward its conclusion, all of us—the public, the press, and the candidates themselves—will get an education in how elections work in the age of social media. We may discover that the gates maintained by our new gatekeepers are narrower than ever.