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Culture war games: walking into glass walls

Apple’s New Spaceship Campus Has One Flaw – and It Hurts
By Mark Bergen






The Follower Factory
By Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris and Mark Hansen

Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.

“I started this company with a thousand dollars in the bank, without investors, and only the burning passion for success,” Mr. Calas wrote last year on the job-listing site Glassdoor.

As Mr. Calas’s ambitions grew, so did his embroidery. A copy of his résumé posted online in 2014 claimed that he earned a physics degree from Princeton University in 2000, when he would have been about 10 years old, and a Ph.D. in computer science from M.I.T. Representatives for both schools said they had no record of Mr. Calas’s attending their institution. His current LinkedIn page says that he has a master’s degree in “international business” from M.I.T., a degree it does not offer.

Last August, Mr. Calas sued Ronwaldo Boado, a Filipino contractor who previously worked for Devumi as an assistant customer support manager. After being fired for squabbling with other members of his team, Mr. Boado took control of a Devumi email account listing more than 170,000 customer orders, Mr. Calas alleged in court papers. Then Mr. Boado created a fake Devumi.

Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries Into Fake Accounts
By Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance and Rich Harris

Some federal and state lawmakers have called for more stringent laws regulating social media companies, in part to combat the epidemic of fake accounts. Many fake accounts are deployed by Russia and other countries seeking to influence American politics, but others are used by marketing companies to influence consumers and even policymakers.

Marc Levine, a California state assemblyman from outside San Francisco, introduced legislation on Monday that would require social media companies doing business in California to link every account to a human being. The legislation would also require that social media companies allow only human account holders to place advertisements on their platforms.

“There are any number of interest groups looking to shape public opinion,” Mr. Levine said in an interview. “We’ve seen all of this exploited and millions of people manipulated.”

Last Week at Wellesley
By Alice Domurat Dreger

Earlier in the day, in a class co-taught by the Freedom Project’s Director, Tom Cushman, a student had read aloud to me something I supposedly have said about transgender people. It was so comically bigoted, it was hard to take seriously. But apparently someone somewhere said I said this, and this “quote” from me was being transmitted in an email around campus, the one calling for the protest of me. I explained in that class and later in my talk that there are fake social media accounts in my name, including fake blogs, with my photo and my name. A student asked why I “let that happen.” I answered that I can’t spend my life chasing them down and trying to stop them.

(I tried that once, with Facebook. Did you know if someone sets up a fake Facebook account in your name, you have to prove you are you by sending a photo of your passport ID page to Facebook? The person stealing your identity doesn’t have to prove she’s you. To this day, Twitter won’t shut down a fake account using my name and photo, no matter how many times I and my followers ask.)

Matt Stoller on Modern Monopolies
By EconTalk

Matt Stoller: Well, I mean, you know, I guess there are sort of two different ways to think about it. The first is: You have institutions that are so large that they simply can’t be managed. So, Facebook has two billion users on its various networks. Google has 7 products with more than a billion users. And what you find is all sorts of areas where the people that are managing these networks are just not paying attention to parts of the networks that are damaging people. So, as an example, Google organizes the world’s information; they’ve engaged in a whole range of conduct to make sure that specialized search engines don’t emerge and potentially challenge them in niche areas. And so, one of the results is: You have a health crisis. That exists already, the opioid crisis. But, when people who are addicted to opioids do a search for rehab clinics, what they will find is, first, about a year ago they would find a whole bunch of different ads from rehab clinics that weren’t particularly good but were from out of state, would rip them off, and most importantly, wouldn’t help them off opioids. And when Google found about this, they got rid of the advertising. So, they weren’t–they were making a bunch of money off of this but they stopped making money on it. And then afterwards, Google’s search engine was actually manipulated and gamed by some of these kind of scummy rehab clinics. And that’s just an example of–the net result is that a bunch of people who are addicted to opioids and want to get off them, can’t. And that’s incredibly harmful. And that’s not because anybody at Google was sort of a bad person. It’s just because the institution, there’s just–the network is too big for them to actually manage. And you see that in all sorts of ways with institutions like Facebook, where you have lots of things just coming in the back door. So, that’s one problem. That’s a problem of absentee ownership–no one’s minding the store. The other problem is that the algorithms themselves drive extremist behavior. So, these are based, the algorithms that Facebook uses or that Google uses to sort of attract you and keep you using their technologies, keep your attention so they can sell you more advertising–they have specific biases built in that are not good for human beings. So, as an example, if you are, say, a conspiracy theorist around vaccinations, they will say–the recommendation engine will tell you–‘Well, maybe you are interested in this thing called PizzaGate.’ Or, maybe you are interested in this thing called, you know, ‘Sovereign Citizen.’ If you are–an doesn’t matter if it’s a Right or a Left thing. It’s an extremist-generating engine. So, if you are interested in being a vegetarian, maybe you should try becoming a vegan. Or, whatever. And it keeps you and pulls you into a more and more extremist, sort of socially dysfunctional position, because essentially it’s manipulating your brain in a way that is very similar to the desire to see a fight going on, where you just can’t look away. And the algorithms that these guys use, because they are so attention-based, actually incentivize sort of the worst socially dysfunctional behavior. So, those are two basic problems.

By Zephyr Teachout

When Google was founded in 1998, it famously committed itself to the motto: “Don’t be evil.” It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent. As Lord Acton famously said, “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.” Those with too much power cannot help but be evil. Google, the company dedicated to free expression, has chosen to silence opposition, apparently without any sense of irony.


The Supreme Court Case That Could Give Tech Giants More Power
By Lina M. Khan

The concept is that players in “two-sided” markets are unique because they serve different sets of customers in distinct but related markets, effectively facilitating transactions. American Express, for example, charges both merchants who accept its cards and consumers who use them. Using this concept, the Second Circuit held that the government would have to show that any price increases for merchants also harmed cardholders, or at least didn’t benefit them. In effect, the court introduced a dramatically new rule, making it much more difficult to win important antitrust cases and to stop anticompetitive behavior.


The fact that the tech platforms could effectively be shielded from antitrust is troubling because, in several respects, these firms enjoy dominant market positions that makes antitrust scrutiny of their conduct especially important. By virtue of providing increasingly critical services, tech giants wield immense leverage over the sellers and buyers that rely on their platforms. This power is ripe for abuse. If the Supreme Court ratifies the Second Circuit’s approach, platforms will be able to engage in anticompetitive activity with one set of users, so long as they can plausibly claim that harmful conduct enabled them to benefit another group.

The Case Against Google
By Charles Duhigg




By Scott Galloway



Corporate America Is Suppressing Wages for Many Workers
By Alan B. Krueger and Eric Posner


When employers exercise monopsonistic power, wages are suppressed, jobs are left unfilled, and economic growth suffers. Unions used to offset employer monopsony power, but unions now represent only 7 percent of private sector workers, down from a peak of 35 percent in the 1950s. Combating the practices that employers use to monopsonize the labor market can lead to higher wages, more jobs and faster economic growth.

During the Obama administration, the government awoke to the problem of monopsony. It was then that the public learned that high-tech companies, including Google and Apple, had agreed not to poach one another’s talent, a flagrant monopsonistic tactic that brought down the wrath of the Justice Department.

Google and Apple Settle Lawsuit Alleging Wage-Fixing
By Eliana Dockerman

About 60,000 tech employees filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe in 2011 accusing those companies of agreeing not to hire one another’s employees in order to drive down salaries. The plaintiffs cited emails from top executives like the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which they discussed an agreement not to poach each others’ workers and thus enter a salary war.

In one particularly damning email, Schmidt tells Jobs that an employee recruited from Apple to Google will be fired per their agreement—an email that Jobs forwarded to an Apple human resources executive with the comment: “:)”

The Rise of Tech Giants May Be Bad News for the Economy
By Alessandro Speciale

Tech giants like Facebook and Amazon are the tip of the iceberg of a trend toward market concentration. That’s good for profits, but a new study says it also risks harming productivity and growth potential in the long run.

According to Sophie Guilloux-Nefussi, an economist with France’s central bank, the market share of the eight largest companies rose in more than 60 percent of the sectors of U.S. between 2002 and 2012.

Profits have grown as a consequence, but investment and salaries have failed to keep up. The falling share of companies’ revenue ending up in the pockets of workers may deepen the polarization of society while the lower investments reduce growth potential for the economy in the years ahead.

Moreover, the barriers to new entrants have become higher, as shown by a sharp decline in the creation of new companies.

Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Big Fight’ Against Monopolies
By George Zornick

Warren: When giant corporations have that much economic power, they also accumulate massive political power. They can pour insane amounts of money into electing politicians who will do their bidding in government. It’s no wonder that the biggest companies in America also spend the most on lobbying government officials. It becomes an ugly, self-perpetuating cycle.

Zornick: Companies like Google and Facebook have become just massive. Are there unique dangers when tech companies get so big and control so much?

Warren: In many ways, tech monopolies are similar to the oil and sugar and railroad trusts of the 19th century. And antitrust enforcers have the tools to stop tech companies from engaging in practices that choke off competition, but only if they use them. But there’s one key difference between the 19th-century trusts and today’s tech companies, and that’s data. Companies today gather more data on everything from where we work to where we shop, to our political views, to what we eat for breakfast. There’s this belief, when it comes to tech companies, that when people don’t pay up front, there’s no antitrust concern. But that’s a myth. Data is power. And data allows companies to push tailored advertisements to both shape and drive our preferences, and ultimately to benefit the corporation’s bottom line. That’s why it’s critically important that antitrust enforcers focus on the ways data can be used to undermine competition.

Google for the first time outspent every other company to influence Washington in 2017
By Hamza Shaban

The tech industry’s ballooning lobbying budgets may also be an indication that the companies will fight hard to protect the data they are collecting on Americans, said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University. Bedoya worries that the government will now struggle to pass new and meaningful consumer protection laws.

“Because this is the first time in American history that the giants of industry have as their raw material personal data, [tech companies] are going to do as much as possible to protect access to that raw material,” Bedoya said.

Google and Facebook are watching our every move online. It’s time to make them stop
By Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo

What you may not realize, though, is 76 percent of websites now contain hidden Google trackers, and 24 percent have hidden Facebook trackers, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. The next highest is Twitter with 12 percent. It is likely that Google or Facebook are watching you on many sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products.

As a result, these two companies have amassed huge data profiles on each person, which can include your interests, purchases, search, browsing and location history, and much more. They then make your sensitive data profile available for invasive targeted advertising that can follow you around the Internet.

Google flexed its muscles with new ad-blocking rules, and some smaller players are concerned about its power
By Jillian D’Onfro

Meanwhile, some believe that the sheer scale of Google’s business makes this move feel a bit like it’s playing God with what users will or will not see online.

Google’s global online ads business is bigger than its next five competitors combined, while Chrome has 59.23 percent browser market share across desktop and mobile, according to

“This gives Google even more power over the internet now than ever before,” Rich Kahn, the CEO of digital advertising company eZanga tells CNBC. “When does one consider it to be too much power in the hands of one company?”

By Stephen Nellis and Cate Cadell





China’s Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious
By Adam Greenfield

The Chinese state relies upon private enterprise to implement social credit and extend its tentacular reach. Top-tier concerns like Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent, Baidu, the mobility-on-demand service Didi Chuxing, and the massively popular dating site Baihe either contribute significant elements of the system’s architecture or incorporate its rulings into their services. As is common in Western-style credit scoring, these companies use readily observable and easily measurable acts as proxies for behaviors that are more abstract or harder to gauge. For example, a propensity to spend hours playing online games becomes an index of indiscipline in and of itself, even if the person playing them is debt-free and has a clean record otherwise. One’s brand of smartphone serves as a stand-in for social class, while routine purchases of diapers are taken as an indication that one is a parent and therefore more likely to be responsible. All of these qualities are factors in determining what score one is ultimately awarded.

China learned to bind real-world consequences with such clunky, even laughable inferences from the West, where algorithmic credit-scoring systems can flag a tendency to fill out loan application forms in capital letters exclusively as a proxy for low reliability and creditworthiness. But by drawing conclusions about citizens’s political sentiments into the judgments it renders, social credit goes far beyond anything currently imagined in the Western world. The state relies on its corporate partners to punish behavior it regards as problematic. Private, commercial transactions—renting a car, reserving a hotel room, buying a plane ticket—become venues for state-directed punishment for nonconformity.

It’s not always clear, even in retrospect, what behavior might have triggered such an exclusion, but early indications suggest that a broad array of putative transgressions can be picked up and punished by the system. Human Rights Watch reports that the lawyer Li Xiaolin was barred from boarding a domestic flight because a written apology he’d offered a regional court in an unrelated matter some months before was held to be “insincere.” His name had been entered into a national no-fly list because he’d run afoul of the whims of a petty bureaucrat. And the activist Liu Hu was apparently ensnared by the system for undertaking political activity abrasive to the state. Frozen out by the network, he can no longer buy real estate, secure a commercial loan, or pay for airfare. He can’t even travel on the national high-speed rail network. It’s not hard to see how such restrictions, applied broadly enough, would put an effective brake on nonconforming behaviors—or even the expression of nonconforming opinions.

China censorship after Xi Jinping presidency extension proposal
By Kerry Allen

Several key terms have suddenly been subjected to heavy censorship on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblog since Sunday.

According to censorship-monitoring websites China Digital Times and Free Weibo, censored phrases include:

  1. I don’t agree
  2. migration
  3. emigration
  4. re-election
  5. election term
  6. constitution amendment
  7. constitution rules
  8. proclaiming oneself an emperor
  9. Winnie the Pooh

The rise of China as a digital totalitarian state
By Xiao Qiang




What’s worse than fake news? The distortion of reality itself.
By Aviv Ovadya

Advances in communications technology and artificial intelligence are making it easy to create audio or video content with potentially dangerous consequences, from making it appear that a world leader is ordering a nuclear strike to simulating your spouse’s voice on the phone asking for a bank password.

As individuals and institutions, we must ensure that we trust the trustworthy and disregard the disingenuous. Representative government requires accountability, and accountability requires discerning knowledge. But technology is disrupting that edifice of knowledge, and if we don’t act quickly enough, it may soon bring us past the point of no return.

So what can we do? In short, we need massive investment across industry, civil society and government, to understand and mitigate threats to our information ecosystems. And we need it now.

Special counsel Mueller: Russians conducted ‘information warfare’ against US during election to help Donald Trump win
By Dan Mangan and Mike Calia

The indictment said the Internet Research Agency was registered with the Russian government as a corporate entity in 2013, and by May 2014 the group’s strategy included interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with the stated goal of “spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general,” the indictment said.

The indictment details an extremely sophisticated conspiracy in which defendants traveled to the United States to conduct research, employed specialists to fine-tune social media posts to “ensure they appeared authentic,” and stole real people’s identities to purchase online ads.

How Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics
By Nicholas Confessore and Daisuke Wakabayashi



Why Putin’s Foes Deplore U.S. Fixation on Election Meddling
By Andrew Higgins



The hysteria over Russian bots has reached new levels
By Thomas Frank

… either Democratic “political operatives” are incredibly bad at what they do, or else they are feigning amazement in order to get themselves off the hook for the lousy job they did in 2016. They themselves blew millions and came up empty, but to this handful of bargain-basement Russian trolls they ascribe all manner of ability. Clinton’s glittering Jedi army was simply powerless against them.

It is worth noting that the indictment itself, as the deputy US attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, said on Friday, declines to attribute any actual election results to the Russian ads. It is also important to acknowledge that I believe Mueller’s indictment is probably correct in its particulars. Everyone can see that we are living in an age of rampant propaganda, that conspiracy theories have never travelled faster. But no thanks to a new cold war.

Yes, go after the Russian trolls. Prosecute them for their alleged crimes. Punish Putin if he tried to jack with us. But understand that this sort of operation is not going away.

By Amanda Taub and Max Fisher

But if Americans were susceptible to messages seeking to discredit democratic institutions, it was because many already believed them.

The Tea Party movement, for instance, rose on a fear that Barack Obama was more dictator than president, and that his health care reforms would send elderly Americans to “death panels.” Mr. Trump rose on the lie that Mr. Obama is secretly foreign-born. Some supporters of Bernie Sanders, a Democratic senator, suspected that Mrs. Clinton had engineered the primary vote against him, a notion later hit upon by Russian misinformation.

How Liberals Amped Up a Parkland Shooting Conspiracy Theory
By Molly McKew

People outraged by the conspiracy helped to promote it—in some cases far more than the supporters of the story. And algorithms—apparently absent the necessary “sentiment sensitivity” that is needed to tell the context of a piece of content and assess whether it is being shared positively or negatively—see all that noise the same.

This unintended amplification created by outrage-sharing may have helped put the conspiracy in front of more unsuspecting people.

It’s the wild-west landscape that social media platforms have encouraged, knowing that outrage is an effective currency in the so-called attention economy.

This terminology camouflages the war for minds that is underway on social media platforms, the impact that this has on our cognitive capabilities over time, and the extent to which automation is being engaged to gain advantage. The assumption, for example, that other would-be participants in social media information wars who choose to use these same tactics will gain the same capabilities or advantage is not necessarily true. This is a playing field that is hard to level: Amplification networks have data-driven, machine learning components that work better with refinement over time. You can’t just turn one on and expect it to work perfectly.

The vast amounts of content being uploaded every minute cannot possibly be reviewed by human beings. Algorithms, and the poets who sculpt them, are thus given an increasingly outsized role in the shape of our information environment. Human minds are on a battlefield between warring AIs—caught in the crossfire between forces we can’t see, sometimes as collateral damage and sometimes as unwitting participants. In this blackbox algorithmic wonderland, we don’t know if we are picking up a gun or a shield.

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