Caitlin Dewey

City politicians and technology leaders pitch Buffalo (NY) as a nascent tech hub, envisioning a rosy future where every child owns a laptop and geeks flock downtown with their edgy startups. But the city may face a major obstacle before this grand vision even gets off the ground: Its internet speeds rank among the country’s slowest, according to two separate analyses by The Buffalo News and the technology firm Ookla. Ookla’s Dec internet-speed report ranked Buffalo’s speeds fifth-last, ahead of only Cleveland (OH), Toledo (OH), Memphis (TN), and Laredo (TX).

The digital divide looks like Buffalo’s (NY) Broadway Market on a Friday afternoon: a dozen round tables thronged with lunchgoers – and nary a laptop or tablet among them. Most households in this neighborhood don’t own such devices, new first-of-its-kind federal data show. And even fewer have the means to go online with them, either at the Broadway Market or in their own homes.

There’s been a lot of consternation in recent months about Facebook’s impact on politics. If it’s not fears of partisan censorship and suppressed trending topics, it’s worries about echo chambers or hyper-targeted campaign ads. But in the upcoming presidential election, at least, Facebook’s influence will lie somewhere else: The social network is driving huge numbers of people to the polls — and most of those people are likely to vote Democrat.

This effect is not at all by design. Instead, it’s an accident of demographics. Facebook skews both young and female, which means the site’s powerful get-out-the-vote campaigns reach more potential voters in the Hillary Clinton camp. The same could be said of Twitter, which over-indexes with people of color. Or Airbnb, which is popular among older, white adults — those statistically most likely to be Republican voters.

As more and more political discourse has moved to the Internet, the techniques of political "astroturfing" have multiplied. Here are what some of the motivated actors are attempting now:

The bots: There are the bots, for starters — we tend to hear about those a lot. While an analysis by the Atlantic’s Andrew McGill found that there are relatively few Twitter bots among the direct followers of Donald Trump and Clinton, that certainly hasn’t been the case elsewhere. Especially seen in the Brexit vote.
The coordinated posters: That could also be said of what we’ll term the “coordinated posters” — real users who are secretly instructed to share similar political messages on behalf of a campaign or other organization. This isn’t fakery, per se — but it’s also not 100 percent certified organic.
The dark-money memes: viral videos, memes and other apparently amateur political ephemera, which behave like political ads but require very little disclosure.

You touch your phone an average of 2,617 times per day — more, if you’re a heavy user. That’s 18,000 times a week. Nearly one million times a year. Enough that all those swipes, taps, drags, flicks and pinches feel both hard-wired and totally natural. Of course, our interactions with our touch screens are neither of those things: They’re deliberately strategized, user-tested and designed toward specific purposes, by people with self-serving goals. And Ben Grosser, an artist whose work interrogates power and technology, thinks we ought to pay more attention to both. Grosser released the first in a series of three videos that will examine how we interact with our touch screens and how those interactions are represented in modern television and movies.

Since early June, an account called @StayWokeBot has been doing its best to help keep others aware. The bot, a collaboration between activists DeRay Mckesson and Sam Sinyangwe and the tech cooperative Feel Train, is intended to protect and maintain morale among the black protest community. As of this writing, the bot does two things, though it may do more in the future: When a Twitter user initially follows @StayWokeBot, it auto-tweets them a singsong affirmation; when a follower tweets at the bot with his or her state, it responds with contact information for that state’s senators and a prompt to ask them to vote in favor of two gun-control measures. These sorts of repetitive, exhausting social media tasks — rallying the community, calling for action, facing down the angry @-replies of haters and critics — have long been the undertaking of activists themselves. But there’s a growing understanding that this work takes a lot of time, not to mention a profound emotional and psychological toll. And bots, of all things, could be the ones to absorb that kind of emotional labor. This idea, that bots could serve as a sort of proxy or extension of human activists, is a subtle shift from the activist and protest bots of the past.

Users view Google Maps more than a billion times each week: It’s one of the world’s largest sources of geographic data and the first place many of us turn when we need to locate something. So it makes sense that, when a Gaza City-based journalism group claimed that the nation of Palestine had literally been wiped from Google’s maps, readers were, well — indignant. Dozens of Middle-Eastern news outlets have covered the “backlash,” and tens of thousands have Facebook-shared and tweeted it. The only problem? Google Maps didn’t delete Palestine on July 25, as claimed. It hasn’t changed its labeling of the region at all. If you search “Palestine” in Google Maps, you’ll get the same result you would have gotten five months ago, when a guy named Zak Martin began a Change.org petition on the subject: The map view defaults to a demarcated, but unlabeled, region stretching from Hebron in the south to Jenin in the north, and from Jerusalem to the Jordanian border.

Even if the current outrage is misplaced, it does raise some interesting questions about the power of mapping technologies like Google’s. In their attempts to dispassionately document the physical world online, tech companies often end up shaping our understanding of it, too. That’s not something that we tend to think about often, but it does become pretty obvious when a map changes/is said to have changed, or when we compare different maps against each other. Some Palestinians have said, for instance, that they’re switching to Microsoft’s Bing Maps, because those do label Palestine as its own discrete place. Apple Maps, meanwhile, neither labels the territory nor differentiates it at all from the Israeli state.

There has never been a worse time to declare your politics publicly, according to a new and nationally representative online poll conducted by the Rad Campaign, Craigconnects and Lincoln Strategies. This year’s survey, the second in a biannual series, found that nearly a third of all Internet-using adults self-report that they’ve been “harassed online for expressing political opinions.” That abuse is highest among Democrats, the highly political and those ages 55 to 64. It’s also nearly double the rate of political harassment that users reported in 2014.