Atlantic, The

There’s a category of often-misleading news sources that seems to have escaped the notice of tech companies: state-sponsored outlets like RT, a TV network and online news website that’s funded by the Russian government. As my colleagues Julia Ioffe and Rosie Gray wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review and BuzzFeed, respectively, RT—formerly known as Russia Today—routinely shapes its coverage portray Russia in the best possible light, and to make the West, and especially the United States, look bad. RT stories regularly appear toward the top of Google search results.

[Commentary] Interrogating the meaning of “the media” has become more important in recent months, as no American president has tried so aggressively to discredit all journalists. This sort of wholesale antagonism can only occur in a world that is drastically oversimplified into binaries. If you’ve read this far, you probably don’t “hate the media” or “love the media,” but see it as the complex professional-commercial-personal-political ecosystem that it is.

Making sweeping claims about “the media” jumbles up journalists with infotainment and partisan pundits and advocates. Many of us see the absurdity in that type of overgeneralization, and yet we contribute to it, with every mention of “the media” as if it were some monolithic entity. That sort of usage enables the painting of this monolithic entity as either corrupt or not, trustworthy or not. It further jeopardizes what little trust remains in the profession that exists only to convey truth. The profession that grows more necessary by the day.

On March 19, an IT employee at the Hillary Clinton campaign gave John Podesta, the campaign chairman, some computer-security advice. “John needs to change his password immediately,” he wrote in an e-mail, “and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account.” The helpdesk staffer was responding to a Google alert with a bright red banner that had been sent to Podesta’s personal Gmail account. An aide to Podesta had forwarded the warning when she saw it in his inbox. The warning, it turned out, was fake. It was designed to look authentic by Russian hackers, who also created a fake password-reset page that would capture Podesta’s password when he entered it.

But the Clinton IT employee, Charles Delavan, made a crucial error when he responded to the aide who forwarded the warning. “This is a legitimate email,” he wrote back. Somebody on the campaign clicked on the fake link, entered Podesta’s password, and the hackers gained access to tens of thousands of his e-mails. In a detailed new report from The New York Times, Delavan said he didn’t intend to legitimize the phishing email back in March: "He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them. He said he had meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” e-mail, an error that he said has plagued him ever since"

If the public is to stay informed about foreign hacking that the executive branch wanted to keep quiet, whistleblowers in the intelligence community would have to come forward to leak important findings. But under President Barack Obama, leakers have faced steep penalties for sharing classified information with the press or the public—and President-elect Donald Trump seems far more hostile toward transparency, as evidenced by his stances on journalism and free speech. In the absence of official reports about hacking, the private sector would have a bigger role to play, too.

The Republican party’s 2016 platform referred to existing network neutrality rules as the “gravest peril” putting “the survival of the internet as we know it ... at risk.” But President-elect Donald Trump is unpredictable enough that looking to his party doesn’t offer much clarity as to what he might actually do.

Rather than basing his decisions on overarching principles—or party platforms—the president elect often seems to be guided by vendetta (or at least the desire to generate a punchy sound bite). Trump’s record of opposing monopolies, for instance, often centers around his disdain for the media, which was a reliable crowd-pleaser among his supporters.

Nearly half of American Internet users have been harassed or abused online, according to a new study published by Data & Society, a technology-focused think tank. Some groups are more often targeted than others. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual users are more than twice as likely than straight users to experience abuse online, the study found, and although men and women are subject to similar levels of abuse, the attacks on women were often of a more serious nature. Of the 20 categories of harassment the researchers looked at, men were more likely to report being called names and being embarrassed online, while women were more likely to be stalked, sexually harassed, or have false rumors spread about them.

But a person doesn’t have to be the target of abuse for it to color their experience online. More than 70 percent of Americans say they’ve seen others harassed on the Internet. For black users, that percentage rose to 78; among younger users and lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans, the proportion is close 90 percent. Groups that were more likely to come into contact with online abuse were also more likely to say that people on the Internet are mostly unkind.

In retrospect, President Barack Obama wasn’t the first high-tech president just because he had a personal relationship with technology. He was also the president who oversaw Silicon Valley’s reincarnation, from industrial accessory of the PC and E-commerce era to information sovereign in the age of iPhone and Facebook. The Obama Administration mostly supported the tech sector, implicitly or explicitly, and for worse as much as better.

Now that President-elect Donald Trump is heading to the White House, things are likely to change. And Silicon Valley is worried. In July, a hundred tech-industry business leaders condemned President-elect Trump publicly, largely on social justice grounds. After his election, fear of a Trump presidency sent the tech industry into a tailspin. A prominent investor called for California to secede from the union. But once the dust clears, Trump might prove eminently compatible with Silicon Valley’s ongoing project. And if that’s the case, the technology industry’s mask of affable, harmless progressivism is about to be pulled off forever.

Rep Mike Pompeo (R-KS), the man that President-elect Donald Trump chose to lead the CIA when he becomes president, has long been a vocal supporter of expanding the government’s surveillance powers. As Congress worked to wind down the National Security Agency’s bulk data-collection program in the summer of 2016, rolling back one of the secret measures first authorized under President George W. Bush, Rep Pompeo, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, was pushing back.

In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal this January, Rep Pompeo argued forcefully against “blunting” the government’s surveillance powers and called for “a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities.” In the piece, he laid out a road map for expanding surveillance. "Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. That includes Presidential Policy Directive-28, which bestows privacy rights on foreigners and imposes burdensome requirements to justify data collection,"he wrote. In a break with other national-security hawks, however, Rep Pompeo wrote that mandating backdoors that would allow the government to access encrypted communications would “do little good.” He argued, as most technologists who promote encryption do, that weakening digital security in the United States would just push bad actors to switch to foreign-made or homegrown software.

There is power in numbers, or so the saying goes. But statistics mean different things to different people. Take Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, for instance. During the first presidential debate, Trump touted a 30-million strong Facebook and Twitter following as a sign of mainstream popularity not reflected elsewhere. The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, has stuck by traditional polls as evidence of her success. All these numbers—social media followings, polls, or statistics—are only as viable as the tools used to get to them. Political campaigns worldwide now use bots, software developed to automatically do tasks online, as a means for gaming online polls and artificially inflating social-media traffic.

Recent analysis by our research team at Oxford University reveals that more than a third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets between the first and second debates came from automated accounts, which produced more than 1 million tweets in total. This data corroborates recent reports suggesting that both candidates’ social media followings are highly automated. What does this mean for democracy?

Facebook’s ability to let advertisers target a specific audience—for instance, women between the ages of 25 and 34 with young children—is its primary strength. More and more advertisers count on being able to identify, and market to, very specific groups. But Facebook’s advertising system not only allows marketers to choose who they most want to see their ads—it also allows them choose entire groups who will never see their ads. When placing an ad on Facebook, advertisers can explicitly exclude lots of groups, including people with any given educational level, financial status, political affiliation, and—perhaps most disturbingly—“ethnic affinity.”

"Targeting ads for housing, credit, or employment based upon race, gender, or sexual orientation violates the federal civil-rights laws that cover those fields—the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and Title VII,” says Rachel Goodman, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If Facebook is going to allow advertisers to target ads toward or away from users based on these sensitive characteristics, it must at the very least prohibit targeting in these three areas central to economic prosperity.” A better ad-buying platform might involve a system under which ads in areas where the U.S. has key civil-rights legislation—such as housing, credit, or employment—that also include ethnic targeting automatically get flagged for review. That type of due diligence already exists in the industry.