Verge, The

Donald Trump used Twitter to make outrageous claims during the entire 2016 election, and he’s still making them after winning the presidency. He is now turning Twitter into a state-media machine capable of quickly and widely spreading disinformation.

In the middle of a rant about the Electoral College, President-elect Trump tweeted a preposterous claim: that millions of people voted illegally in the election he just won. (He also trashed democratic norms before the election, saying it would be rigged and that he would not accept the results if he lost.) President-elect Trump made the false claim about illegal voting in the middle of saying there should be no vote recount in Wisconsin. President-elect Trump has given no indication that he will restrain his careless speech or improve his standards for evidence. He has used Twitter to tweet and retweet false and misleading information at a volume that has challenged the bandwidth of fact checkers. In many cases the fact-checkers don’t get a word in before the false claim. When President-elect Trump becomes President, his Twitter account won’t just be the ramblings of a private citizen — it will be the remarks of the chief executive of the US government. And if his Twitter account is the most open part of his administration, the platform could effectively become the White House press office.

A Q&A with Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University.

Tim Wu is perhaps best known for coming up with the phrase "net neutrality." In his last book, The Master Switch, Wu traced the history of modern communications and media consolidation. In his new book, The Attention Merchants, Wu delves into the history of advertising, propaganda, and media. Wu writes a history that begins with Benjamin Day’s idea to sell his paper, The New York Sun, for less than the cost of production and make up the difference through advertising; now, ads are even displayed in public schools. Many media companies — including this one — aim to attract the attention of readers or viewers. That attention is then directed, at least theoretically, toward the ads the company serves. That model has expanded, however, with companies that consider themselves the tech sector — like Google or Facebook — borrowing the media model of serving ads to a captive audience, either through search results or through your social media feed. I spoke to Wu about the long view on advertising, the role of propaganda in politics, and the rise of celebrity culture.

The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to President-elect Donald Trump.

It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes National Security Agency surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what President-elect Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights. The crown jewel of that system is the NSA, and there’s reason to think it will grow even more secretive and voracious in the Trump Administration. President-elect Trump’s current transition team includes two of the NSA’s foremost defenders — Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) and former congressman Mike Rogers — a move that suggests the agency will be moving toward more invasive collection and less transparency than ever before.

A new report says Facebook shelved an update that would have suppressed fake news from going viral on the social network. High-ranking Facebook executives were briefed on an update that identified fake news and hoaxes, but the tool was never released in fears of “upsetting conservatives.” The tool, which heavily affected right-wing media, was reportedly killed following revelations that the company’s human-curated Trending Topics team often favored liberal topics. Facebook then fired the team in place of an algorithm, which instead regularly surfaced fake news onto Trending Topics. It also updated the news feed to favor stories about friends and family over clickbait headlines and spam.

Still, Zuckerberg maintains that “99 percent of what people see [on Facebook] is authentic.” The CEO claimed that fake news worked both ways — with inaccurate stories shared on both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — though a report earlier in 2016 cites that right-wing media published misleading information 38 percent of the time compared to left-wing media’s 20 percent.

AT&T announced a new feature for its data plans called Stream Saver that will effectively throttle mobile video streams starting sometime in 2017. Touted as a “free and convenient, data-saving feature,” AT&T will cap what it says are most video streams to 480p by default. To watch video in high definition, consumers will have to opt-out using the myAT&T app or on the company’s website. AT&T says there is no charge to use the feature.

It sounds innocuous right now, and in most cases having a data-saving tool you can toggle on and off at will is a good thing. (AT&T killed overage fees in August, so it no longer has a vested interest in letting customers exceed their limit.) Yet Stream Saver could pave the way for AT&T to start enabling the potentially net neutrality-violating exemption features championed by T-Mobile and its Music Freedom and Binge On initiatives.

People who are well liked on Facebook may also be healthier, according to a study that linked people’s activity on the social network to their lifespans. This could be another blow against the increasingly unstable position that digital media is inherently dangerous. The study looked at the association between the Facebook use of 12 million people between the ages of 27 and 71 and their longevity, using records from the California Department of Public Health. Led by William Hobbs — who at the time was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego — the researchers found that Facebook activity that indicated a rich offline social life tracked with improved longevity. They published their results Oct 31 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Specifically, they found that people who received a lot of friend requests tended to live longer, but there was little association between longevity and sending friend requests. Posting photos was also linked with reduced mortality in the study. And moderate levels of online-only behavior like sending messages also appears to track with a longer life. The study supports previous research that associated a robust, real-world social network with improved health. The study, however, covered just one state and one social network. And it looked at correlation, not causation. “We cannot say that spurring users to post more photos on Facebook will increase user longevity,” the authors write in the paper. In fact, it’s just as likely that the association goes the reverse direction: these findings could mean that healthier people have the energy and time for richer offline social lives that bleed into their online lives.

While the Trump campaign continues to flounder weeks before Election Day, a new report is providing some inside information on the candidate's strategy, including an unorthodox use of Facebook. Businessweek explains how the Trump team has quietly organized a data enterprise to sharpen its White House bid. The campaign is meanwhile attempting to depress votes in demographics where Hillary Clinton is winning by wide margins. In one move, the Trump campaign reportedly created a cartoon animation with Clinton repeating her now-infamous line about "super predators," pairing it with the text, "Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators."

Businessweek reports that the Trump campaign is planning to use the ad in so-called "dark" Facebook posts — targeted, paid posts — to convince black voters not to come out for Election Day. Certainly there's nothing new about political ads trashing an opponent — but using Facebook to target the opposition's supporters is a different strategy. As Businessweek points out, there's no widely available evidence that such a plan will work. It may even backfire, unintentionally convincing some Americans to vote instead. But, the data the Trump campaign has built may be the foundation for a Trump project launching well past Election Day.

This weekend saw one of the biggest corporate acquisitions in years as AT&T reached a deal to purchase Time Warner for more than $80 billion. If approved, the deal would create a massive new joining of the telecom and media business, along the lines of AOL-Verizon (combined in May of 2015 ) and Comcast-NBCUniversal.

But AT&T's new conglomerate has a unique combination. Comcast has a bundle of cable channels and a fiber network — a scary combination for many — but it doesn't have a wireless business (at least not yet). Verizon has a wireless business and a web empire, but it doesn't have any TV channels. The newly formed AT&T conglomerate would be the only company with the means to build a direct pipeline from Game of Thrones to your smartphone — which could be a powerful and frightening force in the years to come. If the future of the media business is mobile video, zero-rating could give carriers frightening new powers — and no one would benefit more than the newly joined AT&T-Time Warner conglomerate. For now, content companies are holding most of the cards — but that only means AT&T’s new powers are more likely to appear as a bonus rather than a restriction.

Cities across the country are clamoring for technological upgrades to transform themselves from cities of the past into “smart cities” of the future. Sidewalk Labs says it will help over a dozen cities do just that. Sidewalk Labs will join forces with national advocacy group Transportation For America (T4A) to help 16 cities better prepare themselves for innovations like self-driving cars and ride-sharing apps, as well as share information with each other to find out what works and what doesn’t.

The 16 cities that were selected are: Austin, TX; Denver, CO; Boston, MA; Centennial, CO; Chattanooga, TN; Lone Tree, CO; Los Angeles, CA; Miami-Dade County, FL; Madison, WI; Minneapolis / St. Paul, MN; Nashville, TN; Portland, OR; Sacramento, CA; San Jose, CA; Seattle, WA; and Washington, DC.

Verizon has a new unlimited mobile data offering with some significant strings attached. PopData is essentially a pay-as-you-go unlimited option that costs $2 for every 30 minutes or $3 for every 60 minutes. Think of it like a microtransaction or in-app purchase in a mobile game, where you can’t enjoy the full benefits of a product you ostensibly already own or pay for without ponying up a few extra bucks. Of course, PopData isn’t quite as insidious as it sounds upfront.

There does appear to be some legitimate reasons to want unfettered data access for a short amount of time. For instance, perhaps you know you’ll be downloading large files to your phone like numerous Spotify playlists, or maybe you want to enjoy an uninterrupted stream of a sports game or Netflix movie without having to worry about your data cap. But there’s no telling really whether this is a good or bad deal, as it complicates how we think of the value of data by blending a monthly bucket metaphor with that of a time-based subscription system. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if customers could simply pay for unlimited data every month. Yet Verizon — unlike AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — does not offer customers a standard unlimited plan, and the company has made an effort to kick users off their grandfathered plans in the past.