How youth in Senegal are using digital tools to safeguard a democracy under threat

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On the evening of March 4, 2021, the day following one of the biggest series of protests in Senegal’s modern history, the African nation’s government switched off the internet. Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube, and other social communication channels were restricted. By shutting down one of the most important means of communication in Senegal, the government aimed to suppress the magnitude of the protests against President Macky Sall and his regime. This practice of restricting the internet and social networking channels isn’t singular to Senegal. Internet shutdown and throttling has been a long-standing practice employed by governments to prevent protests and control information spread, especially in South Asia and Africa. But in an increasingly digital world, internet access has become a human right, and governments and internet service providers shouldn’t have the ability to shut it down, especially in countries with a fragile democracy. In Senegal, where 70% of the electoral population is below the age of 40, where internet penetration is at 46% and rapidly increasing, and where a sizable part of the electorate is in the diaspora, access to the internet is necessary to uphold democratic values. As a Senegalese technologist in the diaspora, I am inspired by how the country’s young people have leveraged technology to fight for their democracy. A shaky democracy While Senegal has been touted as the last standing soldier when it comes to democracy in Africa, the country’s status as a stable democracy is increasingly in doubt Read More …

Two new bills could put a dent in technology’s ‘homework gap’

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It’s only taken a year since the onset of the pandemic, but serious help is finally coming for students and their parents who haven’t had reliable internet bandwidth for distance learning. First, a bill passed in the dying days of the Trump administration will bring $50 discounts on internet access for lower-income households. Second, the Biden administration’s first major bill will let schools and libraries share connectivity beyond their own premises. Combined, they could make a sizable dent in a problem that educational advocates identified as the “homework gap” years before the coronavirus pandemic aimed a harsh spotlight at it. “The homework gap exists in rural America, urban America, and everywhere in between,” said the Federal Communications Commission’s Jessica Rosenworcel in April 2019 , almost two years before President Biden elevated her from FCC commissioner to acting FCC chair. The first phase of help arrived with the Consolidated Appropriations Act that President Trump signed on December 27. That mammoth spending bill allocated $3.2 billion for an Emergency Broadband Benefit that will bring $50 monthly discounts ($75 on tribal lands) for internet access to cash-strapped Americans. This benefit and a one-time $100 reimbursement for computer purchases will be open to far more people than the FCC’s existing Lifeline subsidies . Beneficiaries will include parents of children eligible for free or discounted school lunches, workers whose incomes plunged since last February, Pell Grant college-aid recipients, and people who already qualify for internet providers’ low-income options. The second phase arrived with the American Rescue Plan Act that Biden signed Thursday. That sets up an Emergency Connectivity Fund of $7.171 billion to pay for schools and libraries to expand their existing connectivity beyond their own properties so that nearby students, staff, and patrons can connect wirelessly. The need is there Both of these measures promise to get millions of Americans online, although the number of millions isn’t clear yet. “The agency hasn’t published any estimates on how many households could benefit,” said Paloma Perez, press secretary for Rosenworcel, in an email. Demand clearly exists. A Morning Consult poll conducted in early March found that 16% of white adults making less than $50,000 annually had missed paying an internet-service provider bill in the last year—and that the figure among Black, Latino, and other nonwhite adults was 27%. Both programs also face big challenges, judging from such earlier broadband subsidies as Lifeline —which as of January had sign-ups only from an estimated 26% of eligible households nationwide . “More people have not used Lifeline because they don’t know about it,” says Nicol Turner-Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution , a centrist policy institute in Washington Read More …

Meet the CRISPR pioneers who are making gene editing easy

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Henry Ford is  still best known for his 1908 Model T, an inexpensive automobile that almost anyone could own. But his real innovation was integrating the conveyor belt into assembly line production. The inspiration came from the meat packing industry. There, factory workers bled, skinned, and sliced ugly carcasses into smooth chops and filets. Ford adapted the process for cars Read More …

Tinder will integrate background checks to keep users safe

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Tinder parent company Match Group announced Monday that it plans to bring background checks to the dating app later this year. To do so, it plans to work with Garbo , a New York nonprofit focused on background checks around violence and abuse, to make it easy for people to find out if their matches have documented histories of such behavior. While the exact details remain to be determined, Match Group head of safety Tracey Breeden says users can expect to see a feature based on the partnership appear in Tinder in 2021. Since Tinder is one of the company’s most popular dating apps, it’s a natural place to try the feature, she says, but if it is successful there users are likely to see it appear in Match’s other apps as well, including OKCupid, Hinge, and Plenty of Fish. Tracy Breeden [Photo: courtesy of Tinder] Garbo’s overall goal is to work with vulnerable populations including women, people of color, and LGBT people to protect them from gender-based violence. It aims to provide inexpensive or free access to information that’s buried in paywalled court records or otherwise difficult for people to access, like convictions for crimes of violence or civil restraining orders. “We fundamentally believe that public record access should be free, if not very, very low cost,” says Garbo founder Kathryn Kosmides, who is herself a survivor of gender-based violence. Relationship violence is unfortunately quite common , especially against women, and violence linked to dating services has existed long before the internet. Tinder already provides users with safety tips like meeting in public and avoiding accepting drinks from strangers, as well as ways to report people who behave inappropriately on the platform. Match Group announced a partnership with the anti-sexual violence group, Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), late last year , to review its existing safety measures and reporting tools. Read More …

Vaccine passports are coming. Here’s why they’re controversial

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Vaccine passports—proof that you’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19—are at this point an inevitability. Countries including Seychelles, Cyprus, Georgia, Romania, Poland, Iceland, and Estonia will require travelers to have a COVID-19 vaccination to enter. Now, lots of tech companies are working on building apps that certify a traveler is vaccinated. But there are a few problems with vaccine passports, and the World Health Organization has voiced its distaste for the concept. The main concern is that vaccine distribution is not globally equitable and vaccine passports could create social stratification. “At the present time the use of certification of vaccination as a requirement for travel is not advised because quite simply vaccination is just not available enough around the world and is not available certainly on an equitable basis,” said Michael Ryan, head of the WHO’s health-emergencies program, at a press conference. The organization says that it thinks providing vaccinated people with an official certification is valuable for public health purposes, but that vaccination should not entitle a person to more freedoms than an unvaccinated person. This is particularly true, the WHO notes, because there is no proof that any of the COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of COVID-19 Read More …