The Democratic operative who beat Trump on Facebook is bracing for the war ahead

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Tara McGowan should be celebrating. Acronym, her three-year-old political outfit, placed an unprecedented $100 million bet on digital ads ahead of last month’s election, with the aim of convincing millions of Americans to vote against Donald Trump, and it appeared to pay off. Still, when we spoke in a wide-ranging conversation about Acronym’s work in 2020 and beyond, the 34-year-old veteran of Democratic campaigns sounded nervous. Trump wasn’t the Democrats’ only opponent: They also faced an unprecedented hurricane of right-wing disinformation that wreaked far more damage than the Kremlin ever could. That Trump won more votes than any incumbent president, and that Republicans succeeded in so many down-ballot races, represents one challenge for Democrats; that Trump hasn’t quite acknowledged his defeat and keeps harping on conspiracy theories represents a bigger one. Tara McGowan [Photo: courtesy of Acronym] These are different problems from Acronym’s original focus. Early on, McGowan had raised the alarm about a Republican “death star” of data and ads, and more than $1 billion in Trump campaign funds—all operating in lockstep with a powerful right-wing media apparatus. To combat it, she raised millions from Hollywood and Silicon Valley billionaires, including Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow and the majority owner of The Atlantic . She built a strong team of digital operatives, many of them ex-Facebookers , tasked with bombarding key voters in battleground states with a virtuous circle of microtargeted ads, a monster data machine, and its own network of partisan news sites. Between Acronym’s work and a revamped Democratic data sharing operation, McGowan says the left once again has the digital advantage. “I believe that we definitely closed the gap, and started to leapfrog where Republicans are in terms of digital innovation and infrastructure and investments this cycle.” But the medium for Acronym’s success is also part of the problem, McGowan says. For someone who oversaw the left’s biggest Facebook ad blitz yet, using heaps of Big Tech cash, she has surprisingly little nice to say about the platforms. Now, after helping to accelerate right-wing falsehoods, Facebook and Google are making the problem even worse, she says: The platforms’ new indefinite bans on political ads could give a leg up to wealthier incumbent candidates, who can more easily buy TV spots. But they hurt Democrats in other ways, too: McGowan says the left doesn’t have the same kind of partisan media infrastructure as the right, which can use organic posts on Facebook and Google to circumvent ad bans. McGowan knows the damage that partisan misinformation can do. After a voter tabulation app made by a for-profit spin-off of Acronym failed disastrously during last year’s Iowa caucus, she became the target of a few conspiracy theories herself. (The startup’s name, Shadow Inc., didn’t help.) The incident brought intense scrutiny to Acronym, and its associated super PAC, Pacronym, spooked some donors and fed a burning skepticism about its venture-backed, Silicon Valley-style approach to progressive politics. Read More …

Google wants you to help capture Street View’s next 10 million miles

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In the very near future you’ll be seeing photos shot on smartphones woven into Google Maps’ Street View. Until now, the street-level imagery in Street View has been shot mainly by expensive cameras mounted to the top of vehicles deployed by Google itself. Now some of that job will be outsourced to Android phone users who will use the Street View app to upload their own photos of streets and places. Google says that this will not only allow Street View to keep its imagery of changing neighborhoods more current but also extend its gaze to places it’s never been before, such as streets and roads in rural areas and in developing countries. To weave the user images into a continuous flow, Street View-style, Google says it’ll call on the same software it uses to stitch together the street-level imagery shot by its own car-cams. The software also blurs faces and license plates and places images in the appropriate place on Google Maps. If users capture business storefronts, those can be added to Google Maps along with their name and address, Google Maps product manager Stafford Marquardt tells me. The owner of the business might later come along and claim the listing and perhaps add more information, such as hours of operation, website, and phone number. Previously, Google allowed users in some places to submit Street View imagery shot using rotating cameras mounted to their own vehicles. (Yes, people really do this .) And users have been able to submit single-place photos that are viewable within Maps. But now is the first time Google will accept Street View images shot on smartphones. To submit imagery, you’ll need an Android phone that supports Google’s ARCore augmented reality framework , Marquardt says. The ARCore integration allows a phone to send data from its various sensors—such as the accelerometer and gyroscope—along with the Street View images to help orient them correctly within a place on the map. Google says it will gradually roll out the ability to capture and upload images through the Street View map. It’s already made the feature available to a small percentage of Maps app users in Austin and Toronto and is turning it on for users in New York City Thursday. The camerawork of these contributors will gradually become visible within the Street View app and within Maps on the desktop. Read More …

14 essential Siri time-savers you may have overlooked

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Yes, Siri can set timers, alarms, and reminders. But Apple’s voice-enabled AI assistant is much more capable than you might think. The problem is that Apple hasn’t published a definitive list of all the things Siri can do. And while such a list would likely be overwhelmingly massive, here’s a list of lesser-known commands that are truly useful when it comes to making your day a bit easier. “Open [app name]” Your iPhone’s home screen is an unfortunate mess of folders and apps numbering into the zillions. One result is you can never seem to find those apps you downloaded years ago but only need to use once in a while—there’s just no muscle memory involved. For those times, a quick “Hey, Siri—open Couch to 5K” instantly opens up your virtually-cobwebbed fitness app without requiring you to flick through screen after screen to find it. “Take me home” This one’s a godsend for the perpetually lost—especially when in the car. The phrase opens up Maps and starts navigating you back to the comfort of your abode. “Split a check [number] ways” You’re out eating with friends or coworkers and nobody’s itching to pick up the tab. Read More …

These are Apple’s best apps of the year—for a year like no other

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For almost as long as there’s been an App Store, Apple has published a list of the year’s best apps. Once iPhone-centric, it has expanded to cover the iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Mac, and now spans everything from purely practical wares to games and streaming entertainment. Apple’s 2020 list—which it’s unveiling today—includes 15 honorees. Some are natural picks: Zoom, for example, is the iPad app of the year. Others you might not know about yet. (Or at least I didn’t.) The company says that it considers technical innovation, user experience, design, and cultural impact—and that this year, it gravitated toward candidates that helped us get through all the disruptions that have made 2020 a challenge, even for those of us who have been pretty lucky, all things considered. The list, in its entirety: iPhone App of the Year: Wakeout (Andres Canella, U.S.) iPhone Game of the Year: Genshin Impact (miHoYo, China) iPad App of the Year: Zoom (Zoom, U.S.) iPad Game of the Year: Legends of Runeterra (Riot Games, U.S.) Mac App of the Year: Fantastical (Flexibits, U.S.) Mac Game of the Year: Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, U.K./Estonia) Apple TV App of the Year: Disney+ (Disney, U.S.) Apple TV Game of the Year: Dandara Trials of Fear (Raw Fury, Sweden) Apple Watch App of the Year: Endel (Endel, Germany) Apple Arcade Game of the Year: Sneaky Sasquatch (RAC7, Canada) App Trend of the Year: Shine for helping users practice self-care (Shine, U.S.) App Trend of the Year: Explain Everything Whiteboard for helping bring remote classrooms to life (Explain Everything, Poland) App Trend of the Year: Caribu for connecting families to loved ones (Caribu, U.S.) App Trend of the Year: Pokémon Go for reinventing the way we play (Niantic, U.S.) App Trend of the Year: ShareTheMeal for helping users make a difference (United Nations, Germany) When I chatted with a few of the winning developers earlier this week, the most striking thing I learned was that 2020’s major news stories—the world-changing stuff not obviously related to the app business—had an impact on all of their businesses, each in a different way. Read More …

Inside the controversial rise of a top Twitter COVID-19 influencer

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E ric Feigl-Ding picked up his phone on the first ring. “Busy,” he said, when asked how things were going. He had just finished up an “epic, long” social media thread, he added—one of hundreds he’s posted about society’s ongoing battle with the coronavirus. “There’s so many different debates in the world of masking and herd immunity and reinfection,” he explained, among other dimensions of the pandemic. “We at FAS, we’ve been kind of monitoring all the debates and how we’re seeing signals in which the data goes one way, the debate goes the other,” he said, referring to his work with the Federation of American Scientists , a nonprofit policy think tank. He rattled off a rapid-fire sampler of hot-button COVID-19 topics: the growing anti-vaxxer movement, SARS-CoV-2 reinfection and antibodies, the body of research suggesting masks could decrease viral load, along with a quick mention of the debate among experts about what airborne  means. This whirlwind tour through viral COVID-19 themes felt like the conversational equivalent of Feigl-Ding’s Twitter account, which has grown by orders of magnitude since the dawn of the pandemic. The Harvard-trained scientist and 2018 Congressional aspirant posts dozens of times daily, often in the form of long, numbered threads. He’s fond of emojis, caps lock, and bombastic phrases. The first words of his very first viral tweet were “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” Made in January, weeks before the massive shutdowns that brought U.S. society to a halt, that exclamation preceded his observation that the “R0” (pronounced “R-naught”) of the novel coronavirus—a mathematical measure of a disease’s reproduction rate—was 3.8. That figure had been proposed in a scientific paper, posted online ahead of peer review, that Feigl-Ding called “thermonuclear pandemic level bad.” Further in that same Twitter thread, he claimed that the novel coronavirus could spread nearly eight times faster than SARS. The thread was widely criticized by infectious-disease experts and science journalists as needlessly fear-mongering and misleading, and the researchers behind the preprint had already tweeted that they’d lowered their estimate to an R0 of 2.5, meaning that Feigl-Ding’s SARS figure was incorrect. (Because R0 is an average measure of a virus’s transmissibility, estimates vary widely based on factors like local policy and population density ; as a result, researchers have suggested that other variables may be of more use.) He soon deleted the tweet—but his influence has only grown. At the beginning of the pandemic, before he began sounding the alarm on COVID-19’s seriousness, Feigl-Ding had around 2,000 followers. That number has since swelled to more than a quarter million, as Twitter users and the mainstream media turn to Feigl-Ding as an expert source, often pointing to his pedigree as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist Read More …