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The pernicious staying power of COVID-19’s first viral disinformation campaign

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This story is part of Doubting the Dose, a series that examines anti-vaccine sentiment and the role of misinformation in supercharging it.  Read more here . On a Monday in May, a now-infamous video titled “Plandemic” started to spread on social media. In a matter of days, millions of people had seen it. Media outlets devoted breathless attention to the conspiracy-laden film and its anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-government agenda. It was not the first piece of disinformation about COVID-19, but it was perhaps the most potent. It also struck at just the right time. It was two months into the pandemic, and little was known yet about the virus. Americans were captive in their homes, searching the web for answers about a deadly disease. “Plandemic” offered a definitive storyline about COVID-19, when public health officials had unsatisfactory answers. The film took the opportunity to sow doubt in crucial figures such as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci and call into question mask wearing—one of the few available tools at the time to combat the spread of COVID-19. It was the best attempt yet to undo critical public health efforts underway and make Americans question government leadership. “Plandemic” was the first big wave in a rising tide of unquellable disinformation and misinformation about COVID-19. By the time the internet platforms we rely on to curate the web suppressed the video, it was already too late. It had reached nearly 10 million people across YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook by some estimates. Read More …

Employee surveillance software is here to stay, even when we go back to the office

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For many people, switching to work remote was a hopeful chance to escape the prying eyes of upper management. No longer would they feel pressure to act busy when bosses walked past, or feel guilty about logging into Twitter (even if it is for work purposes). But despite the physical distance, businesses are keeping closer tabs on employees than ever before. The use of performance monitoring tools has jumped significantly over the past year, as managers try to improve team visibility and track output. Even before the crisis, 62% of organizations were using monitoring tools to collect data on employees’ behavior during work hours.  After a year of remote work, those tools have become securely integrated into companies’ day-to-day. Although a return to offices is approaching, managers are unlikely to roll back software that’s provided insight, especially as many businesses will continue to offer work from home as an option. But there’s a fine line between surveillance and management, and there’s an even finer line between legitimate reasons to monitor staff and an illegal intrusion on people’s privacy Read More …

How Google tried—and failed—to use AlphaGo as a bridge to China

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In the spring of 2017, a year after the match in Korea , AlphaGo played its next match, in Wuzhen, China, an ancient water town 80 miles south of Shanghai along the Yangtze River. With its lily ponds, stone bridges, and narrow boat canals that snaked between rows of small wooden houses topped by rock-tile roofs, Wuzhen is a village meant to look as it had centuries before. Then a 200,000-square-foot conference center rises up among the rice paddies. It looks a lot like the wooden houses spread across the village, except it’s the size of a soccer stadium. Its roof spans more than 2.5 trillion tiles. Built to host the World Internet Conference, an annual gathering where Chinese authorities trumpeted the rise of new internet technologies and marked the ways they would regulate and control the spread of information, it was now hosting a match between AlphaGo and the Chinese grand master Ke Jie, the current No.-1-ranked Go player in the world. The morning of the first game, inside a private room down a side hall from the cavernous auditorium where the match was due to be played, Demis Hassabis sat in a plush, oversized, cream-colored chair in front of a wall painted like an afternoon sky. This was the theme across the building: cloud-strewn afternoon skies. Wearing a dark-blue suit with a small round royal-blue pin on the lapel and no necktie—suddenly looking older and more polished than he had the year before—Hassabis said AlphaGo was now much more talented. Since the match in Korea, DeepMind had spent months improving the machine’s design, and AlphaGo had spent many more playing game after game against itself, learning entirely new skills through digital trial and error. Hassabis was confident the machine was now immune to the kind of sudden meltdown that arrived during the fourth game in Korea, when Lee Sedol, with Move 78, exposed a gap in its knowledge of the game. “A big part of what we were trying to do with the new architecture was close the knowledge gap,” Hassabis said. The new architecture was also more efficient. It could train itself in a fraction of the time, and once trained, it could run on a single computer chip (a Google TPU, naturally). Though Hassabis didn’t exactly say so, it was clear, even then, before the first move of the first game, that the 19-year-old Ke Jie had no chance of winning Read More …

How to build an equitable vaccine passport that respects people’s privacy

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One of President Joe Biden’s executive orders aimed at curbing the pandemic asks government agencies to “assess the feasibility” of linking coronavirus vaccine certificates with other vaccination documents and producing digital versions of them. A vaccine passport, an official document that shows your vaccination status, may soon be required to work or travel. Airlines, industry groups, nonprofits, and technology companies are building a version of this idea that you can display on your mobile phone as an app or part of your digital wallet. Fully reopening the economy requires that we quickly build and administer a protected and equitable digital vaccine passport system . Yet, there are two significant challenges to its success: trust and the digital divide. The American public does not trust our institutions and government with our private data, including information needed for a digital vaccine passport. And for good reason—we can’t protect what we can’t control. According to a recent Pew Research Study , more than 6 in 10 U.S. adults don’t think it’s possible to go through daily life without having data collected about them. We’ve seen the devastating effects of this lack of trust throughout the pandemic response: widespread public rejection of digital contact tracing systems and now, new concerns over vaccine passports. The other challenge, the digital divide, surrounds all aspects of the pandemic response and further complicates the feasibility of a digital vaccine passport Read More …

Writers who crave independence should skip Substack—and do this instead

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Let me start by saying that I appreciate what Substack is trying to do for journalism. The promise of the hosted publishing platform is that anyone can start a subscription-based publication—primarily as a newsletter—without having to worry about building a website, setting up a membership system, and fussing with design. Just put good words in, and if your audience is devoted enough, money will come out. For a growing number of writers, it’s a welcome reprieve from feeding the algorithms of Google, Facebook, and Twitter—and a chance to make some decent money along the way. But one thing I’ve realized in nearly five years of publishing my own independent newsletters is that doing things the hard way has its own rewards, from keeping more of the money to maintaining a stronger sense of independence. As more writers start building up their own newsletter businesses, I suspect a lot of them will discover this for themselves. Starting from scratch If we’re being honest, I probably would have jumped on board with Substack myself if it had been available when I started writing a newsletter about cord-cutting in 2016. Nearly every newsletter service back then was focused on email marketing instead of editorial writing, and they all charged high prices if your mailing list grew too large. As I started to outgrow Mailchimp’s 2,000-subscriber limit for free users, self-hosting seemed like the only option that didn’t cost upward of $30 per month. (Mailchimp did have its own writer-friendly service called Tinyletter , but it, too, had a 5,000-subscriber limit Read More …