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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 …

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 …

Comcast’s 1.2 TB data cap seems like a ton of data—until you factor in remote work

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The most frequent reaction to last week’s news that Comcast will subject all its residential broadband customers to a 1.2 terabyte monthly data cap has been “How could they?!” Broadband experts consistently say there’s no technical reason to enforce usage limits on wired connections such as cable internet. A less frequent reaction: “How could you?” As in, how could any one person possibly burn through that much data in a month? The threshold that Comcast will start enforcing next year on subscribers in the northeast does, indeed, allow for a lot of online life before getting socked by surcharges of $10 for each extra 50 GB, up to $100 a month. For example, streaming 200 hours of high-definition Netflix (at 3 GB an hour ) would still leave half that 1.2 TB allocation free. Read More …

This MySpace clone is the social media nostalgia hit you need right now

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Forget Snapchat or Instagram. The new social network of the moment is a shameless MySpace clone, created by a student developer who was only a few years old during that site’s heyday. The new network in question, SpaceHey , doesn’t hold back in its attempt to re-create MySpace’s mid-aughts vibe. Sign up for the site, and you can create a profile page with status updates, a personal blog, and a list of hobbies. Visit a friend’s page, and you’ll see whether they’re online along with their current mood. And yes, you can customize your profile. SpaceHey is the project of An—he goes by just his first name online —who says he’s an 18-year-old student in Germany. In a nod to MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson , An automatically befriends everyone who creates a profile on the site. On Sunday, he had about 1,000 friends. On Monday, that number had doubled , as sites such as  HackerNews and ProductHunt took notice. Over Twitter, An says that while he never experienced MySpace firsthand, he heard plenty about it on the internet and from older friends Read More …

Why is it so hard to buy a PlayStation 5 right now? ‘Grinch Bots’ are probably to blame

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Phil Nichols, 45, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been very good this year. In a concession to the pandemic, he’s managed his information technology job for the Internal Revenue Service from home and forgone weekly game nights, as well as restaurant and movie outings. To break up the monotony and also distract from his chronic pain, the disabled veteran plays video games. “You get to get out of your bubble, so to speak, and see a whole new world,” he said. So, when Sony released the new PlayStation 5 game console in mid-November, he decided to reward himself with an early Christmas present. But when we spoke, Nichols had been trying for more than a week to buy the console online without success. He blames bots, automated computer programs that people use to buy up in-demand items that they then resell for a profit. They function like ticket scalpers who have expanded into sneakers, toys, and electronics. While the nefarious software plagues e-commerce sites all year long, so-called “Grinch Bots” are especially active over the holidays, snatching up the season’s hottest gifts. When the PlayStation 5 consoles first dropped on November 12, the traffic crashed Walmart’s website . Nichols is sure that bots were beating him to the punch because every time Walmart and other retailers released more consoles, the products were gone in less than five seconds Read More …