Good morning! Today: the most challenging types of election disinformation for Big Tech to deal with, why we need to revive the robot tax, and the latest campaigning tool: Twitch. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. | Efforts to undermine the election are too big for Facebook and Twitter to cope with
The big one: There have been many conspiracy theories about the 2020 US election. But just two weeks before Election Day, the most common disinformation claim is currently the idea that the vote is “rigged,” researchers say. The most prominent booster of the idea of a “rigged” election is President Donald Trump, who—echoing his rhetoric in 2016—has spent much of the last year warning about a “stolen” election. The narrative has been building to the point where an adherent can now view almost any news through the “rigged” lens. Why it’s so challenging: As a “meta-narrative” under which other conspiracies and disinformation can easily fit, this type of disinformation is especially challenging for platforms like Facebook and Twitter to deal with. There is no single incident on which to focus: instead, every incident becomes linked to the grand conspiracy. What to do: The most crucial moment in the life of this conspiracy comes on Election Day in two weeks. Among the possible scenarios is that one candidate prematurely declares victory—which would undermine mail-in ballots that are counted more slowly because of security checks. In the event of such an announcement, Facebook says, it would apply a warning label to the candidate’s post on its site. Twitter’s policy gives room for either labeling or outright removing such a tweet. YouTube has no stated policy here. From a voters’ perspective, the best strategy is to follow verified state and local election officials on social media and on their websites. Read the full story. —Patrick Howell O’Neill
| | AOC’s Among Us livestream hints at Twitch’s political power What happened: Just before 9 pm on October 20, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch to play the hottest game in America: Among Us. She spent three and a half hours playing the game with popular Twitch streamers as well as fellow Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar. At one point Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch stream attracted about 430,000 viewers, making her the third most popular streamer on the site ever. Not bad for your first go. More important: The event offered a glimpse at the future of political campaigning. In the waning weeks of 2020’s volatile American election campaign, Democrats are increasingly turning to Twitch streams of popular video games to reach out to young voters and urge every last one of them to show up and vote. It’s not only Ocasio-Cortez. Just last week, in Animal Crossing, the Biden campaign launched its own island. Some Republicans have tried out Twitch too, but mostly the party scoffs at the Democrats’ activities. —Tanya Basu | It’s time to rethink the legal treatment of robots A suggestion: Whether AI is developed and used in good or harmful ways will depend in large part on the legal frameworks governing and regulating it. There should be a new guiding tenet to AI regulation, a principle of AI legal neutrality asserting that the law should tend not to discriminate between AI and human behavior, argues Ryan Abbott, professor of law and health sciences at University of Surrey. Why? AI does not pay taxes. That means when businesses automate, the government loses revenue, potentially hundreds of billions in the long-term. Though the tax laws were not designed to encourage automation, they favor AI over people because labor is taxed more than capital. A debate on taxing robots took off in 2017 then fizzled out, but the question is even more critical today as more companies seek to replace workers with machines during the pandemic.
The answer: Automation should not be discouraged on principle, but it is critical to craft tax-neutral policies to avoid subsidizing inefficient uses of technology and to ensure government revenue. The advantage of tax neutrality between people and AI is that it permits the marketplace to adjust without tax distortions. Businesses should then automate only if it will be more efficient or productive. And it would help to ensure that the benefits of AI do not come at the expense of the most vulnerable. Read the full story. | | The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Why the second covid-19 wave seems to be less deadly A significant aspect seems to be that doctors have a better idea of what to do this time round. ( FT) + In the past seven days, seven countries have reported over 100,000 new cases each. ( NYT $) + What we’ve learned about the virus—and what we still need to know. ( Nature) + The Oxford vaccine trial has been cleared to continue. ( BBC) + A rheumatoid arthritis drug doesn’t seem to do much to alleviate coronavirus patients’ symptoms. ( CNN) + Should we just let covid-19 spread among the young and healthy? ( The Economist $) + Could a global health app help to reopen borders? ( Reuters) 2 Activists are using facial recognition on the police 👮 Seems only fair. ( NYT $) + The police can probably crack into your phone. ( NYT $) 3 Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democratic voters, US officials say The operation appeared to exploit a vulnerability in the Proud Boys’ online network. ( WP $) + A cybersecurity company has found a hacker selling info on 186 million US voters. ( NBC) + Forget deepfakes. The real problem during this election is “cheapfakes.” ( Mashable) + The left and right in the US quite literally speak different languages. ( Wired $) + Hindu nationalist pro-Trump memes are circulating on WhatsApp. ( Slate) 4 We’re waiting to see if OSIRIS-REx got a sample from asteroid Bennu NASA researchers are optimistic, but we should know for sure by Monday. ( TR) + Vint Cerf has a plan for building out the internet—in space. ( Quanta) 5 The US needs to get more ambitious about offshore wind It has just one farm up and running, compared to 105 in Europe. ( Earther) 6 The unlikely appeal of tarot card readings Tiktok Well, nothing makes any sense anymore so sure, why not. ( Wired $) + TikTok has promised to do more to tackle hateful content. ( NBC) + Snapchat (remember that?) says it has 250 million daily users. ( BBC) 7 We were warned about Facebook Remember The Social Network? ( OneZero $) + Facebook Dating has finally arrived in Europe. ( TechCrunch) 8 How AITA is helping us work out morality in the internet age 🤔 Most people want to be good. Reddit is helping us to figure out when we’ve gone wrong. ( The Guardian) 9 Farewell Quibi The video streaming service has shut after just six months, blaming the pandemic. In reality it just never knew who or what it was for. ( WSJ $) 10 When Zoom goes horribly wrong 😬 Maybe just don’t get your genitals out during company conference calls, as a rule in life. ( Wired UK) | | “It’s painful and scary to see people you love and think should know better fall into these traps.” —Caroline Zepeda, a 30-year-old retail clerk in suburban Phoenix, tells the New York Times she keeps chiming in on family text chains to correct misinformation about covid-19, to no avail. | | | | | |
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