Good morning! Today: Facebook and Twitter face an impossible choice over the Biden story, Trump boosts QAnon just as Congress is warned about it, and how democracies can reclaim power over the digital realm. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. | Facebook and Twitter’s no-win situation over Biden
What’s happening: After months of experts expecting another hack-and-leak operation in the lead up to Election Day, a strange story appeared in the New York Post on Wednesday. It claimed to maybe contain emails belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, that could possibly indicate that Hunter introduced his father, then Vice President, to a Ukrainian energy executive. Despite a headline claiming it was a “smoking gun,” the story is full of questionable sources and unverified facts. The whole thing smacks of a disinformation campaign. One thing worth noting up front is that Senate Republicans found no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden regarding his son’s overseas work.
Moving on: But the story is no longer the story. Instead, allegations of censorship by social media platforms have become the talking point. Soon after the Post published, Twitter and Facebook took action over what they saw as a piece of deliberate disinformation. Their moves to limit sharing meant that the relatively minor splash made by the initial article was followed by a bigger wave of outrage. No good choices: “There were just not a lot of good options here for them,” said Bret Schafer, a media and digital disinformation researcher at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “If they let it run wild and let their platforms serve as accelerants like 2016 and the media breathlessly covered it without analysis, they would have been hammered. If they did what they did, we’ve seen the response and it’s turned into an issue of censorship and political bias.” And so this incident fits squarely into what we’ve seen for the rest of the 2020 presidential campaign. Domestic disinformation is real, it’s happening now at scale, and it’s a much more complicated issue to fix legally, morally, and politically than foreign influence campaigns. Read the full story. —Patrick Howell O’Neill
| | Congress was warned over QAnon. Hours later, Trump boosted it. The news: In a virtual US Congressional hearing hosted by the House Intelligence Committee yesterday, representatives heard urgent, alarming warnings about the state of truth, political fragmentation and spread of conspiracy theories, specifically QAnon. Later that day during a televised town hall meeting, President Trump said he knew “nothing” about QAnon, before saying that he agreed with one of its central beliefs. Who was there: The committee, headed by Democrat Adam Schiff, heard from four disinformation experts: Joan Donovan (a regular contributor to Technology Review), Nina Jankowicz, Cindy Otis, and Melanie Smith. They discussed the proliferation of malign actors and misinformation around the election campaign, noting that they were the result of largely domestic forces. No Republicans attended the hearing. In fact, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee have been boycotting almost all meetings for months. What happened next: At a town hall event later that evening—replacing the second debate, which was cancelled amid concerns over the President’s recent covid-19 diagnosis—Trump was asked to state that QAnon’s fake theory that senior Democrats are part of a satanic operation to abuse and traffic children was not true. At first he claimed "I know nothing about QAnon," before adding that "I do know they are very much against pedophilia.” Read the full story. Read next: YouTube has banned QAnon (after playing a leading role in its rise.) —Tate Ryan-Moseley | How democracies can reclaim digital power Technology companies provide much of the critical infrastructure of the modern state and develop products that affect fundamental rights. Search and social media companies, for example, have set de facto norms on privacy, while facial recognition and predictive policing software used by law enforcement agencies can contain racial bias. In the latest episode of our podcast Deep Tech, Marietje Schaake argues that national regulators aren’t doing enough to enforce democratic values in technology, and it will take an international effort to fight back. Schaake—a Dutch politician who used to be a member of the European parliament and is now international policy director at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center—joins our editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, to discuss how decisions made in the interests of business are dictating the lives of billions of people. | | The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 US coronavirus cases have soared past eight million Infections are rising across the entire country as temperatures cool. ( Reuters) + Deaths in Europe could far outstrip their April peak without effective countermeasures, warns the WHO. ( The Guardian) + How colleges have learned to cope. ( Axios) 2 How contact tracing can work in a care home Carers just have to tread carefully around complex ethical issues like privacy, autonomy, and safety. ( The Verge) 3 A radical new technique lets AI learn with practically no data This could make AI more accessible to companies that have been hampered by the field’s data requirements. ( TR) 4 Facebook doesn’t enforce its own rules A test found it failed to remove three-quarters of rule-breaking content when flagged. ( WSJ $) + Facebook is giving a platform to a group of shady Ukranians who are trying to interfere in the US election. ( Buzzfeed) 5 How officials are protecting the election from ransomware hackers The concerns are genuine, but the hack wouldn't damage the vote as much as the disinformation that would result. ( TR) + Democrats tweet more than Republicans, but Trump dominates everything. ( Protocol) 6 Conditions for Amazon Ring call center workers in the Philippines are awful This sort of cheap sweatshop labor is probably more prevalent in the tech sector than you’d like to hope. ( NBC) 7 Speech recognition software doesn’t work for everyone A study found the main programs are twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers compared to white ones. ( Scientific American) 8 A spacecraft just caught this fresh new look at Venus Interest in the planet is at an all-time high after a possible sign of biological activity was detected in its clouds. ( TR) 9 Finally, it’s the QR code’s time to shine They’ve been around for over 20 years. All it took for them to go mainstream was a global pandemic. ( Quartz) 10 Tune stuck in your head? Hum it to Google 🎵 And its AI might be able to work out what it is. ( The Next Web) | | “I think for a lot of people there was a feeling of discomfort when it came down to: ‘Am I going to be unconscious? Am I going to do something embarrassing? Am I going to shit myself?’” —Melissa Mayr, brand manager for PlayaMedia, tells Sifted how colleagues felt about the prospect of a retreat where they’d all be invited to take the psychedelic drug Ayahuasca. | | | | | |
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