>"The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the awesome power of the tech companies. The Markup will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does."
Also, anyone interested in the high-level question of how technology impacts society is likely to enjoy the only non-fiction book written by one of my favorite authors: The Blind Giant, by Nick Harkaway.[1]
Thanks for the suggestion! I've also been simultaneously reading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier, and The Efficiency Paradox by Edward Tenner, both of which seem to be pretty good reads so far.
Glad they mention misinformation! When AirBnb was spamming craiglist with non existing rentals just to capture your email and send you to their website back then it wasnt illegal per se, but was obviously highly immoral despite Y investment (i get that PG and corp doesnt care about morals when the buck is to be made; why wouldnt they invest in for example Uber for abortions if down the road such unicorn can be passed on for a cool billion bucks). Today for such misinformation Airbnb would be booted out of craiglist and probably fined by Fcc. In Europe this is covered by GDPR now, as the law strictly forbids saying one thing, and doing something totally different with captured information.
Five or so years ago I started a project to make it possible to crowdfund investigative journalism called Uncoverage. We launched with a review in the Times and things looked rosy. The premise: why should rich people - or editors - be the ones deciding what gets investigated? A couple of other projects have made a run at this too. The problem seems to be that the value proposition of “getting investigation” is too abstract for most people, and we’ve all been trained that information, and journalism, is free. The project flopped, as did its competitors like Beacon. The more recently launched Wikitribune is still going. The day we wake up as a society to the power of paying collectively for investigation into what may be hurting us instead of waiting for it to be done for us by the rich, nonprofits or thinly stretched newspapers will be a very important one. I wish I knew how to bring that about.
Well the thing is that somebody has to pay for it and there are pros and cons to every approach.
1. Reader Funded: Accountable directly to user contributions. Common with activists. Good for not being the but needs to raise interest. Sensationalizing is a temptation. Has an echochamber risk as passion sustains it even at the cost of rationality. The viewers must both care enough to support. See cases like Greenpeace trying to ban chlorine as the element of death.
2. Patron supplied: stable funding from a wealthy base. No need to try to sensationalize or generate a profit but control rests with them.
3. Government funded: similar to 2 but vulnerable to politics usually unless held as sacrosanct.
4. Ad funded: A hybrid system of 1 and 2 essentially. A broader base of supporters and only need to care enough to read to support but advertisers have influence.
5. Endowment based - a seed fund internally accountable only. Which means either nothing to keep itself in check or somebody able to exert influence.
Julia Angwin was one of the key people who shed a light on GNU Privacy Guard's precarious funding, helping OSS dev Werner Koch get donations from Stripe, FB, and others:
The World's Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going Broke (2015)
> [news articles will] start going up on the website in early 2019.
I really can't wait for this to take off sooner!
> Ms. Angwin compares tech to canned food, an innovation that took some time to be seen with more scrutiny.
Technology has become a boon in many ways and improved people's lives significantly, but we also seem to be heading toward a future that's completely controlled by a few powerful companies who won't (and after a certain point can't) stop being evil and making huge groups of people further disadvantaged because of said technology.
This site's emphasis on combining technologists with journalists is much needed.
I only hope it can survive the long term and that readers will support it. I for one will be looking forward to the content and supporting it monetarily or otherwise.
> The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the awesome power of the tech companies.
Shouldn't they prove "if" software discriminates before figuring out "how"? It seems like they already have a conclusion in mind which rarely produces quality results.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted for this. Although I'm inclined to agree with their starting position it's hard to deny that quality investigative journalism shouldn't be about proving a preexisting hypothesis.
If you read the article, they already proved that Facebook was selling illegal housing ads that were biased racially and they proved that a common parole software was also biased racially. I think it stands to reason there are plenty of other inadvertent, or otherwise, issues out there.
The book "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neill has plenty of other examples of how profiling algorithms often end up disadvantaging the disadvantaged.
True not all software is however there are some cases which are clearly bias laundering like sentencing algorithms that factor in garden size (UK sense). It is pretty clearly a spurious correlation and even if it was true would suggest requiring paroles be forced to live in areas with larger gardens as a rehabilitative measure - not to give a slap on the wrist to the rural and wealthy.
The comparison to canned food is interesting. It probably resonates with people better than comparing the tech industry to cigarettes. Few people now remember how beloved cigarettes were in their heyday.
I wonder if anybody could give me a link to read on canned food issues. I come from Russia and there were non in USSR and Russia after USSR dissolved, what were the issues in the US?
You could look at it from at least two angles: canned food became associated with lower economic classes, and people became concerned that much of the nutritional value of canned foods was lost when they were preserved.
Today people who see themselves as well-off and/or health-conscious may pride themselves on eating fresh (as well as local and in-season) foods, although it can be an expensive habit in places that don't have as much local agriculture. Restaurants will brag about how they don't use packaged food and how they made dishes from fresh ingredients.
If you go to supermarkets that cater to poorer people, you'll probably see comparatively more preserved foods, although this is far from the only factor and all supermarkets will certainly offer a significant selection of preserved foods.
This phenomenon is probably even more pronounced with "TV dinners", which when they were introduced were seen as impressive and futuristic and somewhat luxurious, and nowadays the original styles are seen as somewhat unhealthy and unappetizing and are often associated with poverty or a lack of leisure time (although there are also frozen prepared dishes that are marketed differently).
Chipotle isn't a very expensive restaurant but they know that being able to say or imply that they prepare most of their items on-site from fresh ingredients makes it look a lot fancier to visitors, compared to other restaurants that might use more canned or frozen ingredients.
No. Fresh produce is basically always cheaper than processed foods, and there are no places on the continent that lack access to 'agriculture'. Hawaii, way up in Northern Canada - maybe.
I buy a big bad of produce from the local market and it comes to like $12. A bag of arbitrary goods from the processed isles would be 5 times that.
The only dietary staple that's expensive is meat.
My grandparents grew up on farms, they were poor, they never saw or ate a 'TV dinner' why on earth would they?
TV dinners and canned foods are not about economic poverty.
People who run their own farms are usually not living in poverty. Poor: yes, poverty: no.
Eating well for really cheap takes some upfront resources that really impoverished people wouldn't have, like kitchen space, cooking equipment, a lot of freezer or shelf space, equipment for freezing or canning your own food, etc.
Those things are all fairly cheap, so poor people living on a farm can afford them since it will save them a lot of money in the long run, but truly impoverished people can't afford that even if it will save them money.
Produce is cheaper than processed food universally.
100% of domiciles in the United States have refrigerators, cooking spaces, and 'shelf space'. (Did you really just use 'shelf space' as an argument?)
The facts are clear - the argument of 'cost of eating well' doesn't make a whole lot of sense because with a marginal bit of thought, it's entirely possible to eat well and save money.
If you're talking 'homeless' - well that's another thing entirely.
I think there may be some issues with 'time' - with two working parents not normative, and possibly kids, people have less time.
I don't see how that makes economic sense. Preserved food should wind up cheaper than the highly perishable even with additional input costs barring truly massive differences - the surplus isn't lost and can build up and even if it the sale price minus processing costs is less per item something is more than nothing.
As for your grandparents they were poor farmers so of course labor and seeds were cheap for them - they already had the prerequisites by definition.
I'm really befuddled at some of the reasoning here.
You buy groceries, right?
Because if you do, and you look at the prices, well then it's pretty clear.
So this should be an exercise in understanding why that is the case, not trying to reason against the reality that produce is cheap.
Most produce, and most of the best foods are really cheap.
Even other things like lentils, beans, quinoa (a little more expensive), chick peas.
You just have to cook it.
As for your argument 'preserved foods should be cheaper' - which by the way is a reasonable point for someone who takes an academic perspective and doesn't actually buy groceries, the answer is simply that those 'massive costs' are indeed that massive. They include expensive things like 'metal' in the cans. Fuel for transportation. Branding. Marketing. Distribution. Supply chains. Etc.
Fresh food is accessible to everyone in America with any kind of domicile. The notion that poor people eat more processed foods due to economic situation doesn't hold a lot of water, though there might be some issues around the margins (again: time), but I suggest it's more simply due to bad behaviours and bad eating habits.
FYI: poor people are also much more likely to smoke - which is a prohibitively expensive activity. Granted - it's addictive - but still.
The thought of homemade garlic hummus with baked peppers has inspired me to go and do that literally right now. It'll cost me $1 ... but a lot of time which I don't really have ...
Edit: My grandparents did not have electricity or cars as children and did not have plumbing until middle age w/ several children. Does that count as 'poor'?
I'm a big fan of buying and processing my own vegetables too. Not a whole lot of work in peeling a carrot or dismembering my own broccoli.
But its only fair to note, organic vegetables can be way more expensive than processed regular (commercially grown and processed) vegetables. That's pretty much the definition of commercial - where production cost is the driving factor.
craig newmark is a generous, effective, and humorous philanthropist. he is behind an absurdist easter egg that you can find in the bathrooms of various nonprofits he's supported: a toilet dedicated to his memory.
I would love for someone to take an investigative look at how the stock market is not working for society in many ways. I can't help but feel that as the pressure of being a listed stock weighs on listed companies, their value sets change and not in ways beneficial to "greater" society.
I thought that was common sense but you're right. Some non-listed companies are like that by choice, to avoid all that encompasses being a public listed company.
The law requires that the executive board to provide value to shareholders (valuation or dividends). This usually translate in quarter reports with good numbers for greater valuations. It's known that this requirement and tradition skews boards to short term goals which can damage companies' future.
This is the good scenario, just a skew for short term goals.
The bad scenario is when the quarter reports look good my quasi-illegal number juggling and also legal practices which should be illegal like a company buying it's own stocks to please shareholders.
Currently this even worse because central banks interventions from low interest rates (it has been cheaper for a company to use debt buy it's own stocks than to invest) to central banks buying stocks and causing inflated valuations.
I eagerly await the announcement of Newmark funding an ambitious local news initiative. That would be a way to put critical information in front of millions of people.
This initiative may also be important, but it doesn't do anything to fill the void of local investigative reporting and press accountability created when Craigslist denuded local newsrooms.
One problem is that local news doesn't scale. Nothing really replaces local reporters developing sources and attending a lot of boring selectman, zoning, etc. meetings. I live in a small town that had a "labor of love" local paper for a while but it went out of business and now there's effectively no local coverage.
The proximate reason it went out of business is b/c Craigslist took all it's classified income. That's why (in addition to Craig Newmark's professed interest in journalism) I think Craigslist is the perfect organization to be funding reportage.
It's not my money, so clearly knowing how best to use it comes easily to me.
I can't wait to see their first publishing. With every article seemingly a sponsored piece nowadays, it's almost impossible to identify those with hidden agendas from reporters whose only interest is to fill up their quotas. I'm happy to see any news source that I can trust.
Mr. Newmark has put it correctly when he said "we're at an information war now". I have seen it first hand how information was reported incorrectly and intentionally on popular news websites just to attack and harm individuals. Our privacy is long gone as people spying on you just so they can sell your private life information to those who have interest. Information is literally being used as weapon nowadays so it's really time we need to wake up.
I hope they have enough power that will back them up as no doubt they will face relentless pressures from the big tech companies.
I'd like to see a serious investigation and discussion around the recommendation engines used to rank content added here.
Something is seriously wrong with youtube's algorithm, whether in the technical implementation or how it deals with spam/unintended consequences.
Kids watching cartoons get recommended messed up stuff (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/65rkxv/what_i... ), watch a single Jordan Peterson video and youtube will recommend you every fringe alt-right anti-feminism video it can find for months... It is toxic, causes real harm, normalizes extremist viewpoints and is shifting the Overton window in politics.
I'm not advocating censorship in any way, my concern is if algorithms/implementation bias what people see towards what will get the strongest reaction it is at least in a similar class of harm as censorship...
I have a hunch this is a natural consequence of using something like UCB (upper confidence bound) for contextual bandits to rank results when the feature vectors are using broad user / video clusters. Are explore vs exploit reinforcement learning algorithms used in production very susceptible to adversarial spam? Any evidence of fringe videos paying for viewbots etc...
> I'd like to see a serious investigation and discussion around the recommendation engines [...] Something is seriously wrong with youtube's algorithm
I had a pretty surreal experience last year. My youtube use is almost exclusively for learning; coding, maths, astronomy, science, and so on. Recommendations were never great for me, usually recommending videos I've already watched. At some point I inadvertently clicked a link to a teenage girl's vlog, and watched maybe 5 seconds of it before closing. Instantly half of my recommendations were teenage girl's vlogs. I then misclicked a video in recommendations a few days later, and it turned into exclusively teenage girl vlogs. A year later, it's slightly recovered, but I still get them.
I am pretty confident their recommendation would not be overrun with science if they inadvertantly click a video.
I like to watch penn and teller fool us videos and if I click on one, my entire feed is full of magicians for weeks. They need to adjust how quickly they read signals.
That said, I also watch numberphile and do get a bunch of like math suggestions like mathologer and v sauce.
Junk food/fast food might be a better villain than canned food: one could probably live perfectly healthily on canned food alone for decades if need be, but the same cannot really be said of junk food/fast food.
Can ProPuboica/MarkUp investigate how Apple never comes under the scanner of anti trust regulators either in the US or EU, while Google, Microsoft get fingered for far less. For instance, Android, which is open source, has been fined by the EU, while EU app developers have consistently complained against Apple's app store authorization and related policies onto deaf ears.
How much do you think it costs to employ 30-40 of the following people for 5 or 10 years?
“reporters and junior reporters, data journalists, researchers, copy editors, line editors, and an assistant managing editor. Graphics editors and designers, a social media editor, a reach/engagement editor, a partnerships lead, developers, and an analytics lead. A Chief Revenue Officer, a Chief of Finance and Administration, and a person to lead business development.”
And during that time there's no revenue? I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted: as a publisher of multiple online and offline projects it seems an extravagant amount for a publication that has a very narrow scope.
It's a non-profit, so probably not much if any advertising, and they'll likely be drawing a lot from ProPublica's model in terms of organization, impact, and growth. ProPublica's annual expenses were over $12 million in 2016, and if you're interested you can get a rough breakdown of where that goes in their 990:
ProPublica has a much, much wider brief, which should translate into why it receives $16 million in annual contributions. OTOH, I can't see how a site that covers a technology niche can support that level of ongoing contributions.
My 'affiliation' with NewsBlocks (I'm the founder and CEO actually) has zero to do with this topic. Are you suggesting that you would add another downvote simply because it is an ICO?
I know you’re being downvoted for snark but I’m going to take a shot at answering this anyway.
In a world where Value is measured in Value in news these days is entirely dictated by the Cost By Impression there’s a huge gap in getting news that’s hugely valuable for only a small audience. In this case it may be an audience of one but he’s apparently willing to both fund the work and share the findings and that’s better than nothing. Perhaps it’s better to ask why people aren’t willing to pay a few bucks to know where their data is going everyday and why we need a single benefactor to make up the difference?
The expense is the investigations and reporting not the website. That's part of why news organizations have been so hard hit. As soon as they publish information, someone else can republish it for nearly no cost.
I knew it. You're involved with cryptocurrency and equating this to an ICO. It's naive how people in blockchain think startups don't need much cash to build a product.
And you're trying to raise $33m in an ICO? The hypocrisy is just stunning.
No, my comment is based primarily on the narrow scope of the publication, which to my mind, as a lifelong publisher of online and offline media, seems excessive. If they were using an ICO to raise the same amount of money for the same project scope I'd also think that excessive.
As for my own project, we have a much wider goal (to convert all the world's news -- past and present -- into data that can be used as a platform for applications) that obviously requires far more investment than a niche content site.
Like someone else said it costs big money to hire people and retain them over 10 years.
They have a reasonable startup objective where as your startup is taking advantage of naive investors that want to invest in X meets blockchain.
None of the copy on your site communicates that you have even a basic understanding of blockchain. You can't throw blockchain at "fake news" and expect a different outcome.
>your startup is taking advantage of naive investors that want to invest in X meets blockchain.
False. Please tell me another technology that will allow us to build a decentralised, failure-tolerant, censorship- and tamper-resistant archive of all the world's news, that has been converted into data and independently verified, and that anyone can use to create news applications.
Sounds great, can't wait. Just hope it doesn't follow the path of the Intercept: starting out as a legitimate source of in-depth governments exposees, only to turn into a run-of-the-mill liberal rag that hires lazy college graduates and unrepentant race-baiters.
>"The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the awesome power of the tech companies. The Markup will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does."
Also, anyone interested in the high-level question of how technology impacts society is likely to enjoy the only non-fiction book written by one of my favorite authors: The Blind Giant, by Nick Harkaway.[1]
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/970091634