It is encouraging to read that in his recent interview for The Atlantic Barack Obama identified the new malevolent information architecture facilitated by Facebook as the “single biggest threat to our democracy,” and to see growing appreciation of this threat among the Senators asking Mark Zuckerberg pointed questions about his company.

Now that this problem has finally caught the public attention, we have to have a serious conversation about the solutions. …

This is the badge post my friend and colleague Adin Rosenberg wrote before leaving Facebook. He originally posted it on his public Facebook timeline. Now that he has deleted his Facebook account, this excellent post needs a new home. With Adin’s gracious permission, I am sharing it here.

Tomorrow, October 6, will be my last day at Facebook.

I arrived at Facebook as a software engineer nearly six years ago, excited to move to New York City and join a group of talented, hard-working and good people. These past years working on Messenger and Instagram have helped me grow personally and professionally, and I look back at them with many fond memories. …

Facebook just rolled out a new metric that is supposed to explain the company’s apparent bias in favor of conservative content (https://about.fb.com/news/2020/11/what-do-people-actually-see-on-facebook-in-the-us/).

Well, rolled out is a bit of an overstatement. Instead of historic data and a way to track it in the future, all we got so far is a single snapshot of what it looks like right now, and even that snapshot still shows the same bias clear as day.

Still, a debate about how exactly to measure reach would be a useful distraction from the things Facebook said and done recently that can’t be explained by metrics:

1. After requesting ranking algorithm tweaks to reduce distribution of progressive news publishers (https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/10/facebook-mother-jones/), Facebook policy leaders protected conservative partners from misinformation strikes (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-arbiter-truth-fact-check-mark-zuckerberg) …

NYT is right to point out that Facebook’s recent announcement on US elections doesn’t go far enough, but their take missed some less obvious but very important problems.

Most obvious problem is that one week of political ads silence before the election is not nearly enough, particularly in a year when more people than usual are going to vote early because of COVID.

And it’s not even real silence, the word “new” in the press-release indicates that Facebook will continue to run the ads that will have been created before that week.

Also obviously, Facebook is not that accurate at labeling ads as political, and most of misinformation on their many platforms spreads through organic engagement that is often only ignited or amplified — but not powered exclusively — by inauthentic actors. …

With 10 weeks to go before the elections, it’s time time refresh my Senate guide (https://medium.com/@angdraug/tactical-voters-guide-to-us-senate-bf84fee31fa).

I’ll start with the good news: Alaska and South Carolina are in play, too!

In Alaska, a commercial fisherman and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Al Gross has won the Democratic and Independent primary with a massive lead and is going to run as Independent with a unambiguously progressive platform against the Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.

In South Carolina, Jaime Harrison has done much better than anyone expected, and changed the state from likely Republican to a toss-up. …

Сила и надежда на успех продолжающихся в Беларуси протестов происходят из одного источника: единства между беларусами разных городов и деревень, разных профессий и социальных слоёв, разных политических убеждений. Именно единство побуждает беларусов улыбаться друг другу на улицах и делает возможным распространение децентрализованного протеста по всей стране. Единство и вера во всенародную поддержку позволили рабочим сформировать стачкомы и начать организовывать забастовки.

Это единство стало возможным благодаря тому, что цели, заявленные объединённым штабом, просты и очевидны, а методы протеста, предлагаемые каналом NEXTA — ненасильственные и не вызывают разногласий об их допустимости.

Консенсус о целях и средствах — уникальная и бесценная особенность беларусского политического дискурса 2020 года, которая должна быть сохранена при любых обстоятельствах, несмотря ни на гестаповские пытки, ни на угрозу вторжения с востока. …

On August 19, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies organized a seminar on the potential democratic breakthrough in Belarus, featuring Michael McFaul, Francis Fukuyama, Anna Grzymala-Busse, and Kathryn Stoner. These are my notes for what I see as the key takeaways.

Non-violence is still the only way. State violence always pushes protests towards radicalization, but every expert on the panel urged for continued restraint. Protests that didn’t turn violent have always had much greater chance of success. Peaceful transition of power makes it much less likely that the country backslides into authoritarianism after a democratic breakthrough.

It is essential to build broad coalitions, prioritize procedure over policy, and avoid splitting into factions. At the same time, decentralization is a strength. Protest should not depend on a single leader or a handful of leaders. …

Like every political surprise, the snowballing protest in Belarus now seems to have been inevitable. It wasn’t. Like every dictatorship before it, Lukashenka’s regime still appears invincible. It isn’t. Now of all times it is essential for Americans to understand the nuance and the context of what’s happening in Belarus. This could be America. This can still happen in America.

The reports from Belarus are blood-curdling. A photo of a five year old girl with a head injury, with a comment that a police vehicle rammed the car she was in. A video of riot police pinning a 15-year old boy to the ground and threatening him with a flash-bang grenade held to his face. Conflicting reports of a man dying from burns after the same kind of flash-bang exploded next to him: the government claims the man tried to throw it at the police, protesters say police shot at him (update: a video has turned up later that shows the victim bleeding and falling after getting shot in the chest at close range). A video of a man ran over by an armored mobile jail vehicle. …