Fake News Is Not the Only Problem

Bias, propaganda, and deliberately misleading information are much more prevalent and do more damage.

Reality check: I blame the media.

For months I have been concerned about how what I was seeing on the ground and in various networks was not at all aligned with what pundits were saying. I knew the polling infrastructure had broken, but whenever I told people about the problems with the sampling…

Media: End Reporting on Election Polls

We now know that the US election polls were wrong. Just like they were in Brexit. Over the last few months, I’ve told numerous reporters and people in the media industry that they should be wary of the polling data they’re seeing, but I was generally ignored and…

Transparency ≠ Accountability

In the next ten years we will see data-driven technologies reconfigure systems in many different sectors…

Ethics review for pernicious feedback loops

\reading Weapons of Math Destruction\

“These Days, Everyone Needs a Side Hustle”

Pew Data Uncovers a Gig Economy Born of our Precarious Times

Uber has TV ads now. The one I see most often is called “Get Your Side Hustle On.” It opens with a thirty-something black male…

Culture of Harassment

In the last two weeks, we’ve seen numerous examples of hate speech and harassment documented and shared on social media. It’s devastating to imagine how many other attacks are occurring that are less visible. We are collectively bearing witness to a form of meanness and cruelty that is by…

Phones, but No Papers

New Vulnerabilities in On-demand Work

Emerging forms of on-demand low-wage work done through online labor platforms like Uber, Postmates, and Amazon Mechanical Turk have raised questions about new kinds of risks faced by low-wage workers in…