Marketplace Tech

For Black History Month, we’re looking at the history of Blackness on the internet. Through most of that history, Black women in particular have been disproportionately harassed and abused. And then ignored when they tried to report that abuse or point out how tech might be misused to further oppress people online and offline. Ignored by tech companies and, it must be said, by journalists, too. Researcher and writer Sydette Harry wrote about this in Wired in a piece called “Listening to Black Women: The Innovation Tech Can’t Figure Out.” Molly asked her: “What could the internet look like right now if we had listened to Black women all along?”

Facebook last month announced it will stop recommending political and civic Groups to its users. The company said users want less politics in their feeds, and it has said it didn’t realize how much its Groups were spreading medical misinformation, were being used to radicalize people into QAnon and that they had become one of the home bases for the planners of the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. But this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company has had internal research for months about private groups being toxic, including some being full of calls for violence, yet they were  still recommended to Facebook users. Molly speaks with Renée DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who said Facebook’s push toward Groups created a cycle of radicalization.

A key part of adapting to climate change is prediction. In Louisiana, where water is eroding huge chunks of land every year, that means looking at how increasingly dangerous hurricanes move water and sand, and which areas might flood and which won’t. Monday we talked with Dutch scientists who make computer models that help make those predictions. The Water Institute of the Gulf is a research organization based in Baton Rouge that uses those Dutch models to mitigate erosion. Molly speaks with Justin Ehrenwerth, president and CEO of the Water Institute. He said the answers the institute is looking for can’t only come from computers.

Justin Ehrenwerth thinks a lot about where to put dirt. He leads the Water Institute of the Gulf, a nonprofit research group based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And one of the reasons he cares so much about dirt is that Louisiana is losing a lot of it. That means when Ehrenwerth and his team happen upon a mountain of dirt, they use computer models to figure out where the water is coming next so they can use the dirt, and the trees and wetlands planted on top of it, to prevent future erosion. And some of those models are developed by scientists in the Netherlands, which has been combating water for hundreds of years.

The trading app Robinhood restricted trading yesterday on GameStop, AMC, Nokia, BlackBerry and a few other ’90s favorite brands that have been targeted for boosting by the Reddit forum WallStreetBets. It’s allowing users to buy limited quantities again today. Other brokers limited trades as well. But at least one retail investor sued Robinhood, saying the company manipulated the market to protect the hedge funds that have lost a lot of money placing short bets on GameStop over the past several months. Those funds, of course, are able to keep trading where and whenever they like. A number of Democratic lawmakers are also calling for regulation, including U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents Silicon Valley.

If you follow financial markets, Reddit or video games, you probably know that all three of those things merged this week in a hail of fire and rocket emojis. The simplest possible version of what happened: Several big hedge funds shorted GameStop stock. That is, they bet it would go down. There’s a group on Reddit called WallStreetBets, and they weren’t having it. Many of them decided to buy GameStop, causing its share price to go up — way up. Now, GameStop is up over 1,00% this month. The hedge funds that shorted it are losing billions, and the WallStreetBets community has moved to buying Nokia and AMC stocks, and who knows what’s next. I spoke with Edward Ongweso, who has been following this for Vice.

With all the crises facing America, it’s surprising to find privacy so high on President Joe Biden’s agenda. But in his first week in office, he already appointed someone to negotiate with the European Union on how personal information is moved between Europe and the U.S. Last summer, the EU said the way data was being sent to the U.S. was insecure. In August, Ireland’s data regulators told Facebook to stop transferring its citizens’ data out of Europe. The issue is with the Irish High Court. In December, Facebook argued to that court that to stop data transfers would have “devastating and irreversible consequences” for its business. But this rule would obviously impact all kinds of commercial data and companies. And obviously, it’s a big deal for the new administration. Molly speaks with Jessica Lee, a partner with the law firm Loeb & Loeb.

On the first full day of his administration, President Joe Biden signed an executive order designed to ensure a data-driven response to COVID-19 and future public health threats. The administration already faces a big choice around COVID-19 data. In July, the Trump administration directed hospitals to stop sending data to the Centers for Disease Control, and instead to send it to the Department of Health and Human Services. And HHS used the data analysis company Palantir to harmonize the data. At first, it was a hot mess. But by the fall, the system was really working, and now is tracking hospitalizations really well. Molly speaks with Alexis Madrigal, who runs the COVID-19 Tracking Project at The Atlantic. He says the Biden administration should try to ignore the messy politics in favor of the good data.

Climate change is high on President Joe Biden’s agenda. Last week, on his first day in office, the United States rejoined the Paris climate accord. Reuters reports he’s expected to announce a climate order that will introduce new regulations and make climate change a national security priority. And Biden has tied economic recovery to climate investment — new jobs, new infrastructure and new funding. Molly spoke with Jay Koh, managing director of the private equity firm Lightsmith Group, which is focused on climate adaptation technology.

We as a country are trying to figure out what is true. Or more accurately, whether we can agree on what is true. In his inaugural speech this week, President Joe Biden called for a return to truth and an end to the deliberate spread of misinformation. That happens on social media platforms; in fact, it’s built into their business models, and misinformation influencers abound. But that’s not the only vector. Molly speaks with Kevin Roose, who covers social media for The New York Times.