Marketplace Tech

Yesterday on the show, we talked with the fact-checkers trying to clean up Facebook. Today we're looking at how misinformation on Facebook affects democracy here in America and the social fabric of many other countries, from India to the Philippines to Myanmar. That's the topic of a two-part Frontline documentary called "The Facebook Dilemma," airing this week on PBS stations and online. It explores Facebook's growth and how it has responded to warnings that it can be used for propaganda, violence and to prop up authoritarian regimes. Molly Wood talks with James Jacoby, a producer of the documentary. (10/30/18)

We're a week away from midterm elections, and it's time to talk about social media. After the 2016 elections, it became clear that a lot of divisive, misleading and flat-out false information was being shared via Facebook. A study earlier this year said Facebook was responsible for the spread of more false news than any other platform. And once the bad information was out there, fact-checking couldn't do much to reverse its impact. After the 2016 election, Facebook partnered with a handful of news organizations to combat misinformation before it spread. Two years later, that still very much feels like an uphill battle. Angie Holan, the editor at PolitiFact — one of the outlets working with Facebook — told Molly Wood that official fact-checking partners get access to a special selection of potentially false information. (10/19/18)

This week in Brussels, Apple CEO Tim Cook lambasted what he calls the “data-industrial complex” created by the tech industry, calling for the United States to adopt comprehensive digital privacy regulations. Apple has stressed privacy as a selling point over the past couple of years, but this was a broadside at a couple of the other biggest tech firms in the world, namely Facebook and Google. It's worth noting that it's easy for Apple to tout privacy when the option it's offering is a closed ecosystem where the company controls every aspect of the technology. We dig into this in Quality Assurance, the Friday segment where we take a deeper look at a big tech story. Molly talked with Tony Romm, a tech policy reporter at The Washington Post. (10/26/18)

This week, we've been looking at election security. We talked about how voting machines are vulnerable to hacking, but an even easier target is voter registration databases. They’ve got the names, addresses and voting histories on all kinds of people. The Illinois' voter registration database was hacked in 2016. The attack exposed the data of more than 70,000 voters, but stealing that information wasn't necessarily the goal. Matt Dietrich, public information officer at the Illinois State Board of Elections, says the real goal was to hack away at the public’s confidence in the voting system. (10/25/18)

This week, we're talking election security and technology. Today's show is focused on old tech: paper. Remember the 2000 presidential election fiasco and the hanging chads, those tiny bits of paper that stuck to paper ballots? They confused vote counters so much the Supreme Court eventually had to decide the election. Well, in 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. It set new voting standards and gave election offices a bunch of money, mostly for new electronic voting machines. But within a few years, election security officials were asking for a good old-fashioned paper trail. Dana DeBeauvoir, who runs elections in Travis County, Texas, went on a yearslong quest to design her own electronic voting machine, complete with paper trail. (10/23/18)