Good morning, Q-MHI readers!
America’s next election is just a year away, and the country is still picking up the pieces from the last one.
This coming week, lawyers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google will tell the US Congress and the public how their platforms were used by Russian accounts to spread fear, hate, and division before last November’s presidential vote. While they’re testifying in the US, what they’re saying should resonate from Europe to Africa to Asia, where local elections have been marred by foreign propaganda spread on social media.
We’re at the early stages of the US grappling with how social media may have been weaponized by a foreign government. The next step after companies try to publicly defend themselves should be the unsettling process of examining how your relatives, your neighbors, your high school classmates, and yes, even you yourself, might have been targeted or manipulated.
But there’s no way to do that. These information giants are unilaterally disappearing the evidence—pulling down whole pages and eliminating accounts linked to Russian users. When news organization have unearthed individual examples, social media companies are wiping them from the internet. Some members of Congress are pushing the companies to make these messages public, but they’re resisting.
These companies are also hoping to avoid heavy regulation, by writing new rules themselves. Twitter said this week it would stop taking advertising dollars from Russian state media, and Facebookrolled out new political ad guidelines that include identifying who they reached, and keeping an archive of federal election ads that goes back years. (That won’t include the Russian propaganda targeted to US voters in 2016, however—the archive starts now. )
Trying to eliminate the evidence of wrongdoing while strengthening rules to prevent it in the future is an understandable corporate reaction. But it doesn’t take into account how intertwined Facebook, Twitter, and Google are in voter’s lives. Americans need to be able to see for themselves what was used to try to divide us, or else it could happen again.
The next test is coming fast—there are 34 Senate seats and all 435 in the House up for grabs in Nov. 2018.—Heather Timmons (Q-MHI).
WEEKEND WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
What’s being said about Robert Mueller’s indictments in the Trump-Russia probe
FIVE THINGS ON Q-MHI WE ESPECIALLY LIKED
One school can teach a nation. A poor, multi-ethnic school on the eastern fringes of London has overcome austerity and changing demographics to produce some of the nation’s top-performing students. Aamna Mohdin returned to the school, which she attended as a refugee from war-torn Somalia, and asks, might my school hold lessons for how a post-brexit Britain can heal its fractured communities?
The White House held a fancy party. Heather Timmonsreported on disgruntlement over the $8,000 party the White House held for its homeland security nominee. As a direct result, a Congressional committee has called for an investigation.
What should a robot wear in the 21st century? You might think JiaJia, a Chinese-built robot, would sport black leather, Lycra, form-fitting jumpsuits, and synthetics. But the astonishingly true-to-life humanoid instead donned white embroidered robes and an elaborate hairstyle in an exhibit in Shanghai this spring. While she didn’t impress AI experts and techies, she left many in China breathless at her beauty. Tripti Lahiri dives deep on the theory behind the robot’s fashion choices, and unearths a puzzling fact: Robots in Asia have human stylists.
This Twitter account hunts for bots that push political opinions.Keith Collins built a service to ferret out the social media astroturfing that Russians and others used to influence the 2016 US presidential election. That loving mother from Langhorne, PA who just wants to see a better world for her grandchildren? Fake news.
FIVE THINGS ELSEWHERE THAT MADE US SMARTER
Desperate cancer patients are making their own miracle drugs at home. When out of medical options from their providers, some terminally-ill cancer patients have started making their own immunotherapies in borrowed lab space, Kristen Brown writes for Gizmodo. Most physicians agree that making these sometimes dangerous DIY drugs at home probably won’t work—but they can’t do anything to stop them from trying.
War games. How many nukes will the US have left in the event it needs to decimate North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and others at the same time? In a striking visual presentation, the New York Times Editorial Board explores this grim scenario by illustrating the incredible size of the US nuclear battery through the context of destruction. It’s display that hits you with cinematic punch: Is this really what it take for Americans to feel safe?
Free-range humans will save the planet. All manner of mammals, birds, trees, insects, and microbes have become stronger because of contact with migrating homo sapiens, contrarian scientist Chris Thomas tells Nautilus for a revealing Q and A in which he posits that the path to true conservation will be cleared only when we stop cordoning off nature from people.
One of the wealthiest families in the US made a fortune on the opioid crisis. The epidemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands since 2000, was created in part by a massive marketing effort by Purdue Pharma, which produces OxyContin. The New England-based company is owned by the Sackler family, which has donated millions to medical groups, the arts, and universities. Patrick Radden Keefe, writing for the New Yorker (paywall) explains the complicated history of a family that has been so generous, yet is also tied to gross addiction and death.
A tale of two economies. Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio argues on LinkedIn that the plight of the middle class American is unknowable via “average” statistics. He cuts the economy in two to prove it, and what follows is a grim picture—the bottom 60%, the vast majority of Americans, see flat or falling household incomes, are unlikely to save or contribute to retirement accounts, and die at increasing rates. “The average man,” meanwhile, sees flat mortality, rising wealth and income, and more and more spending on education. Why are the numbers so misleading? The top 40% now have 10 times as much wealth as the bottom 60%.
Q-MHI 
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Vice President Pence will participate in tax reform meetings with conservative leaders.
MHI 
