Dating apps fail to protect some users from predators, Mother Jones finds

In the past week or so, Nvidia’s stock finally encountered the law of gravity — what goes up must eventually come down, at least a little bit. And we look under the hood of artificial intelligence companies that aren’t necessarily making headlines. Plus, the Supreme Court ruled against Republican-led states that accused the federal government of coercing social media companies into suppressing content. But first, major music labels, including Universal, Sony and Warner, are suing two startups that produce AI-generated music. The labels accuse Suno and Udio of using copyrighted works scraped from the internet to train their AI models. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her takes on these stories in this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

It feels like eons ago, but during a town hall on violence in America in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton took to MTV to reach the nation’s youth. Clinton’s openness to MTV and what The New York Times called “other unconventional media” had helped pave his path to the White House two years earlier. Fast-forward to today, and even reluctant politicians use TikTok to reach younger voters — President Joe Biden is no exception. His first post came just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl. We invited Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, and Joshua Scacco, professor of political communication and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to discuss the evolution of political messaging with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali. Scacco said Clinton’s MTV moment informed how future presidents, including his successor, George W. Bush, have engaged with Americans.

This week, we’ve been taking stock of how tech has both helped and harmed Americans trying to get abortions in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After the Dobbs decision, some experts warned consumers that menstrual tracking apps would provide a means of surveilling abortion seekers. There was even a social media campaign on what was then Twitter advising people to delete their period trackers. But it’s turned out that the threat to privacy isn’t limited to those apps. Other digital data can actually be more likely to reveal an illegal abortion. That’s according to Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that everyday consumer apps generate sensitive data that can be used for abortion surveillance.

After the U.S. Supreme Court took away the federal right to abortion two years ago, telehealth has helped provide ongoing access, including to people in states where abortion is now banned. That was our subject Monday. Now we are looking into apps that link patients with abortion providers. Julie F. Kay, executive director at the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that digital privacy protections are far from equal across these services.

Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court ruled that abortions are not constitutionally protected in the U.S., a decision that would draw protests across the country. Since then, 14 states have outlawed abortions. Still, some people in those states have been able to cut through barriers to get abortions via telehealth, according to a recent report from the research project #WeCount. Usually, this requires a virtual visit with a telehealth care provider. The provider assesses the patient and gets their information, then can mail them mifepristone and misoprostol, which aid in ending a pregnancy. The Supreme Court preserved access to mifepristone in a ruling this month, which means it can still be prescribed and mailed to patients. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed the increase in telehealth abortions with Ushma Upadhyay, professor of OB-GYN and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a coauthor of the #WeCount report.

Big Tech subscription services are once again in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission, nonprofits with links to OpenAI are becoming less transparent, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is urging Congress to require warning labels on social media. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired magazine, for this week’s Tech Bytes: Week in Review

Picture this: The year is 2014. The song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams is playing on every top 100 station, and the Ellen DeGeneres star-studded Oscars selfie has just “broken Twitter.” As all of this is happening, a bunch of content creators in certain corners of social media are about to start making a whole lot of money. Culture reporter Steffi Cao recently wrote in The Ringer that 2014 was the year that shaped the internet we know today. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to her about what happened online 10 years ago.

Shortly after the Union won the Civil War in 1865, a union major general issued an order: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” June 19, known as Juneteenth, has long been celebrated by African Americans. But in 2020, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Juneteenth took the internet by storm. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Brandon Ogbunu, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, who wrote about that moment for WIRED back then. He revisited what was happening at that time a year before Juneteenth became a national holiday.

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited the headquarters of Nautilus Biotechnology to meet with Parag Mallick, the company’s founder and chief scientist, who is also a magician and an associate professor at Stanford University. Since 2016, Mallick and his team have been building a machine that they say will revolutionize biomedicine by unlocking the secrets of the “dark proteome.”

Brazil has densely populated low-income communities living on the outskirts of many cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Ordering online shopping just isn’t an option for residents as these towns don’t have an official address, but that may be changing. The BBC’s Ben Derico reports.

In this episode, I interview Kalim Kalla, the Brand Manager at M&M Products.  We delve into his journey from selling vuvuzelas after attending the World Cup to managing large brands at M&M Products.

We discuss how he strives to create brands that echo his family's motto, 'beauty with love,’ by giving people a sense of beauty through self love. Kalim shares how he nurtures a product's lifecycle, ensuring sustainability and quality ingredients while maintaining the efficacy of the product. He provides insights into his unique process of running marketing campaigns, utilizing the power of user-generated content to showcase the impact of his products. We discuss the crucial role of studying your competitors, products, and consumer behaviors regarding product design and sales. And we discover how Kalim taps into his creative flow state by engaging with other brands in the retail space and how he values consistency and persistence in pursuing his goals. Tune in for this amazing conversation that might change your perspective on how to create and sell successful brands!

Bio

Alejandro Roark is Executive Director of the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership (HTTP) in Washington, DC. HTTP is a national non-profit that convenes an intersectional coalition of national Latino organizations committed to promoting access, adoption, and the full utilization of technology and telecommunications resources by the Hispanic/Latino/a community in the United States. HTTP works at the intersection of ethics, technology, and public policy to educate, advocate, and serve as a national voice for Hispanics/Latinos in technology and telecommunications policy.

As Executive Director, Alejandro leads a strategic planning process with HTTP member organizations to set the national Latino tech policy agenda that creates opportunities for national, and local advocates to engage with Congress and the Administration to advocate for inclusive public policy that promotes civil rights protections, equitable access to broadband, and increased diversity in media and tech workforces. HTTP works to extend Latino priorities in the following policy areas: broadband adoption, spectrum allocation, consumer privacy, open internet, intellectual property, and diversity & Inclusion within the technology workforce.

With nearly a decade of experience working at the local, state and national level, Alejandro has dedicated his career to the elimination of structural inequities across LGBT inclusion, racial and social justice, and civil rights policies, through community power building, story-telling, equitable resource allocation and by creating pathways for a more diverse workforce.

Alejandro applies his skills and leadership to the examination of the ethical and social dimensions of technological change including the attention economy, data privacy, algorithmic decision-making, and artificial intelligence to ensure that Latino priorities are integrated into the policy-making process.

Prior to his position with HTTP, Alejandro oversaw the tech policy portfolio which included the planning and execution of its annual Latinx Tech Summit, for LULAC National, the nation's oldest nation’s country’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization. In addition to leading the corporate social responsibility team where he worked with fortune 500 companies to develop, implement, and scale nationwide community programs and coordinating LULAC’s Corporate Alliance. Alejandro has also served as the founding executive director for Utah’s first and only Mexican Cultural Arts organization, as well as the associate director for Equality Utah where he managed the region’s public relations systems, community outreach programming, and state, local, and federal advocacy work.

Resources

Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership

Intro

Hey everyone. Here we are on Election Day as purveyors of misinformation and intimidation use both traditional and digital tactics to keep voters away from the polls. The backdrop to this, of course, has been the Supreme Court’s roll-back of the Voting Rights Act, most notably its Shelby County v. Holder decision, in which it essentially neutered the VRA’s preclearance requirement -- the provision requiring state and local governments to get federal approval before making changes to their voting laws and practices. 

Section 5 is still there. The Court just ruled the 40-year-old data Congress relied on to decide which states are subject to the requirement were too-old.

Then, as Laurence Tribe wrote in Lawfare last week,  we have the current, conservative majority of the Supreme Court, with the exception of Chief Justice Roberts, suggesting state legislatures should be the highest authority in each state when it comes to each state’s voting laws, even above the highest state court charged with enforcing each state’s constitution. 

Social media has not played as dominant a role in shaping public opinion as it did in 2016. But that doesn’t mean state actors and others aren’t still using it. And the Washington Post reports bad actors are using robocalls, in Michigan specifically, to explicitly tell people to stay away from the polls. The FCC empowered carriers to block robocalls before they reach consumers. But apparently they dropped the ball here. 

The New York Times warned the public this morning about potential rigged voting machines, tossed ballots, and intimidating federal agents, Yes, this is 2020. And yes, we are still fighting this battle. In this election though the electorate cast their votes by mail in record numbers. So we are seeing this shift across the political spectrum to more analog tacticseither to suppress votes or to preserve them.

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We’ll see what happens. I’m tuning it out--at least until tomorrow. I don’t think I’m even gonna watch the results come in. I’ll wake up tomorrow and see what happened.

But my guest today is Alejandro Roark, Executive Director of the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Parntership here in Washington. Previously, Alejandro led LULAC’s tech portfolio. He was also the founding Executive Director of the state of Utah’s first and only Mexican Culutral Arts Organization. Alejandro Roark!

In this insightful episode of "Mastering Your Google Business Profile: A User-Generated Content Guide," delve into the complexities of managing the content that users can add to your business profile on Google. This episode is a beacon for business owners navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of online information management.

Our expert duo, Mark A Preston and Mike Blumenthal, renowned specialists in local SEO, offer their seasoned perspectives on how to maintain the integrity of your business profile in the face of external contributions. They shed light on Google's ambitious goal to create the most up-to-date listings, achieved through the collective effort of user updates. This strategy, while innovative, is not without its pitfalls, and our experts are here to provide the strategies needed to rise above them.

Understand why Google permits public interactions with your business listing and learn how to use this feature to your advantage. Mark and Mike discuss the delicate balance of benefiting from authentic user-generated content while filtering out what doesn't serve your business's image.

The conversation pivots to practical solutions, highlighting indispensable tools like White Spark and Plepper, which act as vigilant sentinels, alerting you to any changes in your profile. This is particularly crucial for businesses with a wide geographic spread, as monitoring becomes an increasingly formidable task.

Through the lens of these experts, gain a clearer understanding of how to discern and decide which user contributions to dispute and which to allow, ensuring your Google Business Profile remains an accurate and beneficial representation of your business.

Tune in to this episode to empower yourself with the know-how to turn potential user-generated chaos into a harmonized symphony of curated content that drives your business forward.

CNN openly calls for a social crackdown on Fox News; Team Biden gets more and more radical; and Trump’s impeachment team falls apart.

Get your copy of "How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps" here: https://utm.io/uHjV

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