Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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AOC’s Among Us stream topped 435,000 concurrent viewers
Last night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went live on Twitch to stream Among Us with a handful of superstar streamers. The purpose of the stream, which drew a massive crowd, was to get out the vote as we head into the general election.
At its peak, the stream drew a concurrent viewership of 435,000+ people, and that’s just on AOC’s Twitch . Other streamers that were in the game, such as Pokimane, HasanAbi and DrLupo, also had their own viewerships tuned in to the game.
For context, this puts AOC’s stream in the top five of most concurrent viewers on a Twitch stream. The record is still held by Ninja’s Fortnite stream with Drake, which hit more than 600,000 concurrent viewers.
Among Us has been around for several years, but only enjoyed top-tier popularity over the past few months as streamers flock to the game. Among Us is a relatively simple game, but gives players the chance to truly show off their personality.
Here’s how it works:
Between four and 10 players join a drop ship. The majority of those players are crewmates who have tasks to complete on the map — these tasks are simple, puzzle-based mini games. The remaining minority of players are impostors, who sabotage and kill crewmates. When a dead body is found and reported, the whole group gets into voice chat to discuss who might be the killer. It’s a bit like a murder mystery party combined with a video game.
There is some irony in the fact that politicians (Rep. Ilhan Omar joined AOC) jumped into a game where lying is a primary skill. In fact, AOC mentioned before gameplay ever started that she was very nervous because she’s terrible at lying.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time that AOC has come to younger voters where they are. The congresswoman played Animal Crossing in May and visited players’ islands.
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AOC aims to get out the vote by streaming Among Us with pokimane and HasanAbi
We are about seven months into a pandemic and just two weeks from a presidential election. At this point, surprises are a dime a dozen. So it should feel very 2020 that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is about to stream Among Us, the hit game of 2020, on Twitch alongside mega-streamer pokimane and political analyst HasanAbi.
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted yesterday that she was looking for people to play the popular game with in an effort to get out the vote, noting that she’s never played before but that it looks fun.
Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote? (I’ve never played but it looks like a lot of fun)
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 19, 2020
Streamer pokimane, who has 6 million followers on Twitch and whose YouTube videos regularly see more than 1 million views each, responded to the tweet with a figurative raised hand.
Let’s do it! I’ll set up and account and get some streaming equipment today
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 19, 2020
HasanAbi, a very popular political commentator on Twitch, who has more than 380,000 Twitter followers, also chimed in to the conversation saying that they’re already making a lobby. It wasn’t long before Rep. Ilhan Omar raised her hand, too.
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 19, 2020
A good game of Among Us (imagine that someone mixed a fairly basic multiplayer video game with a murder mystery party) usually requires 10 players, so the other six players are still TBD. But the Verge reports that a handful of other streamers (such as DrLupo, Felicia Day, Greg Miller, James Charles, and Neekolul) also lined up to play with AOC.
According to Ocasio-Cortez, the stream is all about getting out the vote. And this isn’t the first time that she’s used video games to connect with her followers. AOC opened up her DMs to all 6.8 million of her followers back in May to let them send her an invite to their island, and she visited them.
Millennial voters (and Gen Z) skew toward backing the Biden / Harris ticket, and AOC is coming to them by getting on Twitch and streaming one of the rocket ship games of this year.
The stream starts at 9pm ET/6pm PT and can be found here.
And you can check if you’re registered to vote here.
Update 9:01pm ET: AOC hasn’t even started playing the game yet and has nearly 250,000 concurrent viewers.
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Facebook staff demand Zuckerberg limit lies in political ads
Submit campaign ads to fact checking, limit microtargeting, cap spending, observe silence periods or at least warn users. These are the solutions Facebook employees put forward in an open letter pleading with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company leadership to address misinformation in political ads.
The letter, obtained by The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, insists that “Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing . . . Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for.” The letter was posted to Facebook’s internal collaboration forum a few weeks ago.
The sentiments echo what I called for in a TechCrunch opinion piece on October 13th calling on Facebook to ban political ads. Unfettered misinformation in political ads on Facebook lets politicians and their supporters spread inflammatory and inaccurate claims about their views and their rivals while racking up donations to buy more of these ads.
The social network can still offer freedom of expression to political campaigns on their own Facebook Pages while limiting the ability of the richest and most dishonest to pay to make their lies the loudest. We suggested that if Facebook won’t drop political ads, they should be fact checked and/or use an array of generic “vote for me” or “donate here” ad units that don’t allow accusations. We also criticized how microtargeting of communities vulnerable to misinformation and instant donation links make Facebook ads more dangerous than equivalent TV or radio spots.
The Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday October 23, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
More than 250 employees of Facebook’s 35,000 staffers have signed the letter, which declares, “We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy.” It suggests the current policy undermines Facebook’s election integrity work, confuses users about where misinformation is allowed, and signals Facebook is happy to profit from lies.
The solutions suggested include:
- Don’t accept political ads unless they’re subject to third-party fact checks
- Use visual design to more strongly differentiate between political ads and organic non-ad posts
- Restrict microtargeting for political ads including the use of Custom Audiences since microtargeted hides ads from as much public scrutiny that Facebook claims keeps politicians honest
- Observe pre-election silence periods for political ads to limit the impact and scale of misinformation
- Limit ad spending per politician or candidate, with spending by them and their supporting political action committees combined
- Make it more visually clear to users that political ads aren’t fact-checked
A combination of these approaches could let Facebook stop short of banning political ads without allowing rampant misinformation or having to police individual claims.
Facebook’s response to the letter was “We remain committed to not censoring political speech, and will continue exploring additional steps we can take to bring increased transparency to political ads.” But that straw-man’s the letter’s request. Employees aren’t asking politicians to be kicked off Facebook or have their posts/ads deleted. They’re asking for warning labels and limits on paid reach. That’s not censorship.
Zuckerberg had stood resolute on the policy despite backlash from the press and lawmakers, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). She left him tongue-tied during a congressional testimony when she asked exactly what kinds of misinfo were allowed in ads.
But then Friday, Facebook blocked an ad designed to test its limits by claiming Republican Lindsey Graham had voted for Ocasio-Cortez’s Green Deal he actually opposes. Facebook told Reuters it will fact-check PAC ads.
One sensible approach for politicians’ ads would be for Facebook to ramp up fact-checking, starting with presidential candidates until it has the resources to scan more. Those fact-checked as false should receive an interstitial warning blocking their content rather than just a “false” label. That could be paired with giving political ads a bigger disclaimer without making them too prominent-looking in general and only allowing targeting by state.
Deciding on potential spending limits and silent periods would be more messy. Low limits could even the playing field and broad silent periods, especially during voting periods, and could prevent voter suppression. Perhaps these specifics should be left to Facebook’s upcoming independent Oversight Board that acts as a supreme court for moderation decisions and policies.
Zuckerberg’s core argument for the policy is that over time, history bends toward more speech, not censorship. But that succumbs to utopic fallacy that assumes technology evenly advantages the honest and dishonest. In reality, sensational misinformation spreads much further and faster than level-headed truth. Microtargeted ads with thousands of variants undercut and overwhelm the democratic apparatus designed to punish liars, while partisan news outlets counter attempts to call them out.
Zuckerberg wants to avoid Facebook becoming the truth police. But as we and employees have put forward, there is a progressive approach to limiting misinformation if he’s willing to step back from his philosophical orthodoxy.
The full text of the letter from Facebook employees to leadership about political ads can be found below, via The New York Times:
We are proud to work here.
Facebook stands for people expressing their voice. Creating a place where we can debate, share different opinions, and express our views is what makes our app and technologies meaningful for people all over the world.
We are proud to work for a place that enables that expression, and we believe it is imperative to evolve as societies change. As Chris Cox said, “We know the effects of social media are not neutral, and its history has not yet been written.”
This is our company.
We’re reaching out to you, the leaders of this company, because we’re worried we’re on track to undo the great strides our product teams have made in integrity over the last two years. We work here because we care, because we know that even our smallest choices impact communities at an astounding scale. We want to raise our concerns before it’s too late.
Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing.
Misinformation affects us all. Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy.
Allowing paid civic misinformation to run on the platform in its current state has the potential to:
— Increase distrust in our platform by allowing similar paid and organic content to sit side-by-side — some with third-party fact-checking and some without. Additionally, it communicates that we are OK profiting from deliberate misinformation campaigns by those in or seeking positions of power.
— Undo integrity product work. Currently, integrity teams are working hard to give users more context on the content they see, demote violating content, and more. For the Election 2020 Lockdown, these teams made hard choices on what to support and what not to support, and this policy will undo much of that work by undermining trust in the platform. And after the 2020 Lockdown, this policy has the potential to continue to cause harm in coming elections around the world.
Proposals for improvement
Our goal is to bring awareness to our leadership that a large part of the employee body does not agree with this policy. We want to work with our leadership to develop better solutions that both protect our business and the people who use our products. We know this work is nuanced, but there are many things we can do short of eliminating political ads altogether.
These suggestions are all focused on ad-related content, not organic.
1. Hold political ads to the same standard as other ads.
a. Misinformation shared by political advertisers has an outsized detrimental impact on our community. We should not accept money for political ads without applying the standards that our other ads have to follow.
2. Stronger visual design treatment for political ads.
a. People have trouble distinguishing political ads from organic posts. We should apply a stronger design treatment to political ads that makes it easier for people to establish context.
3. Restrict targeting for political ads.
a. Currently, politicians and political campaigns can use our advanced targeting tools, such as Custom Audiences. It is common for political advertisers to upload voter rolls (which are publicly available in order to reach voters) and then use behavioral tracking tools (such as the FB pixel) and ad engagement to refine ads further. The risk with allowing this is that it’s hard for people in the electorate to participate in the “public scrutiny” that we’re saying comes along with political speech. These ads are often so micro-targeted that the conversations on our platforms are much more siloed than on other platforms. Currently we restrict targeting for housing and education and credit verticals due to a history of discrimination. We should extend similar restrictions to political advertising.
4. Broader observance of the election silence periods
a. Observe election silence in compliance with local laws and regulations. Explore a self-imposed election silence for all elections around the world to act in good faith and as good citizens.
5. Spend caps for individual politicians, regardless of source
a. FB has stated that one of the benefits of running political ads is to help more voices get heard. However, high-profile politicians can out-spend new voices and drown out the competition. To solve for this, if you have a PAC and a politician both running ads, there would be a limit that would apply to both together, rather than to each advertiser individually.
6. Clearer policies for political ads
a. If FB does not change the policies for political ads, we need to update the way they are displayed. For consumers and advertisers, it’s not immediately clear that political ads are exempt from the fact-checking that other ads go through. It should be easily understood by anyone that our advertising policies about misinformation don’t apply to original political content or ads, especially since political misinformation is more destructive than other types of misinformation.
Therefore, the section of the policies should be moved from “prohibited content” (which is not allowed at all) to “restricted content” (which is allowed with restrictions).
We want to have this conversation in an open dialog because we want to see actual change.
We are proud of the work that the integrity teams have done, and we don’t want to see that undermined by policy. Over the coming months, we’ll continue this conversation, and we look forward to working towards solutions together.
This is still our company.
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The climate is our biggest threat. Carl Pope is fighting to change our fate
Michael Bloomberg is an unrepentant capitalist who, as he says in his 2017 book A Climate of Hope, is “not exactly your stereotypical environmentalist.” Yet over the past decade, Bloomberg has become arguably the biggest environmental philanthropist in the world — especially given the $500 million investment Bloomberg announced last month that he would soon make in rapidly moving the U.S. “Beyond Carbon,” off both coal and natural gas and to a “100% clean energy economy.” How did this happen?
It turns out one of the biggest factors in Bloomberg’s green transformation has been his friendship with Carl Pope, the longtime former head of the Sierra Club, whom Bloomberg first met about a decade ago, as Mayor of New York.
Pope is not exactly a household name, but nonetheless at this point can probably be called one of the most influential environmental activists in history. He wears a leather jacket and a weathered-looking sweater on the cover of Climate of Hope alongside Bloomberg’s suit, tie, and flag pin.
The two co-authored the book — and not just in the sense that Pope ghost-wrote Bloomberg’s opinions, as happens regularly when busy political and cultural celebrities take on a lesser-known co-author for some glamour project they may barely even read. A Climate of Hope is an extended dialogue between Bloomberg and Pope, with the two alternating chapters throughout and at times even disagreeing on potentially important issues.
What there’s no disagreement on, however, is that Pope “convinced” his co-author to dive into massive environmental spending (a feat accomplished in part by showing the health-conscious Bloomberg the numbers on how lethal coal can be).
Pope is no stranger to controversy — perhaps unsurprising for a nonprofit leader who has raised money well into the nine figures. He’s a “pragmatist,” as he says many times in the interview below, which depending on who you ask either means compromise to the point of being compromised, or simply that he has a knack for actually getting things done where others merely talk.
His legacy has previously been associated with taking money from natural gas executives in a fundraising bid some saw as necessary and others called ethically tainted; with overlooking people’s polluting individual choices to buy large cars and even bigger homes; and with “looking forward to an active partnership” with Republican leaders when it was obvious they weren’t completely on board with key tenets of the environmental movement.
But Pope has also been equally or better known for pushing the Clinton/Gore administration to be better on emissions; preventing neoliberal environmentalists from adopting a nativist stance on immigration; championing a more diverse and inclusive environmental movement; and now, of course, with potentially ending the use of carbon fuel in America.
Despite 30+ years in the public eye, Carl Pope is a relatively private person who doesn’t seem to like to talk much about himself. So for starters below, I wanted to see if I could figure out what makes him tick.
Because if we could get into the heads of people who persuade billionaires to act against their short-term economic interests, with the bigger human picture in mind, maybe we could do it more often.
Then our conversation moved on to NASA, Ro Khanna, Tesla, AOC and the Green New Deal, and more. And in a soon to come follow up piece, I’ll talk with Pope about the details of the Beyond Carbon plan, including how he was able to persuade Bloomberg to take it on, and some areas of controversy that could arise as the $500 million is distributed.
All of this, after all, is part of what it means to think about the ethics of technology — Pope and Bloomberg’s work, love it or not, is certainly an attempt to reform or transform some of the most influential technologies human hands have ever touched.
How do we motivate people of all backgrounds and means to help make changes for the greener? How do we know what the right changes are to make? How do we grapple with the ethical dilemmas involved and the compromises that can seem to be required?
(Oh and by the way: in the weeks since I spoke with Pope, I have mostly been skipping big evening meals and eating more healthily in the afternoon. So at least there’s that!)
Greg Epstein: I have enjoyed discovering you as — I would even say as a historical figure, though important parts of your story are yet to be told.
I’d like to hear a bit about the key developments in your life that gave you the ethical perspective that you have.
Carl Pope: I can tell you some things about my childhood and my formation. Which particular ingredients formed my ethical perspective, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell you, but I’ll tell you some things [that might] help.
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