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The Markup
The Stories that Made Us Jealous in 2023
At The Markup, we’re proud of all the great investigations we published in 2023, and of their impact. But we are a relatively modest-sized news organization, and hardly the only entity whose work challenges technology to serve the public good. Throughout the year, we see stories in other publications that turn us green with envy.
Meet the People Taking The Markup Reporting Off the Page and Into Real Life
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hi everyone,. Sisi here. As the year winds down and our holiday break approaches, I wanted to share...
In My LA Neighborhood, Doorbell Cameras Are More Reliable Than Cops
This article was copublished with AfroLA, a nonprofit solutions journalism for Los Angeles told through the lens of the Black community. Sign up for The Breakdown newsletter here. When my husband and I moved from Texas to Los Angeles in 2018, we had a very short window of time to...
We’re Not Living a “Predicted” Life: Student Perspectives on Wisconsin’s Dropout Algorithm
During the second half of our junior year of high school, we were shocked to learn about an algorithm called the Dropout Early Warning System (DEWS) that our home state of Wisconsin had been using to predict future dropouts. As Black students, who make up nine percent of the public school student body statewide, it felt wrong that factors like the color of our skin contributed to whether we’d be labeled as “high risk” of dropping out—especially because the algorithm is often wrong.
How Elon Musk Is Trying To Make Web Scraping Dangerous Again
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hello everyone, Ryan here. Behind many of our stories here at The Markup are some surprisingly controversial little...
Second-Generation Americans: What to Do When Loved Ones Are Sharing Misinformation
This article was published in partnership with Documented, a non-profit news site devoted to covering New York City’s immigrants and the policies that affect their lives. Sign up for their Early Arrival newsletter here. Earlier this year a friend of mine, who is a second-generation Vietnamese American, told me...
Without a Trace: How to Keep Your Phone Off the Grid
About the LevelUp series: At The Markup, we’re committed to doing everything we can to protect our readers from digital harm, write about the processes we develop, and share our work. We’re constantly working on improving digital security, respecting reader privacy, creating ethical and responsible user experiences, and making sure our site and tools are accessible.
It Isn’t News, It’s Just Sand
Hi, everyone—Nabiha and Sisi here to discuss something that’s been on our minds lately. We’re sadly all too aware of the crisis of news deserts: communities starved of credible, trustworthy information. With an election looming, the problems they pose rise to the level of a full-on threat to democracy. But because it’s the 2020s, we’re here to talk about a new and different type of hellscape that compounds the problem of news deserts—what we call news mirages.
How Certain Algorithms to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
In order to understand what’s wrong with governments relying too heavily on data and algorithms, let’s go back to the forests of 18th-century Prussia. As James Scott wrote in his book Seeing Like a State, governments in the former German state primarily viewed forests as a way to extract revenue. So when they did surveys of forests, all they counted was the number of trees that could be cut down and turned into commercial wood products.
What It’s Like Living With Limited Access to Internet in the Black Rural South
This story was published in partnership with Capital B, a local-national nonprofit news organization that centers Black voices, audience needs and experiences, and partners with the communities it serves. Subscribe to its newsletters here. This is the first story in Capital B’s “Disconnected: Rural Black America and the Digital Divide”...
On Conflict and Connection
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. “I’m alive.”. It seems like a mundane update. But to Mirna El Helbawi, it’s a sign for...
How to keep your personal data a little more private while pursuing higher education
As coursework has moved online, college students face pervasive tracking and are banding together to protect their privacy. Below are steps individual students can take to safeguard their personal information. (For any professors reading this: you can either do—or talk to your students about—most of these things, too.)
He Wanted Privacy. His College Gave Him None
On a recent Monday, Eric Natividad woke up around 8 a.m., showered, ate breakfast, and braced himself for a day of being tracked. Natividad, 32, is a student at Mt. San Antonio College, which is one of California’s largest community colleges, serving more than 26,000 students east of Los Angeles, about half of whom attend part time. Like virtually all college students in 2023, his life is constantly being converted into a steady stream of data. This information undergirds algorithms and informs decisions by his professors, college administrators, campus police officers, and a far-reaching universe of technology companies—including some he has never heard of.
Facebook Watches Teens Online As They Prep for College
An investigation by The Markup found Meta’s pixel tracking students from kindergarten to college By Colin Lecher and Ross Teixeira. Picture a high school student who wants to go to college, likes to cheer on her school’s football team, and plays in a sport or two herself. One...
‘Unmasking AI’ and the Fight for Algorithmic Justice
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hello, friends,. It’s Nabiha again. Data fuels AI. We know this—and it’s why the fights around copyright and...
Meet the Vietnamese Grandmother Fighting Misinformation One YouTube Video at a Time
Meet Bùi Như Mai, a 67-year-old Vietnamese grandmother who is also a YouTube influencer. “I didn’t think I was going to be a YouTube newscaster at the age of 67. But these days you will often see me at my daughter’s house, holding my grandchild while translating articles from Politico or The Atlantic into Vietnamese that I then broadcast on a news channel on YouTube. Every week I try to work my way through two, if not three articles, which takes one or two full days,” said Bùi standing in her kitchen, laughing to herself.
FCC Approves Rules to Prevent ‘Digital Discrimination’
In a 3–2 vote on Nov. 15, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed rules that represent a historic step toward closing the digital divide. As part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Congress mandated the FCC adopt rules to prohibit “digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.” Since the infrastructure bill was relatively scant on details, many of the specifics on how it would be implemented will be decided by the FCC.
Meet Nightshade—A Tool Empowering Artists to Fight Back Against AI
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hello again, dear readers. My name is Jon Keegan, and I’m an investigative data journalist here at The...
‘Let Me Tell Them Goodbye Before They Get Killed’: How eSIM Cards Are Connecting Palestinian Families
Since the Israel–Hamas war began in early October, Farid Sami Alzaro, 27, has had little control over how and when he can communicate with his family. Alzaro lives in Cairo, and his extended family lives in Gaza. The ability to make phone calls or connect to the Internet has...
I Went to the Real ‘Cop Con.’ Here’s The Tech Police Are Testing.
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. There’s a particularly cheeky episode of Brooklyn 99 about a fictitious Tri-State Police Officers Convention, an annual conference...
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