Letter From New Hampshire: The Dangers of Disinformation

A few days before the New Hampshire primary vote, midway through a speech at a packed town hall in Nashua, Andrew Yang began to talk about data.

Specifically, the industrial-scale harvesting of private data that is at the heart of today's biggest and most profitable tech companies.

It's an incredibly detailed program - including "The right to download all data in a standardized format to port to another platform" - but the fact that he largely ignored it on the stump tells you much about the issues' low-profile on the campaign trail.

In Berlin, the capital of Coos County in New Hampshire's "Great North" bordering Canada, I met a Warren supporter and former computer fraud investigator named Kathleen Kelley.

"Facebook seems to know what I've seen, and said - even recommending things that I was just thinking about. I have Siri at home, and it knows my patterns: when I come home, what music I like, what news I listen to. It's a little scary. I'm at the point, with Amazon and others, where I'm asking, 'How big is too big?' I think we need to talk about that, just as we broke up the Ma Bells years ago, which led to innovation. Good things could come out of reducing their power over the economy and our private data."

Sanders is calling for $150 billion to be invested, as part of the Green New Deal, in "Infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities [and] states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks [that are] resilient to the effects of climate change."

Few of Sanders's supporters may understand the technical details of building resilient community internet networks, but those I met in New Hampshire thought it a no-brainer the state should be more involved in the sector.

"We don't have newspapers up here, like so many places, so people are getting their news on Facebook, Reddit or Instagram, and how much of that is wrong or false? I try to figure out what is true, but sometimes I get fooled and have to stop myself," she said.

"It refuses to take responsibility for lies, hate and disinformation that could jeopardize the integrity of the 2020 elections. The company is also all too happy to profit from micro-targeting that directs disinformation at vulnerable communities and hides it from everyone else."

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist living in New Orleans.