A thread of my best tweets of 2017, according to you. A year of tweeting for dear life, in case you missed it.
In January, I did a few prescient threads that set the tone for the year. This one synthesized how Big Adtech and Big Cable would win their FCC Broadband Privacy repeal while anxiety about how personal data was abused to swing the election began to stir.
In February, I was beaming with pride that former students were getting coverage for @dataselfie, their Chrome extension (and now Firefox addon) that lets you hack your data back from Facebook.
In March, like many, I was wondering if Steve Bannon had actually resigned from Breitbart and whether Roger Stone had a backchannel to Wikileaks. Since then, Bannon is back at Breitbart and Stone is banned from Twitter, cooperating with ongoing inquests.
In April, I was trying to draw attention to data leakage in adtech as folks wondered how the Kremlin could target Americans with propaganda. Facebook would later testify to Congress that the Internet Research Agency uploaded adtech data for targeting.
In May, the calls for Zuckerberg and Dorsey to testify before Congress were being printed as op-eds in major outlets. The cowards sent their lawyers instead.
In June, I noticed that the Washington Post failed to acknowledge that its quoted source, an RNC data operative, was the Director of Product for Cambridge Analytica, the guy who helped ignite controversy over whether or not they used psychographics.
In July, I was fascinated with a paper published by scholars out of Indiana University who had measured the impact of bots spreading toxic sludge leading up to the election.
In August, the Kremlin troll dashboard launched and we could finally see what we had been obvious all along.
In September, in preparation for the news that Big Tech was getting hauled down to Capital Hill to answer for monetizing Kremlin active measures, I did a thread on how Zuck should get grilled by our elected representatives.
In October, I launched my @CrowdJustice campaign to raise the funds to cover the risk of taking SCL Elections Ltd to court in London. They are the registered data controller for Cambridge Analytica. They unlawfully processed our voter data in London.
In November, with Senate Judiciary, HSPCI, SSCI, SC, and UK ICO closing in on the data operations of Trump and Brexit, Flynn-flipped, pleading guilty to lying to FBI. It was time to collect his SCL links in a thread.
In December, multiple news outlets confirmed that Mueller had received emails from Cambridge Analytica and was closing in on the role of various data companies who supplied microtargeting to Trump. This was terrifying in so many ways.
An unreported story of 2017 was from June, when SCL Group (Cambridge Analytica) deleted its Elections division website after my lawyer concluded our pre-action protocol w/o a settlement. I told so many reporters. None printed it.
In December 2018, I’m betting that Robert Mercer’s resignation from RennTech will be a much bigger deal in hindsight, far beyond attribution to the bad publicity for sponsoring the racist troll Milo and other alt-right causes. nyti.ms/2iVdws2
