Aarti Shahani
Aarti Shahani is a correspondent for NPR. Based in Silicon Valley, she covers the biggest companies on earth. She is also an author. Her first book, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares (out Oct. 1, 2019), is about the extreme ups and downs her family encountered as immigrants in the U.S. Before journalism, Shahani was a community organizer in her native New York City, helping prisoners and families facing deportation. Even if it looks like she keeps changing careers, she's always doing the same thing: telling stories that matter.
Shahani has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, a regional Edward R. Murrow Award and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award. Her activism was honored by the Union Square Awards and Legal Aid Society. She received a master's in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, with generous support from the University and the Paul & Daisy Soros fellowship. She has a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago. She is an alumna of A Better Chance, Inc.
Shahani grew up in Flushing, Queens — in one of the most diverse ZIP codes in the country.
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It's known that Russian groups used Facebook and other social media platforms to spread false information during the 2016 election, but now Russian bots are doing the same after the Florida shooting. So, how are tech giants thinking about tackling these issues and making sure the same thing doesn't happen in this year's midterm election?
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Fake news, hate speech and foreign interference are the notable examples of what went wrong online during the 2016 campaign. Facebook, Google and Twitter want to avoid a repeat in the 2018 midterms. They're working on fixes, but the solutions won't be easy.
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Breaking up is hard to do, and spy tools are making it even harder. According to family lawyers, scorned spouses are increasingly turning to GPS trackers and cheap spyware apps to watch an ex.
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Lyft is offering education benefits, a move aimed at recruiting and retaining drivers in its competition with Uber. But it raises a question about what these companies owe their workforces.
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Republicans say their tax proposal will get companies to bring their overseas profits back to the U.S. They say it will lead to more hiring and higher wages. Big tech companies like Microsoft and Apple stand to be the largest beneficiaries of these corporate tax changes But already they have plenty of cash available for new investment. So critics say they'll use the tax breaks instead to benefit investors not workers.
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The company kept the breach secret for more than a year. According to a Bloomberg report, Uber paid the hackers $100,000 to delete the stolen data and stay silent about it.
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The Latin Grammy nominated song "Despacito" is a smash hit on YouTube. But if you ask Google's personal assistant to play "Despacito" it can't understand the command. Even though YouTube is part of Google. It's a learning moment about artificial intelligence, how natural language processing works and why machines still struggle with translation and foreign accents.
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Facebook's celebrity executives — Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg — were not on Capitol Hill yesterday when Congress grilled the company's top lawyer about incendiary Russian ads on the platform. Instead, they were on an earnings call with investors announcing a 79 percent jump in profits, fueled by the company's dominance in online advertising. NPR's Aarti Shahani looks at how advertising is the key to Facebook's success and how that may change following the Russian debacle.
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In whatever corner of the world Facebook is operating, it has become clear that people are using this powerful platform as a communications tool in ways that founder Mark Zuckerberg never envisioned.
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Facebook says 126 million people may have seen Russian content aimed at influencing Americans. Marketing gurus say Facebook is unlikely to solve the problem because of its ad-based business model.