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The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

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Skeptics contend that such misinformation preached to the choir, because exposure was “selective”—meaning that die-hard conservatives saw pro-Trump fake news, while die-hard liberals saw pro-Clinton fake news, making it unlikely that it changed anyone’s mind. Guess et al. found 40 percent of Trump supporters and only 15 percent of Clinton supporters read pro-Trump fake news, while 11 percent of Clinton supporters and only 3 percent of Trump supporters read pro-Clinton fake news. Sixty-six percent of the most conservative voters, the farthest-right decile, visited at least one pro-Trump fake news site and read an average of 33.16 pro-Trump fake news articles. But the argument that fake news was preaching to the choir doesn’t address voter turnout, because ideologically consistent fake news can motivate voters to turn out even if it doesn’t change their vote choices.

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When the public revelation of the sting operation drew investors’ attention to the fact that fake news was being published on websites like Seeking Alpha, Kogan et al. used the public revelation of the sting to examine whether increased awareness of fake news eroded consumers’ trust in real news. Not surprisingly, fake news had a bigger impact on trading volume and price volatility before the SEC announcement than after it. But investors were also less moved by real news once the SEC drew attention to the existence of fake news, demonstrating the potential for fake news to erode the public’s trust in news altogether. If fake news can disrupt markets, it can affect everyone in society, whether we read and share it or not.

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The distributions were skewed by a few viral hits, and a smaller percentage of voters saw the largest concentration of fake news. Guess et al. found that the 20 percent of Americans with the most conservative news diets were responsible for 62 percent of visits to fake news websites and that Americans over sixty were much more likely to consume fake news. On Twitter, Grinberg et al. found that 1 percent of registered voters consumed 80 percent of the fake news and that 0.1 percent accounted for 80 percent of “shares” from fake news websites. In a second, representative online survey of 3,500 Facebook users, Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler found that only 10 percent of respondents shared fake news and that they were highly concentrated among Americans over sixty-five.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

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Donald Trump has labelled the New York Times, CNN and other traditional news sources as fake news, because of what he perceives as one-sided coverage of his presidency. Trump can have this definition if he wants. My definition is stricter: fake news is news that is demonstrably false, not just politically angled. Fake news consists of stories picked up by fact-checker sites like Snopes and PolitiFact, and shown to be factually incorrect. Based on this definition, there were at least 65 fake news sites during the election. The alt-right site Breitbart sits delicately balanced on the edge of my definition. The question is not whether or not fake news exists. There is little doubt about that.

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In the experiment, 14 per cent of people said they had heard these fake fake news stories. This was not significantly different from the 15 per cent who said they had heard the actual fake news stories. Even very shortly after the election, the participants couldn’t properly remember which fake things they had seen online. Combining these results with an analysis of how news spreads on Facebook and the relative impact of fake news websites compared with traditional news sites, Hunt and Matthew made a ‘back-of-an-envelope’ calculation to show that, at the very most, the average American would be able to remember one or two fake news stories as they went to the polls, and they were unlikely to believe these stories.

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When I contacted him, Matthew was reluctant to draw a definitive conclusion that fake news had no influence in the election. He told me: ‘We can’t estimate how actually seeing a story/ad affects how people vote.’ Linking news exposure to actual voting requires further study. Even if we are as cautious as Matthew suggests, I just couldn’t see how the fake news effect could add up. Despite Donald Trump’s narrow victory in the election, Hunt and Matthew’s ‘back-of-an-envelope’ calculation implies that fake news is nothing more than meaningless noise. The ineffectiveness of fake news gives a very different picture to that implied by the concept of a post-truth world.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

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For example, the satirical claim that the US would . . . Nicky Woolf, ‘As fake news takes over Facebook feeds, many are taking satire as fact’, Guardian, 17 November 2016. 26. The Toronto Sun’s false story . . . Ishmael N. Daro, ‘A Fake Online Review Claimed Refugees “Slaughtered Goats” In a Hotel. This Newspaper Helped it Go Viral’, BuzzFeed News, 11 October 2018. 27. The baser truth is that Facebook profited . . . Judd Legum, ‘Facebook’s pledge to eliminate misinformation is itself fake news’, Guardian, 20 July 2018. 28. In 2017, Facebook launched a ‘war on fake news’ . . . Dave Lee, ‘Facebook’s fake news crisis deepens’, BBC News, 15 November 2016; ‘Facebook fake news: Zuckerberg details plans to combat problem’, BBC News, 19 November 2016; Mark Molloy, ‘Facebook just made it harder for you to share fake news’, Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2017. 29.

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The kinds of people prepared to believe such stories were not only far from Clinton’s core demographic; they were not even rooted in the sort of epistemological presuppositions that would be susceptible to a liberal press ‘fact check’. There is also little evidence that ‘fake news’ had much effect in 2016, and attempts to blame belief in ‘fake news’ stories risk shuffling cause and effect. For example, a study by researchers at Ohio State University looked at the correlation between belief in ‘fake news’ stories and defection from the Democratic ticket in 2016.18 It, quite ingeniously, controlled for alternative factors such as age, education, gender, race and ideological orientation.

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Trump’s claim that she lied repeatedly and pathologically about her alleged heroics in Bosnia was also true.21 If the term ‘fake news’ is widely used by the Right, including such conspiracy theorists as Alex Jones, this suggests it is semantically loaded. Indeed, Trump’s appropriation of the term prompted a momentary fumbling for fine distinctions. The BBC suggested that ‘unverified’ was not the same as ‘fake’: fake news was untrue, whereas unverified news had not yet been proven to be true or false. The problem with such Jesuitical distinctions is that all ‘fake news’ is ‘unverified’ until someone proves it is ‘fake’. When Trump used the term, he was using it to describe media organizations publishing a document concerning his alleged relationships with the Russian state that, they admitted, they couldn’t verify.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

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THE UNREALITY MACHINE 118 “When all think alike”: Walter Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy (Henry Holt, 1915), 51. 118 Moët champagne: Samanth Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,” Wired, February 15, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/. 118 slick wardrobes: Alexander Smith and Vladimir Banic, “Fake News: How a Partying Macedonian Teen Earns Thousands Publishing Lies,” NBC News, December 9, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-macedonian-teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451. 118 old industrial town: “About Veles,” Macedonia Information, accessed March 19, 2018, http://makedonija.name/cities/veles. 118 four times the advertising: Josh Constine, “Facebook Swells to 1.65B Users and Beats Q1 Estimates with $5.38B Revenue,” TechCrunch, April 27, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/27/facebook-q1-2016-earnings/. 118 With each click: Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex.” 118 tens of thousands of dollars: Ibid. 119 swelled into the hundreds: Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?

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THE UNREALITY MACHINE 118 “When all think alike”: Walter Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy (Henry Holt, 1915), 51. 118 Moët champagne: Samanth Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,” Wired, February 15, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/. 118 slick wardrobes: Alexander Smith and Vladimir Banic, “Fake News: How a Partying Macedonian Teen Earns Thousands Publishing Lies,” NBC News, December 9, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-macedonian-teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451. 118 old industrial town: “About Veles,” Macedonia Information, accessed March 19, 2018, http://makedonija.name/cities/veles. 118 four times the advertising: Josh Constine, “Facebook Swells to 1.65B Users and Beats Q1 Estimates with $5.38B Revenue,” TechCrunch, April 27, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/27/facebook-q1-2016-earnings/. 118 With each click: Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex.” 118 tens of thousands of dollars: Ibid. 119 swelled into the hundreds: Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?utm_term=.mqxmBEGNRa#.panz3vD86O. 119 would hold special events: Smith and Banic, “Fake News.” 119 “Dmitri”: Ibid. 119 a “clickbait coach”: Isa Soares et al., “The Fake News Machine: Inside a Town Gearing Up for 2020,” CNNMoney, http://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/. 119 “Since fake news started”: Smith and Banic, “Fake News.” 119 “some white people”: Silverman and Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans.” 119 false reports received: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?

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,” Tyndall Report, October 25, 2016, http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5778/. 135 “ Breitbart of the left”: Jonathan Easley, “Top Dem Super PAC Launches Anti-Trump War Room,” The Hill, December 6, 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/308978-top-dem-super-pac-launches-anti-trump-war-room. 135 secret employ: Casey Michel, “The Bizarre Rise and Dramatic Fall of Louise Mensch and Her ‘Blue Detectives,’” ThinkProgress, January 19, 2018, https://thinkprogress.org/blue-detectives-collapse-trump-russia-a42a94537bdf/. 135 2017 French presidential election: Laura Daniels, “How Russia Hacked the French Election,” Politico, April 23, 2017, https://www.politico.eu/article/france-election-2017-russia-hacked-cyberattacks/. 135 Spain: Vasco Cotovio and Emanuella Grinberg, “Spain: ‘Misinformation’ on Catalonia Referendum Came from Russia,” CNN, November 13, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/13/europe/catalonia-russia-connection-referendum/index.html. 135 Pakistani defense minister: Ben Westcott, “Duped by Fake News Story, Pakistani Minister Threatens Nuclear War with Israel,” CNN, December 26, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/middleeast/israel-pakistan-fake-news-nuclear/index.html. 135 false Facebook update: Justin Lynch, “In South Sudan, Fake News Has Deadly Consequences,” Slate, June 9, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/06/in_south_sudan_fake_news_has_deadly_consequences.html. 136 sectarian and ethnic violence: “Social Media and Conflict in South Sudan: A Lexicon of Hate Speech Terms” (report, PeaceTech Lab, n.d.), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54257189e4b0ac0d5fca1566/t/5851c214725e25c531901330/1481753114460/PeaceTech+Lab_+SouthSudanLexicon.pdf. 136 rival Sudanese Facebook groups: Lynch, “In South Sudan.” 136 In India: “Hindutva.Info Runs Fake News of Hindus Thrashing Barkati,” ENewsRoom, February 16, 2018, https://enewsroom.in/hindutva-info-runs-fake-story-hindus-rastravadi-muslims-bashing-barkati/. 136 in Myanmar: Euan McKirdy, “When Facebook Becomes ‘the Beast’: Myanmar Activists Say Social Media Aids Genocide,” CNN, April 6, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/06/asia/myanmar-facebook-social-media-genocide-intl/index.html. 136 in Sri Lanka: Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match,” New York Times, April 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html. 136 “The germs”: Ibid. 136 trademark look: Michael Lohmuller, “Panic Ensues After MS13 Allegedly Prohibits Blonde Hair in Honduras Markets,” InSight Crime, May 27, 2015, https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/ms13-allegedly-prohibits-blonde-hair-in-honduras-markets/. 136 criminals solemnly denounced: MS-13, press release, trans.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

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“With this law,” Maas explained a few months before the law was due to go into effect, “we put an end to the verbal law of the jungle on the internet and protect the freedom of expression for all.”37 Other European countries are also active in trying to curb fake news. The British Parliament has set up a House of Commons Select Committee to “grill Facebook executives” over their role in the fake news ecosystem.38 Even the Czech Republic, which is also holding general elections in late 2017 and has been subjected to a relentless information war no doubt orchestrated by the anonymous Fancy Bears in Moscow, is planning to open a specialist fake news unit ahead of the vote to tackle falsehoods purposely spread on the internet.39 The growing global furor, with its threats of financial punishment over social media’s publication of fake news, bestiality, child sexual abuse, and beheadings is, fortunately, finally having an impact.

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Duncan Robinson and David Bond, “Tech Groups Warned on ‘Fake News,’” Financial Times, January 31, 2017. 33. Ibid. 34. “Terror and the Internet,” Economist, June 10, 2017. 35. Rachel Stern, “Germany’s Plan to Fight Fake News,” Christian Science Monitor, January 9, 2017. 36. Nick Hopkins, “How Facebook Flouts Holocaust Denial Laws Except When It Fears Being Sued,” Guardian, May 24, 2017. 37. Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott, “Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media Companies,” New York Times, June 30, 2017. 38. Ben Riley-Smith, “Parliament to Grill Facebook Chiefs over ‘Fake News,’” Telegraph, January 14, 2017. 39.

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Twitter’s value, he suggests, is more than just economic—particularly in our “post-truth” Trumpian political world, with its infestation of fake news and its nefarious trolls whipping up the online mob.3 So, he says, we should approach prominent media companies like Twitter as if they are public television or radio networks. “It’s important to run Twitter on the same public principles as Harvard University or the Guardian newspaper. Its societal worth can’t be quantified purely in terms of financial value,” the Betaworks CEO insists. What he’s saying is that—given the corrosive impact of fake news and other ridiculously biased or corrupt information on a culture that is already suffering a dearth of trust—some of our most influential new media platforms, like Twitter, might be too important to be treated like other for-profit companies.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

v=QEEnme-miW4&feature=youtu.be. 99 “Impact Study on Citizens’ Ability to Detect Disinformation 1.5 Years After Completing a News Media Literacy Program,” IREX, https://www.irex.org/resource/impact-study-citizens-ability-detect-disinformation-15-years-after-completing-news-media. 100 Erin Murrock, Joy Amulya, Mehri Druckman, and Tetiana Liubyva, “Winning the war on state-sponsored propaganda,” IREX, https://www.irex.org/sites/default/files/node/resource/impact-study-media-literacy-ukraine.pdf. 101 Jon Henley, “How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools,” The Guardian, January 29, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fiction-finlands-new-lessons-in-combating-fake-news. 102 “The Media Literacy Index 2019: Just think about it,” Open Society Institute–Sofia, November 29, 2019, https://osis.bg/?p=3356&lang=en. 103 Eliza Mackintosh, “Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy,” CNN, https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-fake-news-intl/. 104 Ryan J. Foley, “Efforts grow to help students evaluate what they see online,” Associated Press, December 30, 2017, https://apnews.com/64b5ce49f58940eda86608f3eac79158. 105 “MediaWise,” Poynter Institute, https://www.poynter.org/mediawise/. 106 Carl T.

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sequence=5&isAllowed=y. 6 Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo#.fu2okXaeKo. 7 Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s ‘crazy’ to think fake news stories got Donald Trump elected,” Recode, November 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/11/13596792/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 8 Amit Singhal, “ ‘Revenge porn’ and Search,” Google Public Policy Blog, June 19, 2015, https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/06/revenge-porn-and-search.html. 9 P.

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Excerpt from Brad Smith & Carol Ann Browne, “Tools and Weapons,” Apple Books, https://books.apple.com/us/book/tools-and-weapons/id1455068611. 25 Lee, AI Superpowers, e-book, 130. 26 “Beijing police have covered every corner of the city with video surveillance system,” People China, October 5, 2015, http://en.people.cn/n/2015/1005/c90000-8958235.html. 27 Josh Chin and Liza Lin, “China’s all-seeing surveillance state is reading its citizens’ faces,” Strait Times, July 8, 2017, http://www.straittimes.com/opinion/chinas-all-seeing-surveillance-state-is-reading-its-citizens-faces. 28 Ross Andersen, “The Panopticon Is Already Here,” The Atlantic, September 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/. 29 Lee, AI Superpowers, e-book, 94. 30 James Vincent, “Watch Jordan Peele use AI to make Barack Obama deliver a PSA about fake news,” The Verge, April 17, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed. 31 Daniel Gross, interview with author, May 1, 2020. 32 Vincent, “Watch Jordan Peele use AI to make Barack Obama deliver a PSA about fake news.” 33 “Kenya election: Fake CNN and BBC news reports circulate,” BBC, July 29, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40762796. 34 Gianluca Mezzofiore, “No, Emma Gonzalez did not tear up a photo of the Constitution,” CNN, March 26, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/us/emma-gonzalez-photo-doctored-trnd/index.html. 35 Ady Barkan, “Opinion: I speak with a computerized voice.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

It had become such a staple of the fact-checking world that Facebook hired it to help identify fake news on its platform. (Snopes pulled out of the partnership in early 2019, citing too much staff time spent on it.) Snopes, however, does not call things ‘fake news’. If the term once referred to a statement’s inaccuracy, it now ‘behaves like a rhetorical middle finger’ denoting a politician’s dislike of a statement regardless of its truth, writes one Snopes editor. A 2017 Gallup/Knight poll found that 51 per cent of American adults agree that accurate stories portraying politicians negatively sometimes constitute ‘fake news’ (28 per cent said these are ‘always’ fake news). Instead of fanning the flames, Snopes kicked the term out of their style guide.

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<http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/fundamental-flaw-in-press-watchdogs-complaints-process-helps-newspapers-to-promote-climate-change-denial/> Ward, Bob. ‘“The Mail on Sunday” admits publishing more fake news about climate change’. LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment blog, 22 April 2018. <http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-mail-on-sunday-admits-publishing-more-fake-news-about-climate-change/> Wardle, Claire. ‘Fake news. It’s complicated’. First Draft, 16 February 2017. <https://medium.com/1st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d0f773766c79> Wardle, Claire and Hossein Derakhshan. ‘Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making’.

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It’s just as undesirable to use a generalised term to discredit real news by simply labelling it fake. There is precedent for the latter use of the term in Nazi Germany and elsewhere (SEE: LÜGENPRESSE). Donald Trump’s tweet on 17 February 2017 was firmly in this tradition: ‘The FAKE NEWS media is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!’ He named the ‘failing’ New York Times, as well as NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN – all broadly reputable news organisations – as fake news. This was, itself, fake news. FALSE AMPLIFIERS Facebook’s definition: ‘Coordinated activity by inauthentic accounts that has the intent of manipulating political discussion (e.g., by discouraging specific parties from participating in discussion or amplifying sensationalistic voices over others).’

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

We only know about the fine at all because of a legal challenge against the Electoral Commission.40 Otherwise, even this shard of information would have been buried under Northern Irish donor secrecy laws. The CRC story starkly reveals the limits of the rules governing our democracy in other ways, too. Official attempts to scrutinise the DUP donation floundered. When the fake news inquiry wrote to Richard Cook, he initially claimed that his response had been “lost” by the inquiry.41 This was contradicted by clerks in Westminster. Cook then wrote a letter accusing chair Damian Collins of being “the source of the ‘fake news’ you claim to wish to investigate”.42 Cook refused to answer any questions about the donation. In its final report, the committee concluded that: There is an absence of transparency surrounding the relationship between the Constitutional Research Council, the DUP and Vote Leave.

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Chapter 3: The Bad Boys of Brexit 1 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2017), p. 306. 2 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Fake News’, House of Commons, June 2018. See also http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/disinformation-and-fake-news/oral/85344.html; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 3 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 4 Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (London, 2019), p. 37. 5 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 6 Robert Wright, ‘Arron Banks and the mystery Brexit campaign funds’, Financial Times, November 2018. 7 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 8 Ibid. 9 Martin Fletcher, ‘Arron Banks: the man who bought Brexit’, New Statesman, October 2016. 10 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 11 Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (London, 2017), p. 43. 12 Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell, ‘How did Arron Banks afford Brexit?’

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See also https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/public-statement-on-nca-investigation-into-suspected-eu-referendum-offences; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 83 Charles Hymas, ‘Arron Banks threatens to sue Electoral Commission after being cleared by National Crime Agency over loans in Brexit referendum campaign’, Telegraph, September 2019. 84 Andrew Marr Show, BBC, November 2018. 85 Ian Cobain, ‘Ashcroft’s millions: from Belize tax haven to Tories via Southampton’, Guardian, March 2010. 86 Joe Lo, ‘Revealed: How Britain First Disguised the Source of a £200,000 Donation’, Vice, July 2019. 87 Billy Kenber, Paul Morgan-Bentley and Louis Goddard, ‘Tories under attack after tax haven donations’, The Times, March 2019. 88 Ian Cobain and Matthew Taylor, ‘Far-right terrorist Thomas Mair jailed for life for Jo Cox murder’, Guardian, November 2016. 89 ‘The Banks Files: Brexit funder urged campaign to “press it harder” after Jo Cox murder’, Channel 4, March 2019. 90 Rowena Mason, ‘Leave.EU condemned for linking Orlando attack to referendum vote’, Guardian, June 2016. 91 Ibid. 92 ‘Revealed: How Leave.EU faked migrant footage’, Channel 4, April 2019. 93 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Fake News’, House of Commons, June 2018. See also http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/disinformation-and-fake-news/oral/85344.html; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 94 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘Arron Banks lied to Parliament about his Brexit campaign, say whistleblowers’, openDemocracy, November 2018. 95 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2016), pp. 308–309. 96 Ed Howker, ‘Arron Banks and the UKIP data hijack’, Channel 4, December 2019. 97 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘Revealed: Arron Banks’s staff crunched millions of voters’ data after Brexit vote’, openDemocracy, November 2019. 98 Ibid. 99 Alex Hern, ‘Leave.EU and Arron Banks insurance firm fined £120,000 for data breaches’, Guardian, February 2019. 100 Jen Frost, ‘Tribunal throws out Eldon and Leave EU appeals against ICO’, InsurancePost, February 2020. 101 David Pegg, ‘Met to take no further action over Leave.EU spending breaches’, Guardian, September 2019. 102 Andrew Pierce and James Tapsfield, ‘Your gold door’s worth more than my house!

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

The Project P team found that of the top one hundred fake news stories, none of them originated from the suspected Russian groups. Fake news, they concluded, was really a problem of cutting off the money supply of malefactors, like the Macedonians in Veles, who were gaming the system. In a sense, they saw it as a similar situation to Facebook’s problem with spammy developers. Dealing with fake news, under that view, was not really much different from taming the excesses of Zynga’s Mark Pincus. “We understood some of the disinformation efforts had been traced to Russia [but] the fake news problem seemed larger,” says Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel.

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the real newspaper: Eric Lubbers, “There Is No Such Thing as the Denver Guardian, Despite That Facebook Post You Saw,” Denver Post, November 5, 2016. “We’ve tried to do”: Laura Sydell, “We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned,” NPR, November 23, 2016. BuzzFeed tracked: Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016. “They only wanted pocket money”: Samanth Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,” Wired, February 15, 2017. fake news stories on Facebook exceeded: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016.

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There is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. I was in the room during that interview, and can report that the remark in question was greeted with equanimity. Zuckerberg seemed to be reasonable in discussing it. But once out of the room a single remark survived: Facebook’s CEO said it was crazy to think that fake news had an impact. Months later, he would apologize. Given what was to be unearthed, he had no choice. * * * • • • WHILE FACEBOOK WAS making a belated attempt to see where the fake news came from, outsiders were also focusing on it. In the weeks after the election, misinformation on Facebook became a favorite target of finger-pointers devastated by the Trump victory.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Pay Google.” 215 Facebook’s desire not to be the arbiter of truth: Peter Kafka, “Facebook Has Started to Flag Fake News Stories,” Recode, March 4, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/3/4/14816254/facebook-fake-news-disputed-trump-snopes-politifact-seattle-tribune. 215 “before it turns into a tsunami”: Krishna Bharat, “How to Detect Fake News in Real-Time,” NewCo Shift, April 27, 2017, https://shift.newco.co/how-to-detect-fake-news-in-real-time-9fdae0197bfd. Bharat’s article has many additional practical suggestions for how to algorithmically detect fake news in addition to some of those that I outline in this chapter. 215 “the overall logic is the same”: Bharat, “How to Detect Fake News in Real-Time.” 217 “to make it tolerate them”: Michael Marder, “Failure of U.S.

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Similarly, when Facebook cracked down on stories with clickbait headlines, Adam Mosseri, its VP of product management for News Feed, wrote, “Facebook won’t be publicly publishing the multi-page document of guidelines for defining clickbait because ‘a big part of this is actually spam, and if you expose exactly what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, they reverse engineer it and figure out how to get around it.’” Just as with clickbait headlines, some incentives to create fake news can be eliminated. Many of those promoting fake news during the 2016 election were politically motivated, whether sincerely or cynically, but many fake news sites, like the ones created by the Macedonian teens, were created purely for financial gain. Cutting off advertising for sites or accounts that are peddling fake news is a great way to eliminate some of the most egregious offenders. This can be done not only by the platforms themselves, but by advertisers and ad networks who place “remnant advertising” on the lowest-quality sites.

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CHAPTER 10: MEDIA IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS 199 Macedonian teens out to make a buck: Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilver man/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo. 199 to churn out the stuff: Laura Sydell, “We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned,” NPR All Tech Considered, November 23, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs. 199 “a pretty crazy idea”: Aarti Shahani, “Zuckerberg Denies Fake News on Facebook Had Impact on the Election,” NPR All Tech Considered, November 11, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltech considered/2016/11/11/501743684/zuckerberg-denies-fake-news-on-face book-had-impact-on-the-election. 200 hyperpartisan stories shown to each group: “Blue Feed/Red Feed,” Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2016, updated hourly, retrieved March 31, 2007, http://graph ics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/. 200 video claiming that her aide Huma Abedin: “Huma Kidding?

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!” And this: “So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!” In the president’s worldview, by holding itself to account, the network had proved not its integrity but its corruption—and, indeed, the corruption of the entire news industry. In much the same spirit, in 2018 the president and the Republican National Committee touted something they called the “Fake News Awards.” What the president and the committee did not note was that of the eleven supposedly fake news items, at least seven had been promptly corrected by the outlets which had published them.

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Conservatives were also seeing and digesting significantly more fake news. One study, by the political scientists Andrew Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler in 2018, found that fewer than half of Americans visited a fake news website in the weeks before the 2016 election, but the visitors were not evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum: about six in ten visits to fake news sites came from the most conservative 20 percent of Americans. Trump supporters were more than twice as likely as Hillary Clinton supporters to visit untrustworthy websites; strikingly, fake news sites accounted for more than 10 percent of Trump supporters’ overall news diet, versus only 1 percent of Clinton supporters’ news diet.56 Other research found that conservatives were more exposed to conspiracy theories and fake news, and were more likely to believe them.

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Hyping disinformation risked making disruptive actors like Putin and Trump seem ten feet tall, which was exactly their goal. Most people, during the 2016 presidential campaign, did not go to fake news websites. Fewer than 10 percent shared fake news links on Facebook, according to a 2019 analysis by New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab and Princeton University. Republicans were four times more likely than Democrats to share fake news links—but still, fewer than a fifth of Republicans did so.70 Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues found that the reach of fake news declined in the 2018 midterm election cycle, partly thanks to countermeasures by the media platforms.71 During the pandemic in 2020, polls found that more Republicans (80 percent) trusted Trump for medical information than trusted the Centers for Disease Control.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Their posts bore headlines: Craig Silverman, “Use This Checklist to Find Out If You’re Looking at Fake News,” BuzzFeed, December 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-checkllist-1?utm_term=.vsb1J2yAD#.bymK6DqMx; Craig Silverman, “6 Easy AF Steps to Detect Fake News Like a Pro,” BuzzFeed, December 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/detect-fake-news-like-a-pro-2; Craig Silverman, “This Is How You Can Stop Fake News from Spreading on Facebook,” BuzzFeedNews, November 19, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/heres-how-to-report-fake-news-on-facebook. Lytvynenko said: Jane Lytvynenko, interviewed by John Stillman at BuzzFeed Toronto, July 28, 2017.

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As a result, much of what they published had a distinctly didactic quality. Their posts bore headlines like “Use This Checklist to Find Out If You’re Looking at Fake News” and “6 Easy [as Fuck] Steps to Detect Fake News Like a Pro” and “This Is How You Can Stop Fake News from Spreading on Facebook.” The urgency of their work did not altogether prevent them from enjoying it, but the job also posed certain occupational hazards. Lytvynenko said it had given her nightmares. Her first big BuzzFeed story, for example, was on the German creator of a fake-news site whose anti-immigration fearmongering clickbait doubled as a driver of traffic to his web store, where he sold firearms.

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On the very day the editors: Abby Ohlheiser, “Three Days after Removing Human Editors, Facebook Is Already Trending Fake News,” Washington Post, August 29, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08/29/a-fake-headline-about-megyn-kelly-was-trending-on-facebook/?utm_term=.b4df12f85d94. Then more: Craig Silverman, “Here’s Why Facebook’s Trending Algorithm Keeps Promoting Fake News,” BuzzFeed, October 26, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/can-facebook-trending-fight-off-fake-news. He did so in early September: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, September 6, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103087138471551.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

Technologically, the same artificial intelligence techniques used to detect fake news can be used to get around detectors, leading to an arms race of production and detection that the detectors are unlikely to win. A second approach is governmental regulation. Some countries have already passed laws against creating or spreading fake news, but we worry about this approach for two reasons. First, it runs afoul of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. Second, who gets to determine what is fake news? If a leader doesn’t like a story, he or she could declare it fake news and pursue criminal charges against the perpetrators.

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But more recently, governments such as those of China, Iran, and Russia have discovered that social media offers an ideal platform on which to monitor public sentiment, track dissent, and surreptitiously manipulate popular opinion. Still, fake news is not primarily a propaganda tool. Most fake and hyperpartisan news is created for a different reason: to generate advertising revenue. Anyone, anywhere can get in on the action. In the final days of the 2016 US election, Barack Obama talked extensively about the fake news factories in Macedonia. The people running these factories—often teenagers—created at least 140 popular fake news websites during the election. When a story went viral, it generated huge advertising revenues for the site owners.

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You don’t necessarily know the answer just by looking at it; you may have to do some research. It’s not clear where to do that research, or what sources count as authoritative. Once you find an answer, reasonable people still might not agree whether you are looking at fake news, hyperpartisan news, satire, or some other type of misinformation. And because fake news is continually evolving, a training set of fake news stories from 2020 might be out of date by 2021. To call bullshit on the newest AI startup, it is often sufficient to ask for details about the training data. Where did it come from? Who labeled it? How representative is the data?

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

And here’s Jack, in Croydon, in 2018, showing that it worked. Jack: Um. Where do you stand on fake news, James? James: I’m passionately opposed to it. But you can’t answer a question with a question. Jack: I can’t do it. I can’t answer fake questions with fake answers. Sorry, mate. James: It’s not a fake question. How do you feel about the mocking of disabled journalists? Jack: Fake news. James: But we’ve seen the pictures, Jack. Jack: Fake news. James: So the pictures are fake? Jack: Fake news. James: OK. So how do we feel about the mocking of Gold Star families? This refers to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Pakistani American parents of US Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in the Iraq War in 2004.

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Trump responded by suggesting erroneously that the speech had been written by Hillary Clinton’s staff and insulting the parents, saying: ‘If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably – maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.’ Jack: Gold Star families? Again, fake news. James: You’ve seen it on your screen, Jack. Jack: I’ve seen it on my screen, mate. Fake news. James: How do you know the story about the balloon isn’t fake news? Why have you chosen to believe this? Jack: You’re going nuts about it, and I know why. James: Jack, I think it’s funny. I’m not going nuts about it. I’m giggling. You’re the one who’s phoned me about a giant balloon.

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It’s because you describe all the facts that provide the basis for attacking Donald Trump as ‘fake news’. So you can understand why! Come on, Jack, no one’s that stupid. If you describe the evidence of your own eyes as ‘fake news’, then of course you can understand why people keep attacking him. It’s not difficult to grasp that, if you describe facts as lies, then you’ve chosen not to understand. I can’t really help you any more than that. Jack: Give me some real facts and then we can talk about them. James: I just have. He mocks disabled journalists, he boasts about sexually assaulting women, he’s a multiple bankrupt … Jack: Fake news. James: He mocked the parents of a Gold Star soldier.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Above all, I had fallen for “fake news.” Everyone falls for fake news sometimes, and if people say they don’t, they either are lying to themselves, lack the humility to admit it, or still don’t realize they’ve been duped. The vaccine-autism conspiracy continues on the internet and social media today. I’ve even seen it coming from Russian trolls infiltrating American audiences. Autism is something everyone hopes to avoid, regardless of political affiliation. If a troll can hook someone on an autism conspiracy, it’ll be even easier to hook them on a social or political conspiracy. But why did I fall for fake news? I research social media and study this stuff, and yet I still convinced myself to space out my daughter’s vaccinations and demand single packaged shots, just in case vaccinations caused autism.

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Less than a month after the election, social media influence became a fixation with journalists as they looked for an explanation as to how Donald Trump had beaten all the odds. He was completely unconventional, uninformed, unlikable in so many ways, and yet he had become the leader of the free world. Fake news entered the American lexicon, and my team’s pre-election detailing of Russian active measures on the internet was now the subject of hot debate. Had fake news swayed the U.S. presidential election? A Washington Post article cited our study, and soon left-leaning trolls, led by the self-righteous Glenn Greenwald, of the Intercept, and the always bitter Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, grouped me with McCarthyites seeking to suppress free speech.

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I research social media and study this stuff, and yet I still convinced myself to space out my daughter’s vaccinations and demand single packaged shots, just in case vaccinations caused autism. I had created my own fake news back when I socially engineered prank calls at West Point as a cadet, and later I fell for fake news in trying to care for my daughter. I fell for the vaccine-autism conspiracy due to my preference bubble: my friend was the source, and I wanted to believe I could avoid autism by my own initiative. I suffered terribly from my implicit bias. Moreover, my friend and I both shared anxiety about increases in autism diagnoses and, as upcoming first-time parents, we both were more likely to spread the emotionally potent conspiracy.7 Social media has only made the danger of falling for fake news worse.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

But belief in one or more of those fake news stories accounted for another 11 percent. For voters defecting from the Democratic ticket, falling for even one of just those random three fake news items had a greater effect than any other individual factor, apart from simply being a Republican. Gunther, Beck, and Nisbet include the cautious disclaimer that “we cannot prove that belief in fake news caused these former Obama voters to defect from the Democratic candidate in 2016,” but go on to conclude that “these data strongly suggest, however, that exposure to fake news did have a significant impact on voting decisions.”34 In academic speak, this is as close to an admission of direct causality as we are likely to get.

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The data shows that the truth rarely reached more than 1,000 Twitter users, whereas the most malignant and outrageous lies reached well over 10,000—and, of course, it got there a lot faster. The tweets containing “fake news” stories took one-sixth the time to reach 1,500 people as tweets containing accurate information—and not because they were shared by users with a larger platform or disproportionately amplified by bots.39 In fact, the study concluded that, unlike us, bots were spreading fake news and real news at an equal rate. Humans, on the other hand, could not get enough of the lies. Average people were just more inclined—70 percent more inclined—to retweet the “fake news” tweets than anything remotely true. And while Twitter accounts that predominately shared accurate information had more followers, they also determined that the crazier a tweet was—no matter where it came from—the more likely it was to go viral.40 As you’ll recall, mere exposure creates in us an unconscious truth bias toward the familiar and prevalent—the predicate of all successful propaganda.

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The problem is that from riots in China to suicides in New Jersey, Hoaxes are a category of lie that never—by definition—stays on a personal scale. Once enough individual beliefs reach that critical mass I mentioned earlier, they alter everyone’s reality. Take, for example, the 2016 election. According to a recent Ohio State University study, fake news likely swung the presidency to Donald Trump. The study, authored by Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck, and Erik C. Nisbet,32 is one of the first analyses of the effect fake news had on voter turnout and their choices, and it suggests that around 4 percent of Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 were dissuaded from voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 specifically because of the influence of specious news.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

He knew that current technology was not up to the task, which required a very subtle breed of human judgment. Any AI technology that could reliably identify fake news would have passed a much larger milestone. “It would mean AI has reached human-level intelligence,” he said. He also knew that fake news was in the eye of the beholder. Separating the real from the fake was a matter of opinion. If humans couldn’t agree on what was and what was not fake news, how could they train machines to recognize it? News was, inherently, a tension between objective observation and subjective judgment. “In many cases,” Pomerleau said, “there is no right answer.”

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“Today, as we sit here, 99 percent of the ISIS and Al Qaeda content”: Ibid. Pomerleau tweeted out what he called the “Fake News Challenge”: Dean Pomerleau tweet, November 29, 2016, https://twitter.com/deanpomerleau/status/803692511906635777?s=09. “I will give anyone 20:1 odds”: Ibid. “It would mean AI has reached human-level intelligence”: Cade Metz, “The Bittersweet Sweepstakes to Build an AI That Destroys Fake News,” Wired, December 16, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/12/bittersweet-sweepstakes-build-ai-destroys-fake-news/. “In many cases”: Ibid. the company held a press roundtable at its corporate headquarters in Menlo Park: Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Looks to Harness Artificial Intelligence to Weed Out Fake News,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-could-develop-artificial-intelligence-to-weed-out-fake-news-1480608004.

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But the talent shift wasn’t the biggest change wrought by Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office. From the moment the election ended, the national media started to question the role of online misinformation in the outcome, raising deep concerns over the power of “fake news.” Mark Zuckerberg initially dismissed these concerns during a public appearance in Silicon Valley days after the election, blithely saying it was a “pretty crazy idea” that voters were swayed by fake news. A chorus of reporters, lawmakers, pundits, and private citizens, however, pushed back. The truth was that the problem had been rampant during the election, particularly on Facebook’s social network, where hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps even millions, had shared hoax stories with headlines like “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead of Apparent Murder-Suicide” and “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

This is why the Founders felt it critical that an American electorate be well informed, and why being a discerning and informed citizen is now more important than ever before. Fake news has been around forever. Our own time, of course, has put its distinctive mark on this scourge. We haven’t, for instance, always had the technology to disseminate and target fake news in such a way that millions of people believe it to be true, the way we do now. We haven’t always had to deal with weaponized information as a means to wage war by foreign enemy powers. We haven’t always had the willingness and brazenness of certain politicians to exploit the gullibility of certain voters by pushing fake news. Perhaps most destructive of all, we haven’t ever had an occupant of the White House who so routinely calls true reports that irk him “fake news” while giving his seal of approval to fake reports that happen to support his position.

…

Some of our Western allies are so concerned about the threat posed by fake news that they are considering imposing enormous civil penalties on the social networks that spread it and profit from it. Some proposals even criminalize the content itself. In the months after our election, as worries of Russian meddling and an awareness of the magnitude of the problem crossed the Atlantic to threaten parliamentary elections in Germany and France, the German minister of the interior proposed to fine Facebook and Twitter $53 million for each instance of fake news that is not removed from circulation within twenty-four hours.

…

Even the technologists and the social media goliaths are having to race to stay clear about what it is they’re selling and about what is and isn’t true. In the early months of 2017, CBS’s 60 Minutes devoted a segment to the subject of fake news, where it reported that in Michigan (for example) in the days before the election, fully half of the information in circulation on social media was fraudulent. And during its investigation into Russian meddling into our 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee interviewed a former FBI agent named Clinton Watts, who revealed that the Russians, who are now wielding fake news as a weapon of war, had during the election used “trolls” to expertly plant false stories in the American news ecosystem, stories that were amplified geometrically by Russian “bots,” machine-run Twitter accounts that share stories artificially, causing them to go viral.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

For example, Media Matters had a detailed map of the constellation of right-wing Facebook pages that had been the biggest purveyors of fake news - as well as insight into the food chain of fake news and how it was moving through the Facebook ecosystem. Similarly, after Google revised their terms of service in order to prohibit so-called fake news sites from using their advertising network, it was Media Matters that had the information necessary to identify 40 of the worst fake news sites to which this policy applied.” If forcing the social media platforms to silence those with dissenting voices does not work during the course of their four-year plan, Media Matters has a backup plan that seems crazy, even by their standards.

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They have the ability to start hot wars through a simple formula of concocting lies, manipulating the way the viewers felt about those lies, followed by constant repetition. But they call the Alternative Media “fake news”? The Nightly News is so fake that it says “Made in China” on the label and falls apart the first time someone tries to actually put it on and wear it. Their hysterical overreaction when President Trump flipped the script and slapped the “fake news” label on CNN showed their insecurity about being exposed as an entertainment channel and not an actual news organization. The reaction of the mainstream media proves that the “fake news” is not actually fake because they are so obviously threatened by it, otherwise, they would simply ignore it.

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Did NBC run a special broadcast to refute Elvis being spotted at a Chick-Fil-A, or eating Ding Dongs at a Winn Dixie store? No, why not? That is fake news, right? So where is the massive overreaction from the mainstream media? They had fake news right in front of their faces when President Obama pretended to drink a glass of Flint, Michigan water during a campaign, but they failed to recognize such an obvious stunt, in part because they liked the guy.170 The discovery of the actual fake news being pushed by the major news organizations sent some people into a frenzy of retaliation against these big corporations, but they did not turn out as well as some had hoped.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Olivier Sylvain, “Intermediary Design Duties,” Connecticut Law Review 50, no. 1 (2018): 203; Danielle Keats Citron and Mary Anne Franks, “The Internet as a Speech Machine and Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform” (working paper, Public Law Research Paper No. 20-8, Boston University School of Law, Massachusetts, 2020); Carrie Goldberg, Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls (New York: Plume, 2019), 38. 27. Craig Silverman, “Facebook Is Turning to Fact-Checkers to Fight Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, December 15, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/facebook-and-fact-checkers-fight-fake-news?utm_term=.phQ1y0OexV#.sn4XJ8ZoLA. 28. Timothy B. Lee, “Facebook Should Crush Fake News the Way Google Crushed Spammy Content Farms,” Vox, December 8, 2016, http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/12/8/13875960/facebook-fake-news-google. 29. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Carole Cadwalladr, “Google, Democracy and the Truth about Internet Search,” Guardian, December 4, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook. 30.

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Their own design choices mean that summaries of stories shared on Facebook, as well as those presented by Google’s desktop and mobile displays, all tend to look similarly authoritative, whatever the source.19 Thus, a story from the fabricated “Denver Guardian,” falsely tying Hillary Clinton to an FBI agent’s suicide, can appear as authoritative as a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation debunking such conspiracy theories.20 More directly, Facebook profits from fake news; the more a story is shared (whatever its merits), the more ad revenue it brings in.21 Toward the end of the 2016 election, fake news outperformed real news in Facebook’s ecosystem.22 We also now know that Facebook directly helped the Trump campaign target its voter-suppression efforts at African Americans.23 Ethics was an afterthought, as long as the ad money kept rolling in.

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Germany has led the way, with legislation imposing clear responsibility on platforms for fake news. Inadequacies of AI detection systems are no longer an excuse there. The Netherlands has also empowered officials to punish platforms that feature hate speech or lies. Still, media regulators in both countries face criticism from a press that perceives any restrictions—even on the platforms that are now draining their revenue away—as an assault on hard-won independence. Matters are even worse in the United States, where a prevaricator-in-chief managed to use “fake news” as an epithet against the very outlets trying to expose his misdeeds.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

* * * • • • To understand viral humbug such as urban legends, tabloid headlines, and fake news, we have to remember that it is fantastically entertaining. It plays out themes of sex, violence, revenge, danger, fame, magic, and taboo that have always titillated patrons of the arts, high and low. A fake headline like FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide would be an excellent plot in a suspense thriller. A recent quantitative analysis of the content of fake news concluded that “the same features that make urban legends, fiction, and in fact any narrative, culturally attractive also operate for online misinformation.”53 Often the entertainment spills into genres of comedy, including slapstick, satire, and farce: Morgue Employee Cremated by Mistake While Taking a Nap; Donald Trump Ends School Shootings by Banning Schools; Bigfoot Keeps Lumberjack as Love Slave.

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Gigerenzer, G., Swijtink, Z., Porter, T., Daston, L., Beatty, J., et al. 1989. The empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gilbert, B. 2019. The 10 most-viewed fake-news stories on Facebook in 2019 were just revealed in a new report. Business Insider, Nov. 6. https://www.businessinsider.com/most-viewed-fake-news-stories-shared-on-facebook-2019-2019-11. Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., & Tversky, A. 1985. The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295–314. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(85)90010-6.

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Building a better correction: Three lessons from new research on how to counter misinformation. Columbia Journalism Review. http://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/building_a_better_correction_nyhan_new_misperception_research.php. Nyhan, B. 2018. Fake news and bots may be worrisome, but their political power is overblown. New York Times, Feb. 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/fake-news-and-bots-may-be-worrisome-but-their-political-power-is-overblown.html. Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. 2012. Misinformation and fact-checking: Research findings from social science. Washington, DC: New America Foundation. Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. 2019.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

hl=en. 10 | CANNIBALIZATION Most Instagram users had no idea: Casey Newton, “America Doesn’t Trust Facebook,” The Verge, October 27, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16552620/facebook-trust-survey-usage-popularity-fake-news. the top stories with false information: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed News, November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook. Some Facebook executives, like Adam: Salvador Rodriguez, “Facebook’s Adam Mosseri Fought Hard Against Fake News—Now He’s Leading Instagram,” CNBC, May 31, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/31/instagram-adam-mosseri-must-please-facebook-investors-and-zuckerberg.html.

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They tended to promote her brand: Frier, “Trump’s Campaign Says It Was Better at Facebook.” He warned the CEO that: Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Craig Timberg, “Obama Tried to Give Zuckerberg a Wake-Up Call over Fake News on Facebook,” Washington Post, September 24, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-tried-to-give-zuckerberg-a-wake-up-call-over-fake-news-on-facebook/2017/09/24/15d19b12-ddac-4ad5-ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html. Zuckerberg reassured the outgoing president: Entous, Dwoskin, and Timberg, “Obama Tried to Give Zuckerberg a Wake-Up Call.” While people spent an average: Sarah Frier, “Facebook Watch Isn’t Living Up to Its Name,” Bloomberg Businessweek, January 28, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-28/facebook-watch-struggles-to-deliver-hits-or-advertisers.

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Some of them stayed home, too emotional to face the reality of the erratic new leader of the United States. The media generated several handy narratives for How It Happened. A top theory was that the news feed algorithm, designed by engineers to give people what they wanted, had been rewarding articles and videos that subtly nudged voters to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories and fake news that often cast Clinton herself in the worst possible light. Stories that claimed the pope had endorsed Trump, or that Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State, were juiced by Facebook’s algorithms and promoted to millions of Facebook users. In the three months prior to the election, the top stories with false information reached more people on Facebook than the top stories from legitimate news outlets.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

., “Participations”; Bakioglu, “Exposing Convergence”; David and Pinch, “Six Degrees of Reputation”; Fast, Örnebring, and Karlsson, “Metaphors of Free Labor”; Herman, “Production, Consumption, and Labor in the Social Media Mode of Communication”; Jarrett, “The Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’”; Postigo, “The Socio-Technical Architecture of Digital Labor”; van Doorn, “Platform Labor.” 37Melissa Zimdars, “My ‘Fake News List’ Went Viral. But Made-Up Stories Are Only Part of the Problem,” Washington Post, November 18, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/18/my-fake-news-list-went-viral-but-made-up-stories-are-only-part-of-the-problem/?utm_term=.e85377696beb; Angie Drobnic Holan, “2016 Lie of the Year: Fake News,” Politifact, December 13, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/dec/13/2016-lie-year-fake-news/. For a survey of the fake news phenomenon, see also Jack, “Lexicon of Lies.” 38Associated Press, “‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Suspect: ‘The Intel on This Wasn’t 100 Percent,’” December 8, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pizzagate-shooting-suspect-edgar-maddison-welch-intel-wasnt-100-percent/. 39Kaveh Waddell, “Facebook and Google Won’t Let Fake News Sites Use Their Ad Networks,” Atlantic, November 15, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/facebook-and-google-wont-let-fake-news-sites-use-their-ads-platforms/507737/. 40This has expanded: for example, Google started letting users flag when their “snippets” when they’re incorrect.

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When an intermediary grows this large, this entwined with the institutions of public discourse, this crucial, it has an implicit contract with the public that, whether platform management likes it or not, can differ from the contract it required users to click through. The primary and secondary effects these platforms have on essential aspects of public life, as they become apparent, now lie at their doorstep. Fake news is a useful example. Facebook and Twitter never promised to deliver only reliable information, nor are they legally obligated to spot and remove fraud. But the implicit contract is now such that they are held accountable for some of the harms of fake news, and must find ways to intervene. This is not a contract that will ever bind the platforms in court, but it is certain to be upheld in the court of public opinion. Even as moderation grows more complicated and costly, the expectations of users have grown not more forgiving but more demanding.

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For a survey of the fake news phenomenon, see also Jack, “Lexicon of Lies.” 38Associated Press, “‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Suspect: ‘The Intel on This Wasn’t 100 Percent,’” December 8, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pizzagate-shooting-suspect-edgar-maddison-welch-intel-wasnt-100-percent/. 39Kaveh Waddell, “Facebook and Google Won’t Let Fake News Sites Use Their Ad Networks,” Atlantic, November 15, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/facebook-and-google-wont-let-fake-news-sites-use-their-ads-platforms/507737/. 40This has expanded: for example, Google started letting users flag when their “snippets” when they’re incorrect. See Klint Finley, “Google Wants You to Help Fix the Fake-Fact Problem,” Wired, April 26, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/04/google-wants-crowd-solve-fake-fact-problem/. 41danah boyd, “Turmoil in Blogland,” Salon, January 8, 2005, http://www.salon.com/2005/01/08/livejournal/. 42Personal interview. 43Personal interview. 44Carolyn Gregoire, “The Hunger Blogs: A Secret World of Teenage ‘Thinspiration,’” Huffington Post, February 8, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/thinspiration-blogs_n_1264459.html. 45Boero and Pascoe, “Pro-Anorexia Communities and Online Interaction.” 46Alice Marwick, “Is Blocking Pro-ED Content the Right Way to Solve Eating Disorders?”

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Advocates of fact-checking also assume that everyone reasons the same way: Woolley & Joseff. Demand for deceit. Fact-checking can actually reinforce the spread of false information: Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. (2020, March 24). The right way to fight fake news. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/opinion/fake-news-social-media.html; Pennycook, G., Bear, A., Collins, E. T., & Rand, D. G. (2020). The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news headlines increases perceived accuracy of headlines without warnings. Management Science [Forthcoming]. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3035384 General warnings about the veracity of news can actually reduce confidence in all news sources: Clayton, K., Blair, S., Busam, J.

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Doubleday; For a contrary view, see Rid, T. (2013). Cyber war will not take place. Oxford University Press USA. Spreading false information is as old as humanity itself: See Posetti, J., & Matthews, A. (2018, July 23). A short guide to the history of “fake news” and disinformation. Retrieved from https://www.icfj.org/news/short-guide-history-fake-news-and-disinformation-new-icfj-learning-module Nonetheless products of history: See Deibert, R. (1999). Harold Innis and the empire of speed. Review of International Studies, 25(2), 273–289; Ruggie, J. G. (1993). Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing modernity in international relations.

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Retrieved from https://web-assets.domo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18_domo_data-never-sleeps-6verticals.pdf “Human cognitive architecture”: Lin, H. (2019). The existential threat from cyber-enabled information warfare. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (75), 187–196; See also Matthews, J. (2019, April). A cognitive scientist explains why humans are so susceptible to fake news and misinformation. Retrieved from https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/a-cognitive-scientist-explains-why-humans-are-so-susceptible-to-fake-news-and-misinformation/ Thanks to the pioneering work of Nobel Prize– winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman: Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan; Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Whether the timing was coincidental doesn’t really matter: as long as Reddit maintains a “free speech” ideology that relies on unpaid moderators to function, it will continue to fall apart—and the victims will be those on the receiving end of harassment. FAKING NEWS Speaking of broken platforms and the American president, I would be remiss not to talk about perhaps the biggest story related to technology and the 2016 election: “fake news.” As I write this today, the term has pretty much lost its meaning: the president and his staff now use it to vilify any press coverage they don’t like. But during the fall of 2016, actual fake news was all over Facebook: The Pope endorses Donald Trump! Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS! According to a BuzzFeed News analysis, in the run-up to Election Day 2016, the top twenty fake stories from hoax and hyperpartisan sources generated more engagement on Facebook than the top twenty election stories from major news sites: 8.7 million shares, comments, and reactions, versus 7.4 million from real news sources.42 Most reports traced the problem back to May of 2016, when tech news site Gizmodo published an article based on an interview with former members of Facebook’s Trending team.

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But it didn’t matter: in August, the Trending team was suddenly laid off, and a group of engineers took its place to monitor the performance of the Trending algorithm.45 Within three days, that algorithm was pushing fake news to the top of the feed: “BREAKING: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out for Backing Hillary,” the headline read. The story was fake, its description was riddled with typos, and the site it appeared on was anything but credible: EndingTheFed.com, run by a twenty-four-year-old Romanian man who copied and pasted stories from other conservative-leaning fake-news sites. Yet the story stayed at the top of the Trending charts for hours. Four different stories from EndingTheFed.com went on to make it into BuzzFeed’s list of most-shared fake-news articles during the election.46 This time, conservative pundits and politicians were silent.

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The idea is so ingrained in Facebook’s culture—so core to the way it sees the world—that One Hacker Way is even the official address of the company’s fancy Menlo Park headquarters. That’s why it was so easy for fake news to take hold on Facebook: combine the deeply held conviction that you can engineer your way out of anything with a culture focused on moving fast without worrying about the implications, and you don’t just break things. You break public access to information. You break trust. You break people. Facebook didn’t mean to make fake news a real problem, just like Twitter didn’t mean to enable harassers. But Facebook’s unquestioning commitment to the Hacker Way—to a belief system that puts technical solutions first, and encourages programmers and product teams to take risks without thinking about their implications—made it easy for it to stay blind to the problem, until it was far too late.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

So far, the press remains free, at least as a formal matter. But the most popular news outlets enthusiastically embrace President Trump’s programs. They are careful not to criticize him. The majority of Americans dismiss the president’s critics as sources of “fake news.” The Department of Justice is starting to investigate some sources of fake news for possible sedition. Whether or not the investigations result in prosecution, the dissenting news outlets are increasingly marginal. In terms of impact, they’re failing, and their economic situation is increasingly dire. In a recent speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump declared that the war on Islamic terrorism “had no beginning and has no end.”

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Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2. Herbert Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 3. See vol. 6 of The Complete Anti-Federalist, 201. Chapter 5 1. “Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion,” Pew, December 2016, http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowing-confusion/. 2. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (New York: Penguin Press, 1999), 315–17; Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975–1985, eds.

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Presidential Election,” First Monday, November 2016, http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7090/5653. 22. Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” NBER Working Paper No. 23089, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2017, http://www.nber.org/papers/w23089. 23. “National Security Advisor General H. R. McMaster on MSNBC with Hugh Hewitt,” August 5, 2017, http://www.hughhewitt.com/national-security-advisor-general-h-r-mcmaster-msnbc-hugh/. 24. Joe Parkinson and Georgi Kantchev, “Document: Russia Uses Rigged Polls, Fake News to Sway Foreign Elections,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-does-russia-meddle-in-elections-look-at-bulgaria-1490282352. 25.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

Jordan Davidson, “Surprise! The ‘Russian Bounty’ Story Hyped Up by Corrupt Media to Hurt Trump Turned Out to Be Fake News,” The Federalist, April 15, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/15/surprise-the-russian-bounty-story-hyped-up-by-corrupt-media-to-hurt-trump-turned-out-to-be-fake-news/. 41. Tristan Justice, “Liz Cheney Was a Primary Culprit of Spreading Fake News on Russian Bounties to Undermine Trump,” The Federalist, April 16, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/liz-cheney-was-a-primary-culprit-of-spreading-fake-news-on-russian-bounties-to-undermine-trump/. 42. Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews), “This raises the obvious and very serious question: The US had intelligence that Russia was paying militants to kill US & allied troops…,” Twitter, June 27, 2020, 4:54 p.m., https://twitter.com/JoshNBCNews/status/1276982370973945863. 43.

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Jordan Davidson, “These ‘Fortune 500’ Companies Donated to the Marxist, Anti-Capitalism Black Lives Matter Foundation,” The Federalist, July 13, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/13/these-fortune-500-companies-donated-to-the-marxist-anti-capitalism-black-lives-matter-foundation/. 48. Jonah Gottschalk, “Twitter Mob Attacks Wendy’s after Falling for Fake News,” The Federalist, June 2, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/02/twitter-mob-attacks-wendys-after-falling-for-fake-news/. 49. Chris Cwik, “Drew Brees Addresses NFL Players Kneeling in 2020: ‘I Will Never Agree with Anybody Disrespecting the Flag,’ ” Yahoo, June 3, 2020, https://sports.yahoo.com/drew-brees-addresses-nfl-players-kneeling-in-2020-i-will-never-agree-with-anybody-disrespecting-the-flag-164423496.html. 50.

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Allum Bokhari, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election (New York: Center Street, 2020), 29. 4. Ibid., 423. 5. Sheera Frenkel, “Renegade Facebook Employees Form Task Force to Battle Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 14, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/renegade-facebook-employees-form-task-force-to-battle-fake-n. 6. Sam Levin, “Mark Zuckerberg: I Regret Ridiculing Fears over Facebook’s Effect on Election,” The Guardian, September 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-2016-election-fake-news. 7. Michael Nunez, “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” Gizmodo, May 9, 2016, https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006. 8.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

“Facebook: ‘We cannot become arbiters of truth—it’s not our role.’” iNews. April 6, 2017. https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/technology/facebook-looks-choke-fake-news-cutting-off-financial-lifeline/. 36. “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016.” 37. Pogue, David. “What Facebook Is Doing to Combat Fake News.” Scientific American. February 1, 2017. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pogue-what-facebook-is-doing-to-combat-fake-news/. 38. Harris, Sam. Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012), 8. 39. Bosker, Bianca. “The Binge Breaker.” Atlantic, November 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/.

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He went into the restaurant and fired a shot, though without hurting anyone (this time), and was arrested.34 The shit sandwich here is that having legitimate news next to fake news has only made the Facebook platform more dangerous. When standing in line at Kroger, you may suspect Hillary is not an alien, despite what the Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids tell you. However, the presence of the New York Times and WaPo on Facebook has legitimized fake news. Platform How can Facebook exert some form of editorial control? A good place to start is with hate crimes. It’s easy to be on the right side of that one.

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If Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67 percent of U.S. adults,36 and if more us, each day, are getting our news from it, then Facebook has become, de facto, the largest news media firm in the world. The question is, does news media have a greater responsibility to pursue, and police, the truth? Isn’t that the point of news media? As the backlash continued, Facebook introduced tools to help combat fake news. Users can now flag a story as fake, and it will be sent to a fact-checking service. In addition, Facebook is using software to identify potentially fake news.37 However, with both of those methods, even if false, at most the story is only labeled “disputed.” Given the polarization of our political climate and the “backfire effect”—where if you present someone with evidence against their beliefs, they double down on their convictions—a “disputed” label won’t persuade a lot of people.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the Serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries an Untouchable – yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts for ever. I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month – that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years – that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it ‘fake news’ in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath). Note, however, that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion.

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Therefore, if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better try your luck with chimps. Getting out of the brainwashing machine All this does not mean that fake news is not a serious problem, or that politicians and priests have a free licence to lie through their teeth. It would also be totally wrong to conclude that everything is just fake news, that any attempt to discover the truth is doomed to failure, and that there is no difference whatsoever between serious journalism and propaganda. Underneath all the fake news, there are real facts and real suffering. In Ukraine, for example, Russian soldiers are really fighting, thousands have really died, and hundreds of thousands have really lost their homes.

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WAR Never underestimate human stupidity 12. HUMILITY You are not the centre of the world 13. GOD Don’t take the name of God in vain 14. SECULARISM Acknowledge your shadow Part IV: Truth 15. IGNORANCE You know less than you think 16. JUSTICE Our sense of justice might be out of date 17. POST-TRUTH Some fake news lasts for ever 18. SCIENCE FICTION The future is not what you see in the movies Part V: Resilience 19. EDUCATION Change is the only constant 20. MEANING Life is not a story 21. MEDITATION Just observe Notes Acknowledgements Index Copyright About the Book FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER SAPIENS Sapiens showed us where we came from.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

But whatever they said in private, in public Facebook and the other companies rejected the concerns their executives and employees were voicing. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way—I think is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said two days after the vote. He chided critics for, he said, “a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news.” Overnight, the “revolution company,” as Zuckerberg had once described Facebook—the platform that credited itself with aiding the Arab Spring and that had in its own 2010 experiment empirically demonstrated its ability to mobilize 340,000 voters, the leader of an industry that saw itself as the culmination of Silicon Valley’s promise to transform human consciousness—suddenly claimed to be just a website.

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One of them, Glenn Beck, wrote up the meeting, praising Zuckerberg as a champion of free speech. Facebook fired the contractors overseeing the trending widget on a Friday, letting algorithms take full control. By Monday, its top story was a fake-news link accusing Fox News host Megyn Kelly of backing Hillary Clinton. The far-right blog that had published it was later identified as one of the top drivers of fake news on Facebook during the 2016 election. That summer, in July, just a few days before the Republican National Convention formally nominated Trump for president, Zuckerberg was confronted at a financial conference by Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the founder and the CEO, respectively, of News Corp, which owns Fox News and many conservative outlets internationally.

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To the insider who’d leaked them to me, the files were evidence of the company’s sloppiness and shortcuts in trying to stem the growing global turmoil that he believed its products exacerbated, or even caused. To me, they were even more than that. They were a window into how Facebook’s leadership thought about the consequences of social media’s rise. Like many, I had initially assumed social media’s dangers came mostly from misuse by bad actors—propagandists, foreign agents, fake-news peddlers—and that at worst the various platforms were a passive conduit for society’s preexisting problems. But virtually everywhere I traveled in my reporting, covering far-off despots, wars, and upheavals, strange and extreme events kept getting linked back to social media. A sudden riot, a radical new group, widespread belief in some oddball conspiracy—all had a common link.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

You’ll also know that straight white men aren’t evil (it’s actually racist and sexist to believe so) and that Western values rooted in individual rights are the cornerstones of free societies. Defend them proudly! Learn how to spot fake news: So much of this hatred comes from our deeply corrupt mainstream media. Activists pretending to be journalists have helped spread fake news more than Donald Trump ever could do on his own, so we’ll look at how to spot the lies. You’ll learn that the blue-check Twitterati at Vox, BuzzFeed, and HuffPo release ideologically driven articles presented as legitimate journalism.

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. | Rubin, Dave, 1976– Classification: LCC JC585 .R823 2020 (print) | LCC JC585 (ebook) | DDC 320.51/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058060 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058061 pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0 For Ben Affleck CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 It’s Time to Come Out CHAPTER 2 Embrace Your Wake-Up Call CHAPTER 3 Think Freely or Die CHAPTER 4 Don’t Worry, You’re Not a Nazi CHAPTER 5 Check Your Facts, Not Your Privilege CHAPTER 6 Never Surrender to the Mob CHAPTER 7 Stop Hating (Straight) White Men, America, and Western Values CHAPTER 8 Learn How to Spot Fake News CHAPTER 9 Find a Mentor CHAPTER 10 Move On with Your Life Acknowledgments Notes Index 1 It’s Time to Come Out THE ORIGINAL TITLE of this book was Why I Left the Left. For many months, the master plan was to give a definitive account of my political evolution.

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It quickly became clear to me that they were just pushing propaganda by selectively editing stories to drum up click-bait headlines, without ever considering counter-narratives or challenges to their agenda. In essence, they designed the first model of the dangerous outrage machine that produces what we have come to call fake news. In the beginning I’d dismiss this and always try to push the narrative back into the center while discussing whatever political dramas were big at the time, but every debate seemed to end with somebody, somewhere, being called a bigot—just for having a different opinion. Simply put, no matter what the conversation was about, there was always a smear on hand to shame someone into silence.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Media elites and Democratic Party members couldn’t make that argument explicitly—it was simply too authoritarian. So instead, they designed the concept of “fake news”—false news that Americans had apparently been bamboozled by. Post-election, the term gained ground in rapid fashion, with left-wing sites like PolitiFact explaining, “In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse—promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters—gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity.” Predictably, PolitiFact blamed Facebook and Google.21 After the election, President Barack Obama—a man who certainly was no stranger to dissemination of false information, often with the compliance of a sycophantic press—complained about the “capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”22 In November 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) openly threatened the social media companies, growling, “You created these platforms . . . and now they’re being misused.

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Mark Zuckerberg, “Bring the World Closer Together,” Facebook.com, June 22, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/22/bring-the-world-closer-together/. 20. Justin Fox, “Why Twitter’s Mission Statement Matters,” HBR.org, November 13, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/11/why-twitters-mission-statement-matters. 21. Angie Drobnic Holan, “2016 Lie of the Year: Fake news,” Politifact.com, December 13, 2016, https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/dec/13/2016-lie-year-fake-news/. 22. David Remnick, “Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency,” NewYorker.com, November 18, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency. 23. Scott Shackford, “Senator Feinstein’s Threat to ‘Do Something’ to Social Media Companies Is a Bigger Danger to Democracy Than Russia,” Reason.com, November 3, 2017, https://reason.com/2017/11/03/sen-feinsteins-threat-to-do-something-to/. 24.

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Scott Shackford, “Senator Feinstein’s Threat to ‘Do Something’ to Social Media Companies Is a Bigger Danger to Democracy Than Russia,” Reason.com, November 3, 2017, https://reason.com/2017/11/03/sen-feinsteins-threat-to-do-something-to/. 24. Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s ‘crazy’ to think fake news stories got Trump elected,” Vox.com, November 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/11/13596792/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 25. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook.com, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10103508221158471/?pnref=story. 26. “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing,” WashingtonPost.com, April 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/. 27.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

If only people trusted journalists more, society would have a system in place for dealing with fake news. If only . . . we were back to issues of trust and the paradox that popularity, economic viability, editorial quality and trust did not inevitably go hand in hand. There was something about the present age that made people suspicious of the claims that journalism made for itself – along with many other institutions of the tower. And some of the new conventions of information were, in their publicness, an improvement on some historic practices. Take two: the correction and the link. For all the concern about fake news and the casualness with which inaccurate and distorted information spread, there was also a widespread instinct to correct things that were wrong, or untrue, or unclear.

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Joseph ref1 Canary Wharf ref1, ref2, ref3 Canonbury ref1 Carlson, Tucker ref1 Carman, George (QC) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n Carney, Mark ref1 Carter, Graydon ref1 Carter-Ruck lawyers ref1 Carvin, Andy ref1 Catch Me If You Can (film) ref1 Caulfield, Mr Justice ref1 Cecil, Lord Robert ref1 censorship ref1, ref2, ref3 CERN ref1 challenge ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Champaign News Gazette (newspaper) ref1, ref2 Channel 4 (TV) ref1, ref2 Chaos Monkeys (Martínez) ref1, ref2 Chapman, Jessica ref1 charity ref1 Charles, Prince ref1 Chartbeat ref1 Chehadé, Fadi ref1 Chernin, Peter ref1 Chicago Online ref1 Chicago Sun-Times (news-paper) ref1 Chicago Tribune (newspaper) ref1, ref2 China ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Chippendale, Peter ref1 Chomsky, Noam ref1, ref2 Churchill, Prime Minister Sir Winston ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘churnalism’ ref1, ref2 CIA ref1 CiF (Comment is Free) ref1, ref2 CiF Belief ref1, ref2n circulation ref1, ref2, ref3 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n bulk sales ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n, ref8n decline ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 gains ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 international ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 citizen journalists (stringers) ref1, ref2 Citizen Kane (film) ref1 City of London ref1 City University of New York (CUNY) ref1 Clapper, James ref1, ref2 Claridge’s hotel ref1, ref2 classified material ref1, ref2, ref3 Clegg, Nick (MP) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Clerkenwell ref1 ‘click-through rate’ (CTR) ref1 clickbait ref1, ref2 climate change ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n Clinton, President Bill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Clinton, Hillary ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Clooney, George ref1 Cobain, Ian ref1 Cobbet, William ref1 Code of Practice ref1 Coile, Peter ref1 Colao, Vittori ref1 colour ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Colvin, Marie ref1 Comey, James ref1 Committee of Imperial Defence (UK) ref1 Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ref1, ref2n ‘commodity news’ ref1 Common Purpose ref1 complexity ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 composing room ref1, ref2 ComScore ref1, ref2n concentration camps ref1 Conn, David ref1 consent ref1 Conservative Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 content management system ref1, ref2 convergence ref1 Coogan, Steve ref1 Cook, Tim ref1 Corn, David ref1 correction ref1, ref2 corruption ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Coulson, Andy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Cox, Jo (MP) ref1 Craigslist ref1, ref2 The Creation of the Media (Starr) ref1 cricket ref1 Crossman, Richard ref1 crowdfunding ref1 crowdsourcing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Crown Prosecution Service ref1, ref2 Crowther, Geoffrey ref1 Culture Media & Sports committee (UK) ref1 CUNY ref1 CVs ref1, ref2 cybercrime ref1 cyberspace ref1 Dacre, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4n Dagens Nyheter (newspaper) ref1, ref2 Daily Dish ref1 Daily (iPad newspaper) ref1 Daily Mail & General Trust ref1 Daily News (newspaper) ref1 Daily Sketch (newspaper) ref1 Dangerous Estate (Williams) ref1 Danks, Melanie ref1, ref2 Danny (IT expert) ref1 data ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Davies, Nick ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n, ref5n Davis, David (MP) ref1, ref2 Dayton Ohio peace accord ref1 De Correspondent ref1, ref2 de Tocqueville, Alexis ref1 ‘dead-tree journalism’ ref1, ref2 Deadline (film) ref1 deadlines ref1 Dean, Malcolm ref1n ‘death knock’ ref1 Deedes, Lord Bill ref1, ref2 Deedes, Jeremy ref1 Deepwater Horizon ref1 defamation ref1, ref2 Defence Advisory (DA) Notice system ref1, ref2, ref3 deference ref1 Defoe, Daniel ref1, ref2 Delane, John ref1, ref2 Delaunay hotel ref1, ref2 Delingpole, James ref1, ref2 Deller, Jeremy ref1 democracy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Democratic National Committee (DNC) ref1, ref2 Department of Justice (US) ref1 Der Spiegel (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3 Desmond, Richard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n Despicable Me (film) ref1 Dewey, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n Diamond, Bob ref1 Diana, Princess ref1 Diawara, Fatoumata ref1 Dickens, Charles ref1, ref2 Die Zeit (newspaper) ref1 Digg ref1 ‘Digital News Report’ (RISJ) ref1 Dixon, Hugo ref1 Dixon, Jeremy ref1, ref2n docu-tainment ref1, ref2 donations ref1, ref2 doorstep reporting ref1, ref2, ref3 Dorsey, Jack ref1 dot.com bubble ref1 Dowler, Milly ref1, ref2n Downie, Len ref1n Downing Street ref1, ref2 drinks culture ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Drudge ref1 drugs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 duty ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 DVDs ref1 Dworkin, Ronald ref1, ref2 eBay ref1, ref2, ref3 Economist (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Edelman Trust Barometer ref1n Edison, Thomas ref1 editorials ref1, ref2, ref3 Edmondson, Ian ref1 education ref1, ref2 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. ref1 El País (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 election (US 2016) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Electoral Commission ref1 electric cars ref1 Electronic Information Service ref1 The Elements of Journalism (Kovach/Rosenstiel) ref1 Elizabeth II, Queen ref1 Ellingham Hall (Suffolk) ref1 Ellis, Michael (MP) ref1 Ellison, Sarah ref1 Ellsberg, Daniel ref1 Emap ref1 eMarketer ref1 Enders Analysis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 endowment ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n Engelberg, Steve ref1 The Enlightenment ref1, ref2 Enron ref1 environment ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Enzensberger, Hans-Magnus ref1 Ernst & Young ref1 Espionage Act (1917) ref1 EternalBlue ref1n Euromyth ref1 Europe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 European Commission (EC) ref1 European Convention on Human Rights ref1, ref2 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ref1 European Court of Justice (ECJ) ref1, ref2, ref3 European (newspaper) ref1, ref2 European Union (EU) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Euston Project ref1 Evans, Sir Harold ref1, ref2, ref3 Evans, Rob ref1, ref2 Evans, Timothy ref1, ref2n experimentation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Facebook ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3 passim, ref1, ref2 passim, ref1 passim, ref1 facts ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 Fahrenthold, David ref1 Fairfax Media ref1, ref2, ref3 fake news see under falsehood Falconer, Lord ref1 Falkirk Herald (newspaper) ref1, ref2 falsehood ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 fake news ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 passim lies ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Farage, Nigel ref1, ref2 Farrar, Jeremy ref1 Farringdon Road ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 FBI ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 FedEx conditions of carriage ref1 Fedorcio, Dick ref1 Feinstein, Senator Diane ref1 female genital mutilation ref1, ref2 Ferguson, Niall ref1 Ferrer, Albert ref1 Fidler, Roger ref1 The Fifth Estate (film) ref1, ref2n Filloux, Frederic ref1 filter bubbles ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 First Amendment (US) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n Fish4jobs ref1 Fitzsimons, Sheila ref1n, ref2n Flat Earth News (Davies) ref1 Fleet Street ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Flickr ref1, ref2, ref3 Folwell, Steve ref1 food production ref1, ref2 Forbes (magazine) ref1 Ford, John ref1, ref2 foreign correspondents ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (US 1977) ref1 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts ref1 Foreign Office ref1 Forgan, Liz ref1, ref2 fossil fuels ref1 Fourth Estate ref1 Fox TV ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref6 Frankel, Max ref1 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (newspaper) ref1 free newspapers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 free press ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 free speech ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 freebies ref1, ref2, ref3 Freedland, Jonathan ref1, ref2 Freedom Act (2015) ref1 Friedman, Thomas ref1 Friendly, Fred ref1 G4S security guards ref1, ref2n G-20 protests (2009) ref1 Gaddafi, Muammar ref1 GAFAT companies ref1, ref2 Gallagher, Tony ref1 Gaskell, John ref1 Gates, Bill ref1 GCHQ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n Geary, Joanna ref1 Gehry, Frank ref1 Gellman, Barton ref1 Gentleman, Amelia ref1 George III, King ref1 germ (virus) ref1 Germany ref1, ref2 Gibson, Janine ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Gillespie, Fulton ref1 Gillmor, Dan ref1, ref2, ref3n Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) ref1 Gledhill, Ruth ref1 Glocer, Tom ref1 Glover, Stephen ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4n Goldacre, Ben ref1, ref2n Goldman, William ref1, ref2 Goldman Sachs ref1, ref2 Good, Jennifer ref1 Goodale, James ref1 Goodman, Clive ref1, ref2 Goodman, Elinor ref1 Google ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 passim, ref1, ref2 Goranzon, Anders ref1 Gordon, David ref1, ref2, ref3n Gordon, Michael ref1 Gore, Vice President Al ref1 Gorwa, Robert ref1 Gove, Michael ref1 Gowers, Andrew ref1 Graham, Don ref1, ref2 Graham, James ref1 Graham, Katherine (Kay) ref1, ref2, ref3 Granada TV ref1, ref2 Grant, Hugh ref1 Gray, Charles (QC) ref1, ref2, ref3n Great Barrier Reef ref1 Great Integration ref1 Greenslade, Roy ref1, ref2, ref3n Greenwald, Glenn ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Greer, Ian ref1 Guardian Australia ref1 Guardian Cities ref1 Guardian Media Group (GMG) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11n, ref12n Board ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n, ref9n Guardian News and Media (GNM) ref1, ref2n Guardian Unlimited ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n Gulliver, Stuart ref1, ref2 gun control ref1 Gurfein, Judge Murray ref1 GUS retail group ref1 Gutenberg, Johannes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Haaretz (newspaper) ref1 Hack Attack (Davies) ref1, ref2 Hacked Off ref1 Hagel, John ref1 Haig, General Al ref1, ref2 Hamilton, Neil (MP) ref1, ref2, ref3n Hankey, Sir Maurice ref1 Hanks, Tom ref1 Hansard ref1, ref2 hard knocks, school of ref1, ref2 Harding, James ref1 Harford, Tim ref1 Harlow Technical College ref1 Harris, Wendy ref1 Hartwell, Lord ref1 Hastings, Max ref1, ref2, ref3n Hayden, Michael V. ref1 Hayden, Teresa Nielsen ref1 Hayley, Sir William ref1 Hazlitt, William ref1, ref2 Hearst, William Randolph ref1, ref2 Henry, Georgina ref1, ref2 Henry Jackson Society ref1 Herald Sun (newspaper) ref1 Here Comes Everybody (Shirky) ref1 Hetherington, Alistair ref1, ref2 Hewlett, Steve ref1 Heywood, Jeremy ref1, ref2 Higgins, Eliot ref1 High Court ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hillsborough disaster (1989) ref1, ref2, ref3n Hinton, Les ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hirsch, Fred ref1, ref2, ref3n Hislop, Ian ref1 HMRC ref1 Hoare, Sean ref1, ref2 Hodgson, Godfrey ref1 Hoffman, Dustin ref1, ref2 Hoffman, Reid ref1, ref2 Holder, Eric ref1 Hollywood ref1 Home Affairs committee (UK) ref1 Home Office ref1 The Home Organist (magazine) ref1 Hong Kong ref1 Hooper, David ref1 Hopkins, Nick ref1 Horowitz, Ami ref1 Horrie, Chris ref1 Hotel Bristol (Villars) ref1, ref2 HotWired ref1 House of Commons ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 House of Lords ref1, ref2 Houston, Robin ref1 How to Spend It (magazine) ref1 HSBC ref1, ref2, ref3 Huffington, Arianna ref1, ref2n Huffington, Michael ref1 Huffington Post ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Human Genome Project ref1 Human Rights Act (1998) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n Humanity United ref1 Hunt, Henry ref1 Hutton report (2004) ref1 ‘idea agora’ ref1 i-escape ref1 Iliffe of Yattendon, Lord ref1 Imanuelsen, Peter ref1 immigration ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Independent on Sunday (newspaper) ref1 Indonesia ref1 InFacts ref1 ‘influence model’ ref1 Infomediary ref1 information chaos ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ref1 ‘information superhighway’ ref1, ref2, ref3 Ingrams, Richard ref1 injunctions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Ink (Graham) ref1 Inkster, Nigel ref1 ‘innovation blindness’ ref1 Instagram ref1 integrated model ref1 integrity ref1 Intelligence Community programmes (US) ref1 ‘intelligence porn’ ref1 Intelligence and Security committee (UK) ref1, ref2 Intercept ref1 The Internet for Dummies (series) ref1 Internet Explorer ref1 intrusion ref1 investigative journalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n Investigatory Powers Act (2016) (UK) ref1 Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) (UK) ref1, ref2 ‘invisible mending’ ref1 iPad ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 iPhone ref1, ref2 iPlayer ref1 IRA ref1, ref2 Iran ref1, ref2 Iraq wars ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Ireland ref1 Irish Independent (newspaper) ref1, ref2 Irish Times (newspaper) ref1 Irons, Jeremy ref1 Isaacson, Walter ref1 iTunes ref1 ITV ref1, ref2 James, Clive ref1 James, Erwin ref1 Jarvis, Jeff ref1, ref2, ref3 Jay, Peter ref1 Jenkins, Simon ref1, ref2 Jersey ref1 Jobs, Steve ref1 Johnson, Boris (MP) ref1, ref2 Johnson, Graham ref1 Johnston Press Ltd ref1n Jonathan of Arabia (TV) ref1 Jones, George ref1 Joseph Rowntree Foundation ref1 journalism accountability ref1, ref2 dead-tree ref1, ref2 investigative ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n seven deadly sins ref1n traditional ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 training ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Jowell, Tessa ref1 Judicial Redress Act (2016) ref1 Junius ref1 ‘junk news’ ref1 Jupiter Research ref1 Kaplan Educational publishing ref1 Katine (Uganda) ref1 Katz, Ian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Kaufer, Stephen ref1 Keller, Bill ref1, ref2, ref3 Kelner, Simon ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Kenya ref1, ref2 ‘keyword pages’ ref1 Khatchadourian, Raffi ref1 King, Dave ref1, ref2 King’s College, London ref1 Kings Place offices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Kinsley, Michael ref1 Kirwan, Peter ref1 Knight Ridder ref1, ref2 Knopfler, Mark ref1 Kovach, Bill ref1 Krauze, Andre ref1 Kushner, Jared ref1 La Repubblica (newspaper) ref1 Laborde, Jean-Paul ref1 Labour Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Lamb, Larry ref1 Lambert, Richard ref1 Lanchester, John ref1, ref2 Large Hadron Collider ref1 Larson, Jeff ref1 Law Commission (UK) ref1 Lawrence, Felicity ref1 Lawson, Dominic ref1 lawyers ref1n Le Monde (newspaper) ref1, ref2 Leave campaign group ref1 Lebedev, Alexander ref1, ref2n Lebedev, Evgeny ref1n legacy media ref1 legality ref1 Lehman Brothers ref1, ref2 Leigh, David ref1, ref2 Leipzig, mayor of ref1 Lelyveld, Joseph ref1 Leonard, Joe ref1 letters ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 newsletters ref1, ref2, ref3 readers’ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Leveson, Lord Justice Brian ref1, ref2, ref3n Leveson Inquiry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n Levin, Bernard ref1, ref2n Lewinsky, Monica ref1 Lewis, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3 Lewis, Will ref1 libel actions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n, ref8n, ref9n libel laws ref1, ref2 Liberal Democrat party ref1, ref2 Liberty ref1 Liberty and Security in a Changing World (2013 report) ref1 lies see under falsehood lighthouse model ref1, ref2 LinkedIn ref1, ref2, ref3 links ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n Linotype machine ref1, ref2, ref3 Linux ref1 Lippmann, Walter ref1 Littlewoods ref1 Lloyd, John ref1 Lloyds Bank ref1 Local Government Act (1972) ref1 Local World Ltd ref1, ref2, ref3n London Daily News (newspaper) ref1 London Evening Standard (newspaper) ref1 London Review of Books ref1, ref2 London School of Economics ref1n Lonely Planet ref1 ‘long tail’, theory of ref1 Los Angeles Times (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Lowry, L.S. ref1, ref2n loyalty scheme ref1 Ludgate Circus ref1 Ludlow machine ref1, ref2 Luxx (magazine) ref1 Luyendijk, Joris ref1 MacAskill, Ewen ref1, ref2, ref3 McCabe, Douglas ref1 McCabe, Eamonn ref1 McCain, John ref1 McCall, Carolyn ref1, ref2, ref3 Macedonia ref1 MacKenzie, Kelvin ref1 McKibben, Bill ref1, ref2 McKillen, Paddy ref1 McKinsey & Co ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 MacLennan, Murdoch ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Macron, President Emmanuel ref1 MacroWikinomics (Tapscott) ref1 MacTaggart lecture (2009) ref1 Mail Online ref1, ref2, ref3 Mainstream Media (MSM) ref1, ref2, ref3 Major, Prime Minister John ref1 The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson) ref1 Malmo ref1 Manchester Evening News (MEN) (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n Manchester Guardian (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Mandelson, Peter (MP) ref1 Manning, Chelsea ref1, ref2, ref3 Marks, Vic ref1 Marland, Caroline ref1 ‘marmalade dropper’ ref1, ref2n Martínez, Antonio García ref1, ref2 Mashable ref1, ref2 ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (poem) ref1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology ref1 Match.com ref1 Mauro, Ezio ref1 Maxwell, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n May Corporation Ltd ref1 May, Prime Minister Theresa ref1, ref2, ref3 Mayes, Ian ref1, ref2 Mead/Lexis ref1 Medejski, John ref1 Media Guardian ref1 media law ref1 media section ref1 Media Show (radio) ref1 Media Standards Trust (MST) ref1 Meeker, Mary ref1 Melbourne, Florida ref1, ref2 Merkel, Chancellor Angela ref1 Metcalfe, Jane ref1 metrics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Metro (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3n Meyer, Philip ref1, ref2 MI5 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n MI6 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n Miami Herald (newspaper) ref1 Michelin tyres ref1 Microsoft ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Middle East ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 ‘middle market’ ref1 Middleton, Julia ref1 migrant workers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Miliband, Ed (MP) ref1 Miliband, Ralph ref1, ref2 Mill, John Stuart ref1 Miller, Andrew ref1n, ref2n Miller, Sienna ref1 Milton, John ref1, ref2, ref3 Miranda, David ref1, ref2 Mirror Group Newspapers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 mobile devices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 moderation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Monaco ref1 Monbiot, George ref1 monitoring ref1 Monsanto ref1 Moore, Charles ref1, ref2, ref3 Moore, Michael ref1 Moran, Chris ref1 Morgan, Daniel ref1 Morgan, Piers ref1 Morgan Stanley ref1 morning conference ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Morozov, Evgeny ref1 Moses, Sir Alan ref1 Mossberg, Walt ref1 Mother Jones (magazine) ref1 Movable Type ref1 Mowatt, Roger ref1 Mowlam, Mo (MP) ref1, ref2n MPs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 MSN ref1 Mubenga, Jimmy ref1, ref2 Mugabe, President Robert ref1 Mulcaire, Glenn ref1, ref2, ref3 Mumsnet ref1 Murdoch, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Murdoch, Rupert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Murdoch, Wendi ref1 Murdoch empire ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16n Murray, Douglas ref1 Murray, Scott ref1, ref2 Murrow, Edward R. ref1 Muslims ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Mutter, Alan ref1 mutualisation ref1, ref2, ref3 Myners, Paul ref1, ref2 MySpace ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 National Security Agency (NSA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 National Theatre ref1 National Union of Journalists ref1, ref2 Naughton, John ref1 NCND policy (never confirm nor deny) ref1 Negroponte, Nicholas ref1 Netherlands, Queen of the ref1 netiquette ref1 Netscape ref1, ref2 Neuberger, Lord ref1 Nevin, Charles ref1 New Republic (magazine) ref1 New Statesman (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 New York Observer (newspaper) ref1 New York offices ref1, ref2, ref3 New York Post (newspaper) ref1 New York Times v.

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On this most people could agree: we were now up to our necks in a seething, ever churning ocean of information; some of it true, much of it wrong. There was too much false news, not enough reliable news. There might soon be entire communities without news. Or without news they could trust. There was a swamp of stuff we were learning to call ‘fake news’. The recently elected 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, used the term so indiscriminately it rapidly lost any meaning. The best that traditional journalism could offer was – or so he repeatedly told us – fake. We should believe him, not lying journalists. Truth was fake; fake was true.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Sue Shellenbarger, “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576; Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “Most Americans Who See Fake News Believe It, New Survey Says,” BuzzFeed, December 6, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-survey. 13. Sheera Frenkel, “How Facebook Spreads Fake News and Anti-Muslim Views in Myanmar,” BuzzFeed, November 20, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around-the-world. 14. Alexander Smith and Vladimir Banic, “How Macedonian Teens Earn—and Spend—Thousands from Fake News,” NBC News, December 9, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-macedonian-teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451. 15.

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I checked back with activists in the Middle East who confirmed that such fake news—often aimed at discrediting dissidents—had gone viral in their own countries, too. One Tunisian activists told me that he thought it was a major reason a secular party had lost one election. Another blogger wrote about the spread of fake news in Egypt, and lamented: “The social media is always highlighted for its role in the Arab spring, especially in the Egyptian revolution. Well, I think it is time to let the world know that the social media is also destroying the Arab Spring.”15 Fake news and other forms of misinformation could proliferate for some of the same reasons that these same activists could earlier easily share their own content documenting corruption and exposing wrong-doing.

…

The affordances of digital connectivity; globalization of information flows; business models, policies, and algorithms of the few dominant platforms; ease of setting up sites; and enterprising young people had combined in yet another perfect storm. The moral of this story isn’t that “fake news” definitely swung the US election in 2016, or somehow the past was an ideal place of only facts and reasoned dialogue in the public sphere. In fact, various forms of misinformation and propaganda have always been part of the public sphere, and the success of “fake news” rested on many antecedent dynamics. Mass media had already been losing credibility both due to its own missteps and failures, but also due to a sustained attack against its normative function as gatekeeper for facts.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

In short, an unhealthy combination of exponential forces – new information networks, viral network effects and AI – combine to help lies spread. And that means fake news is everywhere. In 2019, a survey of citizens in 25 countries found that more than 4 in 5 thought they had been exposed to fake news. Nearly 9 out of 10 of those had initially thought a fake news story was real (your author is in that majority).32 Nearly half of Turks and more than 30 per cent of Koreans, Brazilians and Mexicans say they are exposed to fake news on a weekly basis.33 During the 2020 US election, social networks became breeding grounds for malevolent actors fomenting conspiracies about vaccines or the origins of Covid-19 – bolstered by the increasingly erratic tweets of the then president Donald Trump.

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Jackson School of International Studies, 28 June 2016 <https://jsis.washington.edu/news/north-korea-cyber-attacks-new-asymmetrical-military-strategy/> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 19 Edward White and Kang Buseong, ‘Kim Jong Un’s Cyber Army Raises Cash for North Korea’, Financial Times, 17 June 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/cbb28ab8-8ce9-11e9-a24d-b42f641eca37> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 20 ‘North Korea GDP’, Trading Economics <https://tradingeconomics.com/north-korea/gdp> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 21 ‘North Korea GDP’. 22 Seth Jones, Containing Tehran: Understanding Iran’s Power and Exploiting Its Vulnerabilities (Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2020) <https://www.csis.org/analysis/containing-tehran-understanding-irans-power-and-exploiting-its-vulnerabilities> [accessed 21 June 2020]. 23 ‘Six Russian GRU Officers Charged in Connection with Worldwide Deployment of Destructive Malware and Other Disruptive Actions in Cyberspace’, US Department of Justice, 19 October 2020 <https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/six-russian-gru-officers-charged-connection-worldwide-deployment-destructive-malware-and> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 24 ‘MH17 Ukraine Plane Crash: What We Know’, BBC News, 26 February 2020 <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28357880> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 25 Andrew Marino, ‘Sandworm Details the Group behind the Worst Cyberattacks in History’, The Verge, 28 July 2020 <https://www.theverge.com/21344961/andy-greenberg-interview-book-sandworm-cyber-war-wired-vergecast> [accessed 14 September 2020]. 26 Rae Ritchie, ‘Maersk: Springing Back from a Catastrophic Cyber-Attack’, I-CIO, August 2019 <https://www.i-cio.com/management/insight/item/maersk-springing-back-from-a-catastrophic-cyber-attack> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 27 ‘The Sinkhole That Saved the Internet’, TechCrunch, 8 July 2019 <https://social.techcrunch.com/2019/07/08/the-wannacry-sinkhole/> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 28 ‘National Cyber Force Transforms Country’s Cyber Capabilities to Protect the UK’, GCHQ, 19 November 2020 <https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news/national-cyber-force> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 29 Dustin Volz and Robert McMillan, ‘Hack Suggests New Scope, Sophistication for Cyberattacks’, Wall Street Journal, 18 December 2020 <https://www.wsj.com/articles/hack-suggests-new-scope-sophistication-for-cyberattacks-11608251360> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 30 Simon Oxenham, ‘“I Was a Macedonian Fake News Writer”’, BBC Future, 28 May 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190528-i-was-a-macedonian-fake-news-writer> [accessed 30 September 2020]. 31 Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral, ‘The Spread of True and False News Online’, Science, 359(6380), 2018, pp. 1146–51 <https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559>. 32 Sean Simpson, ‘Fake News: A Global Epidemic Vast Majority (86 per cent) of Online Global Citizens Have Been Exposed to It’, Ipsos, 11 June 2019 <https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/cigi-fake-news-global-epidemic> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 33 Digital News Report 2018, Reuters, p. 144. 34 Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N.

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Says Russian-Backed Outlets Spread COVID-19 Vaccine “Disinformation”’, Reuters, 8 March 2021 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-covid-disinformation-idUSKBN2B0016> [accessed 23 April 2021]. 43 Peter Walker, ‘New National Security Unit Set Up to Tackle Fake News in UK’, The Guardian, 23 January 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/23/new-national-security-unit-will-tackle-spread-of-fake-news-in-uk>. 44 Brian Raymond, ‘Forget Counterterrorism, the United States Needs a Counter-Disinformation Strategy’, Foreign Policy, 15 October 2020 <https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/15/forget-counterterrorism-the-united-states-needs-a-counter-disinformation-strategy/> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 45 Micah Zenko, ‘Obama’s Final Drone Strike Data’, Council on Foreign Relations, 2017 <https://www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-final-drone-strike-data> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 46 ‘Give and Take – Drone Technology Has Made Huge Strides’, The Economist, 8 June 2017 <https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2017/06/08/drone-technology-has-made-huge-strides> [accessed 14 October 2020]. 47 ‘MQ-1B Predator’, U.S.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Retrieved 19 October 2017, http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/bananas.asp. 2 Forster, K. (7 January 2017), ‘Revealed: How Dangerous Fake News Conquered Facebook’, Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/fake-news-health-facebook-cruel-damaging-social-media-mike-adams-natural-health-ranger-conspiracy-a7498201.html. 3 Binding, L. (24 July 2018), ‘India Asks Whatsapp to Curb Fake News Following Spate of Lynchings’, Sky News online: https://news.sky.com/story/india-asks-whatsapp-to-curb-fake-news-following-spate-of-lynchings-11425849. 4 Dewey, J. (1910), How We Think, p 101. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. 5 Galliford, N. and Furnham, A. (2017), ‘Individual Difference Factors and Beliefs in Medical and Political Conspiracy Theories’, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 58(5), 422?

…

Sure enough, the participants with lower CRT scores reported seeing greater meaning in these pseudo-profound statements, compared to people with a more analytical mindset.26 Pennycook has since explored whether this ‘bullshit receptivity’ also leaves us vulnerable to fake news – unfounded claims, often disguised as real news stories, that percolate through social media. Following the discussions of fake news during the 2016 presidential election, he exposed hundreds of participants to a range of headlines – some of which had been independently verified and fact-checked as being true, others as false. The stories were balanced equally between those that were favourable for Democrats and those that were favourable to Republicans.

…

., Koehler, D.J. and Fugelsang, J.A. (2015), ‘On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit’, Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549?63. 27 Pennycook, G. and Rand, D.G. (2018), ‘Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning than By Motivated Reasoning’, Cognition, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011. See also Pennycook, G. and Rand, D.G. (2017), ‘Who Falls for Fake News? The Roles of Bullshit Receptivity, Overclaiming, Familiarity, and Analytic Thinking’, unpublished paper, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3023545. 28 Swami, V., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., Tran, U.S. and Furnham, A. (2014), ‘Analytic Thinking Reduces Belief in Conspiracy Theories’, Cognition, 133(3), 572?

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

In the Cambridge office, it wasn’t unusual to hear the term fake news invoked, in part, I think, because we Cambridge employees felt that the Russians’ efforts either had been made up by those who couldn’t accept Hillary’s crushing defeat or, perhaps, had been negligible when compared with our own. Cambridge Analytica, and not some outside government, had secured Trump’s presidency, we believed, and the focus on Russia was considered disruptive to the new administration in whose success the company was deeply invested. Of course, Russian influence on the election was of great concern in intelligence circles, and quickly this “fake news” grew harder to ignore.

…

Six days later, a curious all-company email from Julian crossed my desk. This was entirely separate from the ICO. It was about a completely new inquiry, on “fake news,” that the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee (DCMS) had been carrying out for a year. Alexander had been “invited” to speak before the committee on February 27, to “help” its members understand data-driven marketing. He didn’t anticipate any adverse publicity from the appearance, but he wanted the staff to be aware. Our company didn’t have any experience with fake news, he said, so we were “delighted to help,” Julian wrote. Alexander was among many experts who had been invited, including major news organizations such as CNN and CBS and executives from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube.

…

As the day progressed in England, my phone began to blow up. Friends texted me that my name had been mentioned in Parliament—more than once. Robert Murtfeld texted me every quote, word for word. The committee’s inquiry into fake news wasn’t an academic exercise designed to swing the Brexit vote using propaganda to force a new revote, or “people’s vote,” as so many Brexiteers claimed. Alexander hadn’t been invited to share his insights about the dissemination of fake news. He had been summoned there to account for Cambridge Analytica’s complicity in it. The DCMS comprised eleven members, nine of whom were present that day. Its chair was Damian Collins, a no-nonsense, conservative Remainer with a background in advertising.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

In the wake of the disinformation–saturated 2016 Brexit referendum and US election, European governments moved to force online Internet companies to purge disinformation from their platforms. A 2018 German law requires networks with more than two million members to take down fake news within twenty-four hours of notification or face fines of up to €50 million, and a 2018 French law allows authorities to order the deletion of false online information that could affect elections. In Germany, the Network Enforcement Act, or the NetzDG, targets a laundry list of “obviously illegal” materials. French legislators were more precise in defining fake news as “inexact allegations or imputations, or news that falsely report[s] facts, with the aim of changing the sincerity of a vote.”86 In 2018, the EU also arm-wrestled the major platforms into signing a “voluntary” agreement to abide by broad guidelines to address fake news, particularly as it relates to elections.

…

In one instance, the entire channel of the Violation Documentation Center, a human rights monitoring group, was removed, with its 32,000 videos.87 YouTube worked to restore the mistakenly deleted videos, but there is no such good faith in the censorship schemes of authoritarian governments. Under the pretense of combating fake news, online dissent has been widely suppressed. In 2017 alone, seventeen countries, including Belarus, Egypt, and Malaysia, passed or proposed laws outlawing fake news. While Russia’s law is perhaps the most obvious in its hypocrisy—criminalizing false reports along with “blatant disrespect” for authorities—other regimes have the same aims. Egypt jailed nineteen dissident journalists in 2018 on charges of false news, while two women who uploaded videos on Facebook describing incidents of sexual harassment against them and decrying government inaction, were arrested for spreading false rumors.88 One of them received eight years in prison.

…

Shannon Van Sant, “Russia Criminalizes the Spread of Online News Which ‘Disrespects’ the Government,” NPR, March 18, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/704600310/russia-criminalizes-the-spread-of-online-news-which-disrespects-the-government; Daniel Funke, “Egypt Is Jailing More Journalists on ‘False News’ Charges Than Anywhere Else in the World,” Poynter, December 13, 2018, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2018/egypt-is-jailing-more-journalists-on-false-news-charges-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world. 89. Shahbaz, “Freedom on the Net 2018.” 90. “Singapore Fake News Law a ‘Disaster’ for Freedom of Speech, Says Rights Group,” Guardian, May 9, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/09/singapore-fake-news-law-a-disaster-for-freedom-of-speech-says-rights-group. 91. Paul Mozur, “Coronavirus Outrage Spurs China’s Internet Police to Action,” New York Times, March 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/business/china-coronavirus-internet-police.html?

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

As a result, when confronted with evidence that disinformation and fake news spread over Facebook influenced the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and a presidential election in the United States, Facebook took steps that spoke volumes about the company’s world view. They demoted publishers in favor of family, friends, and Groups on the theory that information from those sources would be more trustworthy. The problem is that family, friends, and Groups are the foundational elements of filter and preference bubbles. Whether by design or by accident, they share the very disinformation and fake news that Facebook would like to suppress

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Department of, 32, 34 Delaney, John, 167 Dell, 35, 152 democracy, 2, 3, 10–12, 17, 37, 84, 85, 93, 103, 112, 117, 122, 126–27, 129, 133, 136, 159, 162, 200, 203, 204, 217, 220, 233–35, 238, 239, 242, 253–57, 263–65, 258, 268–69, 277–83 Facebook’s threat to, 242–45, 258, 280, 281 four pillars of, 243–45 see also elections Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), 11, 111, 114, 116 Democratic National Committee (DNC), 11, 111, 114, 116, 124, 125 Democratic Party, Democrats, 121, 130–33, 167, 197, 210, 212, 227 Pizzagate and, 124–26, 130 Depression, Great, 43 developing countries, 179–80, 233 Diamond, Larry, 243 Diana, Elisabeth, 231–32 Digital Equipment, 46, 152 DiResta, Renée, 92–93, 121–23, 127, 128, 146, 242 disinformation and fake news, 94–96, 117, 123, 173, 229, 233, 234, 237, 253, 257–58, 260, 274 on Facebook, 89, 94–96, 119, 159, 165, 166, 208–9, 228, 243, 245, 258, 270, 281 Free Basics and, 180 Pizzagate, 124–26, 130 Russia and, 121–24, 174; see also Russia on Twitter, 177 on YouTube, 177–78 see also conspiracy theories Disney Company, 143–44, 193 Doerr, John, 26–27, 61 dopamine, 86, 88, 107, 147, 258, 271, 273 Dorsey, Jack, 229 dot-com bubble, 27, 38–40, 48, 49 Doubleclick, 65, 138–39 Doyle, Mike, 210 Dropbox, 41 Drummond, Jamie, 159 DuckDuckGo, 271 Dwoskin, Elizabeth, 168 eBay, 36, 38 economy, economics, 43–48, 82, 155, 162–63, 201, 220, 225, 235, 238, 254, 262–63, 281 Edelman, Gilad, 155 Edelman, Joe, 108 Edge, 28–29 education, 257 Egypt, 243 8chan, 102, 123 Einstein, Albert, ix, 53 elections, 82, 122, 129, 141, 156, 159, 208, 215, 216, 227, 238, 243, 244, 251–55, 258–59, 269, 274, 280, 282 microtargeting and, 237–38 2016 presidential, see presidential election of 2016 of 2018 and 2020, 12, 111, 119, 127, 153, 220, 235, 278, 279, 281 Electronic Arts, 14, 26 Elevation Partners, 13–14, 17–18, 30, 61, 72, 147 EMC, 152 emerging economies, 179–80, 233 emotions, 69, 81, 126 contagion of, 88–89, 92, 103, 233, 234 Facebook and, 9, 11, 68, 69, 75, 233, 270 Facebook study on, 88–89 “lizard brain,” 9, 88 energy, renewable, 248 Engelbart, Douglas, 33, 34 entrepreneurs, 224, 238, 261, 265 see also startups Equifax, 226 Estrin, Judy, 220, 233 European Union (EU), 162 Brexit and, 8–9, 96, 180, 196, 198, 244 Global Data Protection Regulation in, 221, 222, 224, 259–60 Google and, 138, 260, 281–82 Excite, 42 extreme views, 91–93, 102, 119, 173, 214, 232, 253, 260, 279 Facebook, 47–51, 53–79, 110, 139–40, 156, 163, 202–12, 213–20, 223, 224, 232–35, 238–40, 241–48, 251, 255, 256, 258, 262–64, 274, 275, 278, 279, 282, 283, 287 addiction to, 63, 281 advertising and, 11–12, 47, 59–61, 63, 68–77, 85, 103, 119, 128–29, 130, 132, 143, 148, 173, 184, 185, 202, 207–9, 211, 217–19, 237–28, 258, 265, 270, 281, 283–84 algorithms of, 4, 9, 11, 66, 74, 76, 81, 87, 91, 128–29, 143, 166, 232, 235, 243, 270, 274, 277, 281 Android and, 204 artificial intelligence of, 10, 11, 69, 85, 87, 91, 95, 108, 203, 219–20, 230, 261 banks and, 231–32 Beacon, 60, 62, 64, 142 behavior modification and, 63, 278 Black Lives Matter and, 8, 243 Bosworth memo and, 204–6 Cambridge Analytica and, 78, 180–98, 199, 202–4, 207, 208, 210, 213, 216–18, 251, 259 Center for Humane Technology and, 166–67 changing personal usage of, 270 Clear History, 218–19 community standards and, 103, 179, 228, 244–45 Congress and, 122, 127–33 Connect, 62, 63, 68, 72, 158, 218, 249, 270 Connectivity, 232 content moderation by, 229–30, 232, 237 content suppliers harmed by, 283 criticisms of, and responses, 3, 65, 95–96, 141, 143, 146, 147–49, 151–53, 158–61, 169, 174–75, 178–80, 192–93, 207, 216, 217, 230, 247–48, 280, 281 Custom Audiences, 76–77 data brokers banned by, 208 dating service, 207, 218 deactivating account, 99 decision making and organization of, 144–45, 154, 155, 160 democracy threatened by, 242–45, 258, 278, 280, 281 disinformation on, 89, 94–96, 119, 159, 165, 166, 208–9, 228, 243, 245, 258, 270, 281 early days of, 16–17 earnings in 2018, 216–17, 228 Elevation and, 17–18, 72 emotional contagion study of, 88–89 emotions and, 9, 11, 68, 69, 75, 233, 270 F8 conference, 217–18 fake accounts deleted by, 229, 230, 265 FarmVille, 184, 195, 196 filter bubbles and, 78, 87, 90, 96, 116–19, 124–27, 141, 166, 209, 215, 245, 257, 258 financial value of, 9, 284 Free Basics, 179–80, 232, 245 FriendFeed and, 63 FTC and, 182–84, 188–90 games, 184, 191, 195, 196 Global Data Protection Regulation and, 221, 259 Goldman’s tweet and, 169–73 Groups, 7–8, 51, 78, 89–92, 94–96, 115–17, 119, 124, 126, 130–32, 165–66, 207–8, 270 Growth group at, 76, 84, 148 hackers and, 280 hate speech and, 178–79, 203, 204, 215, 216, 228, 230, 245, 280 History, 270 housing discrimination and, 11, 129, 245 influence power of, 10–11, 141, 204, 215 innovation threatened by, 246–47 Instagram and, 70, 139, 140, 144, 223, 261, 270–71 IPO (initial public offering) of, 70–75, 78, 145, 169, 184, 190 Jones and Infowars and, 228–29 lack of alternative to, 92, 100, 141, 223, 280 Like button, 63, 68, 72, 98 Live, 74 Lookalike Audiences, 76, 77, 115 marketing messages sent by, 174 market power of, 46 McGinn’s departure from, 167–69, 172 McNamee’s investment in, 1, 17–18, 59 Messenger, 67, 70, 85, 139, 140, 207, 232 Messenger Kids, 254 metrics of, 76–78, 206, 216 Microsoft and, 14, 15, 59–60, 65 mobile platforms and, 106, 228 monopoly power and antitrust issues, 47–48, 100, 136–41, 162, 225–26, 234, 246, 247, 261–63, 284 Moonalice and, 73–75 motto and philosophy of, 41, 51, 72–73, 142–43, 193 as national security threat, 282 network effects and, 47, 246 new kind of marketplace created by, 283 News Feed, 59, 60, 68, 70, 74, 75, 88, 89, 90–91, 97, 165–66, 208–9, 243, 244, 247 as news source, 10 nondisclosure agreement for employees of, 169, 172 Oculus and, 139, 144, 223, 261 Onavo and, 139–40 Open Graph, 70, 71, 74 persuasive technology used by, 17 photo tagging on, 59, 63, 68, 98–99 Platform, 188, 190–91 Portal, 281 presidential election and, 183, 190, 232, 278; see also Cambridge Analytica; Russia privacy settings of, 97 privacy threatened by, 246 public health threatened by, 246 regulation and, 112, 280 Russian interference and, 90, 115–17, 119, 124, 126, 130–32, 145–46, 149, 152–54, 166, 168–72, 187, 193–94, 203, 207–8, 217, 228, 244, 245, 251 Sandberg’s joining of, 5, 16, 60, 61, 64 self-regulation of, 280 smartphones and, 59 Snapchat and, 140, 246 Social Graph, 70 Sponsored Stories, 71 state attorneys general and, 120, 172, 227 stock price in 2018, 228, 265 team philosophy of, 145 and technology as value neutral, 129 terms of service of, 97, 178, 182, 211, 253–54 Trending Stories, 166 Truth About Tech conference and, 166, 167 user browsing history and, 218–19 user data and, 4–5, 9, 62, 72, 75–76, 78, 87, 131–32, 141–42, 174, 180–98, 202–4, 210–11, 216–19, 223, 258–59 user engagement and, 9 user growth and numbers, 62–63, 65, 71–72, 77, 78, 84, 128, 140–41, 143, 151, 184, 187, 215, 228, 233, 234 user trust and, 2, 7 “war room” opened by, 281 WhatsApp and, 139, 140, 144, 223, 261, 270–71, 280 words associated with, 231 work environment at, 45 Yahoo and, 14–16, 56, 57 Zuckerberg considers selling, 13–16 Zuckerberg’s launch of, 4, 39, 42, 50–51, 35–56, 104, 141, 189, 203, 241 Zuckerberg’s plan for addressing problems with, 158–59 Facemash, 53, 60 fact-checking, 103, 178, 179 Fair Housing Act, 11, 245 fake news, see disinformation and fake news FarmVille, 184, 195, 196 Fast Company, 53 FBI, 209, 252 fear of missing out (FOMO), 98, 99, 253, 269 Federal Communications Commission, 136 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 113–14, 136, 182–84, 188–90, 200, 286 Feinstein, Dianne, 132 Fernando, Randima, 167 Ferrell, Will, 156 filter bubbles, 66–67, 87, 94, 109, 125–27, 157–58, 246, 269, 278–81 extreme views and, 91, 93 Facebook and, 78, 87, 90, 96, 116–19, 124–27, 141, 166, 209, 215, 245, 257, 258 polarization and, 89–90, 274 Financial Times, 224–25 FireEye, 229 Fisher, Adam, 55 5G wireless technology, 261–62 Foer, Franklin, 167 Fogg, B.

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Most of those doing the sharing would have been Americans who trusted that the leaders of the Group were genuine. There are millions of Groups on Facebook, for just about every organization, personality, politician, brand, sport, philosophy, and idea. The ones built around extreme ideas—disinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, hate speech—become filter bubbles, reinforcing the shared value, intensifying emotional attachments to it. Thanks to Groups and filter bubbles, inflammatory posts can reach huge numbers of like-minded people on Facebook with only a little spending. The Russian interference on social media was exceptionally cost effective.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

., “Understanding and Reducing the Spread of Misinformation Online,” PsyArXiv, November 13, 2019, DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/3n9u8; also see Oliver Burkeman, “How to Stop the Spread of Fake News? Pause for a Moment,” Guardian, February 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/07/how-to-stop-spread-of-fake-news-oliver-burkeman. 23. G. Pennycook and D. G. Rand, “Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning,” Cognition, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011. 24. Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (2005), 25–42, DOI: 10.1257/089533005775196732. 25.

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And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”15 The history of another term associated with Donald Trump—“fake news”—is instructive here. Originally, it described a very specific phenomenon: websites publishing false articles in the hope of getting clicks from social media and thus advertising dollars. The iconic example was the claim that the pope endorsed Trump’s presidential bid. When Trump won, for a while there was a moral panic, serious commentators worried that gullible voters had been lured into voting for Trump because they believed these outrageous lies. That panic was a mistake. Academic studies found that fake news was never widespread or influential; most of it was consumed by a small number of highly conservative, elderly voters who were likely Trump supporters all along.

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These false stories quickly became much less of a problem, as social media websites woke up to the threat.16 But the idea of “fake news” became a powerful one—an excuse to dismiss any inconvenient claim from any source, a modern version of the cynical aphorism about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Mr. Trump, with his twisted talent for turning a complex issue into a political cudgel, deployed the term to demonize regular journalists. So did many other politicians, including Theresa May, then prime minister of the UK, and her opposite number, the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. “Fake news” resonated because it tapped into an unfortunate truth: there is plenty of slapdash journalism even in mainstream outlets, as we shall see.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Oregonian staff and wire reports, “Man Accused of Bomb Threats Sentenced to Time Served After Medication Returns Competence,” OregonLive, March 17, 2015, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2015/03/man_accused_of_bomb_threats_at.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 CHAPTER SIXTEEN Amanda Robb, “Pizzagate: Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 23089, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3386/w23089. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Amy Chozick, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael Barbaro, “Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease with Wall Street,” New York Times, October 8, 2016, U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/hillary-clinton-speeches-wikileaks.html.

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., review of After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” HBO, Abstract Production, https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/after-truth-disinformation-and-the-cost-of-fake-news. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Cecilia Kang, “Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking,” New York Times, November 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html.

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Although the Sandy Hook families had already suffered for years, Pizzagate jolted people awake to the real-world consequences of “fake news.” The term, defined by Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University, referred to “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers.”[2] At least that was its original meaning, before President Trump repurposed it to discredit reports critical of him, and authoritarians around the world followed suit. In their article “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” Allcott and Gentzkow framed the problem. “Social media platforms such as Facebook have a dramatically different structure than previous media technologies.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

At one point there were ninety messages an hour: claims that Rappler was making up the deaths, that it was in the pay of Duterte’s enemies, that it was all fake news. The messages were like an infestation of insects, swarming into the email in-boxes and descending like a scourge onto the site’s community pages, which Rappler had curated with such care to enable what it hoped would be the Internet’s ‘wisdom of crowds’. Sometimes Rappler staff would check to see who was behind a rape threat: maybe it was an automated account? To their disappointment it would turn out to be a real person. People were enjoying this. Rappler journalists were shouted at in the malls: ‘Hey, you – you’re fake news! Shame on you!’ Relatives would admonish them too.

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His former colleague Nix made a similar argument when testifying to the UK Parliamentary Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’, which I had been brought into as one of many ‘specialist advisers’. ‘We are trying to make sure that voters receive messages on the issues and policies they care most about … that can only be good for democracy,’ Nix told the Committee, utterly unrepentant about any of his actions. By the time I joined, the Committee had already been going for two years, and it had become obsessed with the question of what exactly was ‘good for democracy’ in an age of ‘information abundance’. It had started by looking into ‘fake news’, but after astounded Members of Parliament heard testimony about how ethnic cleansing in Burma had been fuelled via Facebook, about Kremlin interference in Europe and the US, about how people’s online information was used to target them in political campaigns, the members of the Committee decided that ‘our existing legal framework is no longer fit for purpose’.

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More information was supposed to mean mutual understanding across borders, but it has also made possible new and more subtle forms of conflict and subversion. We live in a world of mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, fake news, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump … Forty years after my father’s detention and interrogation, I find myself following the palest of imprints of my parents’ journey, though with none of their courage, risk or certainty. As I write this – and given the economic turbulence, this might not be the case when you read it – I run a programme in an institute at a London university that researches the newer breeds of influence campaigns, what might casually be referred to as ‘propaganda’, a term so fraught and fractured in its interpretation – defined by some as deception and by others as the neutral activity of propagation – that I avoid using it.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The rise of companies such as Facebook and Google has also created and exacerbated a host of more complex problems that we’re just beginning to grapple with. Thornier Problems “Fake news” is a problem that’s been around at least since newspaper publishers, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, went head to head in the 1890s, spinning fantastic tales to see who could sell the most newspapers. Today, fake news—stories that try to mislead the reader with hoaxes and deliberate misinformation in an effort to discredit someone or for financial or political gain—are a topic of conversation once again. On the surface, the problem of fake news is fairly simple. Increasingly, people get their news from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Google News.

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By not self-identifying as a media company Facebook avoids liability for any nastiness that pops up on its site: section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act enables companies such as Facebook to avoid “intermediary liability” for the things people say or do on their platforms and, on the flip side, allows them to act as “Good Samaritans,” policing their sites as they see fit. Nonetheless, after a year of denying that fake news was a problem, Facebook quietly started reducing the amount of news people see in their newsfeed. Does this mean we can just go back to reading news wherever we read it before? Unfortunately not. Fake news is a manifestation of a much bigger problem—the replacement of quality, investigative journalism with “content.”39 This trend has radically accelerated with our move to the small screen. As the digital has colonized our lives, and the tech titans have colonized the web, our digital lives have been hemmed in to a handful of apps.

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See surveillance Square, 148 stalkerware apps, 25 Standing Rock, 103–4, 110 start-ups, 120–21 status-consciousness, 62 Sterling, Alton, 20 stewardship, 56–57 stimulation, digital, 66 stingrays, 96 Stoppelman, Jeremy, 43–44 Stop the Killing, 20 storytelling, 115–16, 120 subcontracting, multitier, 31 Substitute Phone, 8 Sullivan, Andrew, 132 Sunrise Movement, 103–4, 152, 179n22 “superstar firms,” 42–43 surveillance: big data and, 84; by government, 81, 137–38, 144, 148–49; by law enforcement, 96–97, 137–38, 176n28; by Uber, 127 surveillance capitalism, 8 sustainability, 151–52, 154–55 SVR (Silicon Valley Rising), 147 Syrian war, 90 Tahrir Square, 92 task app, mobile, 32 “tasker,” 30 TaskRabbit, 30 tax evasion by titans, 49–50 taxi drivers, 146, 178–79n5 Tea Party, 105 technological determinism, 12, 131–32, 140–41 “technology shabbats,” 133 technophilanthropy, 56–57 tech refuseniks, 67 tech start-ups, 120–21 Tech Workers Coalition, 148 teenagers, sexting by, 25–27, 35 telemedicine, 10 television, 11–12 temp workers, 31–32 Tencent, 4, 42 terrorists, 95 tether, smartphones as new, 3–7 texting, 5, 6 Thatcher, Margaret, 118 Thiel, Peter, 45, 81, 124 Thoreau, Henry David, 133 TikTok, 95 “time bind,” 30 time-tracking tools, 69 Tinder, 23–24, 25, 63 Tin Dog, 23 titans of cyberspace, 37–57; and antitrust investigations, 52–53; emerging criticisms of, 45–50; and fake news, 50–51; funding by, 55; lobbying by, 55– 56; old titans vs., 37–38; and personalization, 53; philanthropy by, 56–57; power of, 39–40, 54–57; rise of, 38–45; and search algorithms, 51–52 Tometi, Opal, 101–2 tracking: government, 94–95; and privacy, 70–71, 81; of workers, 32–33 transcendentalists, 133 Transdr, 23 transhumanism, 123 translation, 10 Trump, Donald: election of, 13; and fake news, 50; inauguration of, 107; and North Dakota pipeline, 110; small donors to, 105; tweets by, 87–88, 92–93, 175n14 trust, 8 truth, 8 Twitch, 41 Twitter: addiction to, 69; content on, 60; microcelebrities on, 60; as news source, 50; as new titan, 42, 45; sharing on, 84; time spent on, 60; use by politicians of, 87–88, 92–93 230 Fifth, 62 Uber: app jobs at, 30–33, 153; data collection by, 84; and new capitalism, 119, 126– 27; as new titan, 42; vs. taxi drivers, 146, 178–79n5 Uber-X, 33 Ukraine, 95 union(s), 147, 154 Union Pacific Railroad, 80 United Kingdom, 32–33 United We Dream, 104 unjust relationships, 137–38, 152–54 unpaid labor, 73–79, 84–85, 153 Upworthy, 53 urban poor, access to high-speed internet by, 29 USAID, 95 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 21, 148 Utah Data Center, 81 Utopia, 124–25, 132 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 39, 44, 54 venture capital firms, 121 Verily, 41 Verizon, 42, 71 Vestager, Margrethe, 52, 150 Vice Media, 106 videos, 5 Vietnam, 95 virality in politics, 81 virtual signaling, 109, 111 Vonnegut, Kurt, 129–30 voter outreach, 89 Wages for Housework, 85 walking lanes for phone users, 3 Walmart, 33 warehouse workers, 31–32, 33, 35, 46 Warren, Elizabeth, 45 Waymo, 41 Way of the Future, 123 wealth hierarchies, 28–29, 35 WeChat app, 4 Weinstein, Harvey, 108 Weyl, E.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Thomas Hobbes was convinced that Leviathan had to have the power to control expression in order to govern effectively. Were he alive today, he would certainly argue for a much narrower interpretation of the rules of free speech. We could make it illegal to knowingly spread fake news—that is, to make statements of supposed fact that are not supported by adequate data. If, like libel, the definition of fake news was legally circumscribed to include only statements that are known to be falsehoods in light of generally available empirical data, and that are spoken or published with malign intent, and if culpability was treated as a crime and prosecuted in the courts—and if to be a crime, multiple infractions were required, not just one mistake—we might begin to get a handle on the problem.

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It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of.12 Rules, laws, and cyber controls can help us keep the game fair. But trolls, fake news, cyberbullying, hacking, unethical businesses hiding in virtual space, and groups that encourage tribal cultures and intolerance will continue to exist. Soft solutions may turn out to be the most effective. Charismatic business, government, church, and social leaders are going to have to set and model standards of behavior that turn trolls, cyberbullies, and those who spread fake news into social misfits rather than the heroes that some of them are today. We must confront two other extremely important issues as part of our adaptation process.

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While these equivalences may seem minor, the changes in the rules that they precipitate can be enormously important. When political blogs and “citizen journalism” first began to proliferate on the Internet less than twenty years ago, they seemed, if anything, to be a boon for democracy. Had we understood how radically the rules were changing, we might have recognized the darker implications of “fake news” much sooner. So too, we might have foreseen the dangers of a fully uncensored Web (child pornography, terrorism, etc.) on the one hand, and the politically biased censorship of social network content by the employees of their parent corporations on the other. In subsequent chapters, we will explore how phase change is rewriting the rules of business while driving what we call nonmonetizable productivity, the bipolar economy, and the destruction of millions of jobs.

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

But he did not ditch the mindset it represents, even after he won. Trump as president has continued to peddle conspiracy theories from the Oval Office. He accused his defeated opponent of having stolen the popular vote by widespread electoral fraud. He accused his critics in the mainstream media of deliberately creating fake news stories to discredit his presidency. He accused his predecessor of having tapped his phones. There was little or no evidence for any of this. Trump the winner was behaving as though he had lost. He did this in order to cement the terms on which he had won and keep himself firmly aligned with his core constituency.

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In the late 1890s the US embarked on a war with Spain in various imperial outposts, including Cuba and the Philippines. National feeling was stoked up by a jingoistic press. It did not long survive the end of the conflict because the unity it supplied was superficial, feeding off the production of fake news in the yellow press. The Boer War fought by the British state at the dawn of the twentieth century produced short outbursts of collective national fervour, but in the end the conflict did more to divide the nation than to unite it. The same was true of the Iraq War of 2003, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

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The violent overthrow of a democracy establishes the conditions under which democracy can be defended: it clarifies the situation. Without that prospect, democracy simply persists and the frustrations that people increasingly feel with it get channelled into forms of mutual mistrust. Ours are not the first democracies in history to get stuck in a rut of conspiracy theories and fake news. But ours are the first with no obvious way out. Reform is possible but it may not be sufficient. Violence is impossible but it may be all that works. Democracies have become very good at solving one problem – violence – that has in the past been a precondition for solving the other – inequality.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Shannon Bond, “Trade Group Warns on Google Ad Backlash ‘Crisis,’” Financial Times, March 24, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/0936a49e-b521-369e-9d22-c194ed1c0d48; Matthew Garrahan, “AT&T Pulls Some Ads from Google After YouTube Controversy,” Financial Times, March 22, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/254d330d-f3d1-3ac2-ab8d-761083d6976a; Sapna Maheshwari and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “AT&T and Johnson & Johnson Pull Ads from YouTube,” New York Times, March 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/business/atampt-and-johnson-amp-johnson-pull-ads-from-youtube-amid-hate-speech-concerns.html; Rob Davies, “Google Braces for Questions as More Big-Name Firms Pull Adverts,” Guardian, March 19, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/19/google-braces-for-questions-as-more-big-name-firms-pull-adverts. 42. Olivia Solon, “Facebook’s Fake News: Mark Zuckerberg Rejects ‘Crazy Idea’ That It Swayed Voters,” Guardian, November 11, 2016,, https://www.the guardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-us-election-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 43. Guy Chazan, “Berlin Looks at Fines for Facebook with Fake News Law,” Financial Times, December 16, 2016; Guy Chazan, “Germany Cracks Down on Social Media Over Fake News,” Financial Times, March 14, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/c10aa4f8-08a5-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b; Jim Pickard, “Amber Rudd Urges Action from Internet Groups on Extremist Content,” Financial Times, March 26, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/f652c9bc-120d-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c; Alexandra Topping, Mark Sweney, and Jamie Grierson, “Google Is ‘Profiting from Hatred’ Say MPs in Row Over Adverts,” Guardian, March 17, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/17/google-is-profiting-from-hatred-say-mps-in-row-over-adverts; Sabrina Siddiqui, “‘From Heroes to Villains’: Tech Industry Faces Bipartisan Backlash in Washington,” Guardian, September 26, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/26/tech-industry-washington-google-amazon-apple-facebook; Nancy Scola and Josh Meyer, “Google, Facebook May Have to Reveal Deepest Secrets,” Politico, October 1, 2017, http://politi.co/2yBtppQ; Paul Lewis, “Senator Warns YouTube Algorithm May Be Open to Manipulation by ‘Bad Actors,’” Guardian, February 5, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/05/senator-warns-youtube-algorithm-may-be-open-to-manipulation-by-bad-actors. 44.

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A consequential example was Facebook’s decision to standardize the presentation of its News Feed content so that “all news stories looked roughly the same as each other… whether they were investigations in The Washington Post, gossip in the New York Post, or flat-out lies in the Denver Guardian, an entirely bogus newspaper.”27 This expression of equivalence without equality made Facebook’s first text exceptionally vulnerable to corruption from what would come to be called “fake news.” This is the context in which Facebook and Google became the focus of international attention following the discovery of organized political disinformation campaigns and profit-driven “fake news” stories during the 2016 US presidential election and the UK Brexit vote earlier that year. Economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, who have studied these phenomena in detail, define “fake news” as “distorted signals uncorrelated with the truth” that impose “private and social costs by making it more difficult… to infer the true state of the world.…” They found that in the lead-up to the 2016 US election there were 760 million instances of a user reading these intentionally orchestrated lies online, or about three such stories for each adult American.28 As radical indifference would predict, however, “fake news” and other forms of information corruption have been perennial features of Google and Facebook’s online environments.

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Michael Nunez, “Facebook’s Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash,” Gizmodo, November 14, 2016, http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204. 38. Varner and Angwin, “Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters.’” 39. Alex Kantrowitz, “Google Allowed Advertisers to Target ‘Jewish Parasite,’ ‘Black People Ruin Everything,’” BuzzFeed, September 15, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/google-allowed-advertisers-to-target-jewish-parasite-black. 40. Jack Nicas, “Big Brands Boost Fake News Sites,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2016; Olivia Solon, “Google’s Bad Week: YouTube Loses Millions as Advertising Row Reaches US,” Guardian, March 25, 2017, http://www.the guardian.com/technology/2017/mar/25/google-youtube-advertising-extremist-content-att-verizon; Alexi Mostrous, “YouTube Hate Preachers Share Screens with Household Names,” Times, March 17, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-hate-preachers-share-screens-with-household-names-kdmpm kkjk; Alexi Mostrous, “Advertising Giant Drops Google in Storm Over Extremist Videos,” Times, March 18, 2017, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/advertising-giant-drops-google-in-storm-over-extremist-videos-2klgvv8d5. 41.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In Europe, politicians have been debating (and increasingly enacting) laws that mete out substantive fines to companies that fail to get with the program. But the nature of the fix is surprisingly similar in both cases: social media platforms, activists on both sides of the Atlantic have argued, should enforce a comprehensive ban on hate speech and fake news.1 The forceful demands made by advocates of regulation are matched by equally forceful rebuttals by its opponents. Tech executives have argued that effectively identifying fake news, or demarcating the boundaries of hate speech, lies beyond the power of algorithms. To stop the spread of noxious ideas, they would have to hire a small army of moderators—who would not only be expensive to maintain but also bear an uncomfortable resemblance to old-style censors.2 This objection is especially powerful against the prospect of formal government intervention.

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Reuters, March 7, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-vote-grillo-insight-idUSBRE92608G20130307. 27. The party now relies on funds that come from fake news inspired by Russian disinformation—and so it is hardly surprising that, to give but one example, a recent video from a party-controlled news source claimed that Turkey and the United States are secretly conspiring to stop Russia from fighting ISIS. See Alberto Nardelli and Craig Silverman, “Italy’s Most Popular Political Party Is Leading Europe in Fake News and Kremlin Propaganda,” Buzzfeed, November 29, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/italys-most-popular-political-party-is-leading-europe-in-fak?

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On the continued ability of hate speech groups to make money through advertising on platforms like YouTube, see Patrick Kulp, “Big Brands Are Still Advertising on YouTube Vids by Hate Groups—Here’s the Proof,” Mashable, January 26, 2017, http://mashable.com/2017/03/23/youtube-advertisers-hate-groups/#gqeCW7JsAOqk; and Charles Riley, “Google under Fire for Posting Government Ads on Hate Videos,” CNN Money, March 17, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/17/technology/google-youtube-ads-hate-speech/index.html. 8. Gideon Resnick, “How Pro-Trump Twitter Bots Spread Fake News,” Daily Beast, November 17, 2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/how-pro-trump-twitter-bots-spread-fake-news. See also S. Woolley and P. N. Howard, “Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents,” introduction to special section on Automation, Algorithms, and Politics, International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 4882–4890; Philip N.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

The new goal was to promote news sources that were “trustworthy” and “informative,” with the trustworthiness of news sources based on surveys of Facebook users.22 Facebook also announced it would ramp up efforts to catch fake news, foreign interference, and fake accounts through human monitoring, the use of third-party fact-checkers, and improved algorithms. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product management, stated, “We are all responsible for making sure the same kind of attack on our democracy does not happen again.”23 Stepping up monitoring entailed compromises, however. As Zuckerberg noted, “When you think about issues like fake news or hate speech, right, it’s a trade-off between free speech and free expression and safety and having an informed community.”24 Until recently, social media platforms were adamant that they were not publishers but rather passive conduits of unedited and uncensored information that was generated by their users.

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In 2014 a researcher at the University of Cambridge working with a small British consultancy named Cambridge Analytica (now bankrupt) built one of those millions of Facebook applications. Its main purpose was to track the preferences of users and their friends. The application provided data on as many as 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users in the United States and helped Russian hackers target particular users with fake news stories supporting candidate Donald Trump and criticizing rival Hillary Clinton.8 The U.S. Congress called in Zuckerberg to explain how his seemingly harmless social media platform had become an instrument of such power for a foreign government. Zuckerberg explained in his written testimony: We face a number of important issues around privacy, safety, and democracy, and you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer.

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Just recently, we’ve seen the #metoo movement and the March for Our Lives, organized, at least in part, on Facebook. After Hurricane Harvey, people raised more than $20 million for relief. And more than 70 million small businesses now use Facebook to grow and create jobs. But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.9 How Did We Get to This Point?

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

If we build subservient AI systems that slavishly do our every bidding, and we make them look and sound like women, then we will propagate a portrait of women as servants.24 Fake News Fake news is precisely what the name suggests: false, inaccurate or misleading information that is presented as fact. Of course, the world had plenty of sources of fake news before the digital age, but the Internet, and more particularly, social media turned out to be the perfect conduit for the propagation of fake news – and the consequences have been dramatic. Social media is all about putting people in touch with one another, and modern social media platforms are spectacularly successful at this – Facebook and Twitter in the West, and WeChat in China, collectively have a sizable proportion of the world’s population registered as users.

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Social media undoubtedly played a significant role in both campaigns – Trump, whatever one thinks of his politics or personal behaviour, is adept at using social media to rally his supporters. In both cases, there were suggestions that social media platforms like Twitter had been used to propagate fake news stories favouring the eventual winners. AI is an important part of the fake news story because it is crucial to the way that fake news is propagated. All social media platforms rely on you spending time interacting with them – it gives them the opportunity to show you adverts, which is how these platforms ultimately make their money. If you like what you see on the platform then you are going to spend more time on it than you would do otherwise.

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When social media applications first appeared, in the early years of this century, they all seemed to be about friends, family and everyday life: there were lots of pictures of children, and lots of pictures of cats. But social media is a very powerful tool, and it quickly began to be used for other purposes. The phenomenon of fake news, which started to make global headlines in 2016, demonstrated just how powerful social media is, and how easily it can be used to influence events on a global scale. Two events made fake news into global headlines: the US presidential elections of November 2016, which led to the election of Donald Trump; and the June 2016 UK national referendum on continued membership of the European Union, which resulted in a narrow vote in favour of leaving.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

The second value has, I hope, pervaded most of the book so far. Now, following an eruption of post-truth and fake news all over the world over the past few years, we turn to the third value; the critical questions of truth and trust. If we are going to live well, humans need to raise their game in this area. The rising complexity of the issues and the rising flood of both information and misinformation, sometimes accidental and sometimes intentional, means that we need to get much better at cutting out the lies, disinformation and ‘fake news’. Both sides of the Atlantic are seeing worrying lurches in the wrong direction. The consequences will surely hit us before long, and I hope will give rise to a longer lasting counter-swing in the right direction.

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Every citizen can help, at almost every turn, to insist on the cleanest possible view of the facts. From the office desk, to the voting booth, to the choice of news station to the bar chat. Fake news A phenomenon that has always been with us but which has recently erupted with devastating consequences. The tools for its propagation get more sophisticated, all of us have to improve our capacity to spot it and the vigor with which we reject it. Many of the thinking skills I outline for twenty-first century living are to do with raising our defenses against fake news. Farming Growing food with respect to both world and wildlife has to be one of the most useful ways that a person can spend their days.

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For many, this might sound too obvious to be worth writing down, but all too often the values behind ideas are not made explicit even though the implications are usually enormous for economics, food policy, climate policy and just about everything else you can think of for thriving in the Anthropocene. To be very clear, the same principle of inherent equal value of all human beings is universal. It applies to all world leaders, purveyors of both real and fake news, tireless aid workers, left wingers, right wingers, billionaires, paupers, your own kids, other people’s kids and even the call centre employee who rings you when you are having dinner with your family to try to persuade you to sue for an accident that never even happened. A person’s inherent worth is independent of their circumstances or the choices they have made in their lives or have had made for them.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

When Jack and his colleagues at OpenAI developed GPT-2, they were concerned about potential misuse of this technology and were thinking about a strategy for responsible release. Humans didn’t need machines to generate fake news, of course. The internet was already rife with disinformation, but tools like GPT-2 could make it easier for trolls, propagandists, and malicious actors to generate fake articles faster and in larger numbers. The technology was problematic in several ways. For one, GPT-2 lowered the barrier to entry for who could create convincing fake news stories. With a single sentence, I used GPT-2 to generate a reasonably convincing fake news story about President Trump declaring war on North Korea. I didn’t have to research how news articles were written or what kinds of details (such as threatening Guam) would make the article more convincing.

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It wasn’t merely regurgitating facts; GPT-2 was creating new content. It was an impressive technical feat but also deeply problematic. GPT-2 might be designed to simply predict the next word in a block of text, but in practice OpenAI had created a fake news generator. Language models such as GPT-2 are just one example of AI tools that can influence and distort the information ecosystem, undermining truth. AI-generated text, audio, and video can be used to create fake news for disinformation and propaganda. They can even be used to convincingly impersonate political leaders. Bots can flood social media with manufactured narratives, allowing authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent.

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I didn’t have to research how news articles were written or what kinds of details (such as threatening Guam) would make the article more convincing. GPT-2 did that for me. Language models like GPT-2 could enable a wider array of actors to create believable disinformation. Second, AI text generation allows the creation of fake news at industrial scales. By typing one-sentence prompts into GPT-2 and allowing the bot to generate the rest of the article, one person could generate ten to twenty times as many fake news stories in the same amount of time it would take to write a single story by hand. Apply automated scripts, and malicious actors could release a deluge of fake content at a scale far beyond what people could create on their own.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

Andrew Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the Consumption of Fake News During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign,” European Research Council working paper, January 9, 2018. 68. Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “Most Americans Who See Fake News Believe It, New Survey Says,” Buzzfeed, December 6, 2016; Ipsos Public Affairs, “BuzzFeed Fake News,” December 6, 2016. See also Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2018) 211–236. 69. United States of America v.

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Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”63 Other messages posted in the Blacktivist Instagram group urged minorities to vote for Jill Stein, a third-party candidate who was deeply unlikely to win. “Trust me,” one reassured them, “it’s not a wasted vote.”64 All told, the Facebook campaign of inflammatory posts on Russian-controlled pages reached more than 126 million people.65 Fake news was part of the campaign, too. One retrospective analysis of Facebook sharing during the period before the election showed that the most popular fake news stories (from all sources, not limited to Russia) were more widely shared among users than the top news stories from legitimate outlets. Among the most popular fakes were stories attacking Clinton, accusing her of selling weapons to the Islamic State, of being legally disqualified from holding office, and of orchestrating the murder of an FBI agent.

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Among the most popular fakes were stories attacking Clinton, accusing her of selling weapons to the Islamic State, of being legally disqualified from holding office, and of orchestrating the murder of an FBI agent. Another widely shared story claimed that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump.66 One study estimates that about 25 percent of Americans visited a website that published fake news in the month before the election, with conservatives much more likely to have done so.67 A 2016 survey found that three-quarters of Americans who recalled seeing fake news headlines considered them to be at least somewhat accurate.68 In parallel with the Facebook operation, the Russians created thousands of fake accounts on Twitter. Here, too, they pretended to be American.69 As the 2016 election approached, they amplified a series of hashtags designed to hurt Clinton, such as #Hillary4Prison, #MAGA, #TrumpTrain, #Trump2016, and #IWontProtectHillary.70 They deployed some of the most popular of their accounts to claim that Clinton was orchestrating key voter-fraud efforts in competitive states such as North Carolina and Florida.71 Paid advertising complemented all these efforts.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

Contents Title Page Preface PART I: BREXIT IN PRINT 2016–2019 Introduction The EU debate is a cynical battle of big beasts, not belief I’m not saying Michael Gove is a bit of an animal but … Where was Putin when Corbyn needed him? No more schmoozing with the enemy on TV shows My Paul Nuttalls routine has floated back up the U-bend Beyond good and evil with Gove and Trump Roll over, Grandma, and tell Robert Peston the news Even stand-up has been weaponised by fake news How a sex robot ended up on the One Show sofa When Boris Johnson’s inner monster goes on the rampage A papal encounter with a bat-faced duck-lion It will take more than ceramics and cheese to unite our divided country Chronicle of May’s fiasco foretold in a urine stain ‘Oh, Jeremy Clarkson.’

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Shtove The usual Guardian anti-Corbyn verbiage. Silvertown Another pathetically veiled article to bash Corbyn … Really low stuff. Forageforfood 1 By February 2019, the terrifying conclusions of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s eighteen-month investigation into Facebook’s dissemination of ‘fake news’, and the way Russia weaponised it, made me nostalgic for comic exaggerations like this, which now just seem like statements of fact. We know without a doubt that our referendum was rigged, and yet we roll forward with its result. 2 I thought it was just me that was being systematically trolled by Russians.

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Gove is a desperate, disappointed man, staring into the murky dew pond of Trump’s inarticulate pronouncements, looking for something that validates him. Hearing that Trump will do a trade deal with the UK ‘absolutely, very quickly’, Gove the emasculated Brexiteer makes this the focus of a Times interview so uncritical as to be as dangerous and dishonest as anything emerging from a Macedonian fake-news factory. This is not a game. Lives are at stake. You all need to do better. See me. Play the ball, not the man. This kind of ad hom attack on Gove (and his wife too?) is very undignified. Yohdur This seemed mean-spirited and irrelevant, for example: ‘resentful foundling Michael Gove’. Lee being an adoptee does not make it right or excuse it any more than my father dying when I was 11 allows me to say ‘half-orphaned Mr X was left wondering what his life would have been if his father had not choked his arteries to death prematurely in an effort to avoid his son’s difficult teenage years.’

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016. At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump.

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In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.* What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors. Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options.

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But even this will not eradicate the problem entirely, because a networked world where everyone is posting from everywhere all the time is simply impossible to control completely. This is more than Russian influence: democracies can no longer effectively police their information borders. Facebook’s dream to connect the world also means connecting Russian bots with British voters and gullible news outlets, fake news purveyors with floating voters, and Theresa Hong with worried American mothers who have never voted before. Every election has become an arms race, and the problem with arms races is that they are very difficult to slow down. Big Tech has built the infrastructure for selling stuff – some of the most sophisticated and connected configurations man has ever dreamt up – and now these infrastructures have been repurposed to win elections.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Firing Comey, the solve-all-problems Jarvanka solution, had indeed unleashed a set of terrible consequences. The Jarvanka side believed that Bannon was in essence blackmailing the president. As Bannon went, so went the virulence of right-wing digital media. Despite his apparent obsession with the “fake news” put out by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, for the president the threat of fake news was actually greater on the right. Though he would never call out fake news on Fox, Breitbart, and the others, these outlets—which could conceivably spew a catchall of conspiracies in which a weak Trump sold out to a powerful establishment—were potentially far more dangerous than their counterparts on the left.

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(In fact, he read his 2011 speech from a sheet of paper.) “So when you have practically no notes and no preparation and then you leave and everybody was thrilled. I said, I think I like this business.” This first preamble gave way to the next preamble. “I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s phony. Fake. A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources. They just make ’em up when there are none. I saw one story recently where they said nine people have confirmed. There are no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two people. Nine people. And I said, Give me a break.

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I could run the Trump organization, a great, great company, and I could run the country, but I don’t want to do that.” Then the direct attack on CNN, his nemesis: “Your organization is terrible. Your organization is terrible. . . . Quiet . . . quiet . . . don’t be rude . . . Don’t be. . . . No, I’m not going to give you a question . . . I’m not going to give you a question. . . . You are fake news. . . .” And in summation: “That report first of all should never have been printed because it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. I will tell you that should never ever happen. Twenty-two million accounts were hacked by China. That’s because we have no defense, because we’re run by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

“Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook”: Mark Zuckerberg, interview by David Kirkpatrick, “In Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg,” Techonomy, November 17, 2016, techonomy.com/conf/te16/videos-conversations-with-2/in-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg/. The president took him into a private room: Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Craig Timberg, “Obama Tried to Give Zuckerberg a Wake-Up Call over Fake News on Facebook,” Washington Post, September 24, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-tried-to-give-zuckerberg-a-wake-up-call-over-fake-news-on-facebook/2017/09/24/15d19b12-ddac-4ad5-ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html?

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* * * — Mark Zuckerberg quickly came to regret his dismissive words, six days after Donald Trump’s election, that Facebook had nothing to do with it. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way—I think is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience. I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news. If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.”

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When Gerasimov published his article in 2013, American war fighters looking at cyberpower were still focusing on its physical effects on power plants or equipment, as embodied by Operation Olympic Games. For them, cyberwar was one thing, information war another. To the Russians, it was all on a spectrum. At one end was pure propaganda. Then came fake news, manipulated election results, the publication of stolen emails. Physical attacks on infrastructure marked the far end. Ukraine was where the techniques all came together, starting in early 2014. In the country’s east, Putin sent in the Little Green Men—his unofficial army of soldiers, so named for their unmarked green uniforms—to maintain a simmering, low-level insurrection that used assassinations and bombings to keep the Ukrainian government off balance.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

Twitter is self-feeding: if you have many millions of followers, those followers can retweet, and soon you are reaching a huge audience of target voters. Twitter is something of a gift for political outsiders, as momentum can be generated speedily and without costs. Target audiences are reached with ease. Trump’s favourite form of communication becomes unavoidably linked with his relationship to truth. Is he tweeting fake news? Was his campaign more widely built around fake news? Some newspaper and magazine editors in America are in agonies about whether they should have done more to expose Trump’s mendacities during the campaign. Fact-checking journalists – the assiduous journalists who were seeking out the precise degree to which Trump was telling the truth – could often still be working in the early hours of every morning during the campaign, comparing the truth with the claims from the campaign.

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We must look at that powerful force – the media – which mediates politics in a way that can sometimes make elected leaders feel powerless. 8 ______ POWERLESSNESS AND THE MEDIA Today the so-called mainstream media – the newspapers and the broadcasters – can seem like relatively innocent relics struggling to survive, in the face of an avalanche of social-media outlets. The relics are the good guys taking on the purveyors of ‘fake news’. There is some truth in the evocation of the battle between old and new. Even if Donald Trump thinks otherwise, there is no contest between The New York Times and a fantasist blogger. But more orthodox media outlets played a significant role in the rise of the outsiders and the undermining of the mainstream insiders, both in the UK and in the US.

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Arguably it is in both of these countries that political change has been especially dramatic, with the election of Trump, Brexit and the rise of Scottish nationalism. While outsiders made hay, the mainstream leaders in these two countries suffered wild fluctuations of reputation long before social media erupted. The focus on ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ politics, after Brexit, and the rise of Trump serve to create a false impression, if only by implication, that there was an era of reliable news and an age when ‘truth’ was a defining force in politics, especially during elections and referendums. This is not the case. In order to understand the various crises in mainstream parties in the UK and the US, and their failure to adapt to tumultuous change, it is necessary to assess the role of the so-called mainstream media, broadcasters and, in some cases, mighty newspapers.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

Facebook’s decision to deprioritize news18 was an absurd way to address issues of “fake news.” It claimed that it wanted to drive engagement through comments and discussion, not shares and likes. Like the whole idea of providing a personalized feed or muting and blocking posts instead of removing them, it said that “meaningful interaction” would now come from family and friends. Research showed that most of us are predisposed to share what our friends and family tell us. The predictable end result of designing the algorithms to suppress news?19 More hate, toxicity, and “fake news.”20 Which was exactly what happened. Three months later, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.

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New Book Explores Its Role in Misinformation,” PBS NewsHour, July 22, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/is-facebook-putting-company-over-country-new-book-explores-its-role-in-misinformation. 50.Lora Kolodny, “Zuckerberg Claims 99% of Facebook Posts ‘Authentic,’ Denies Fake News There Influenced Election,” TechCrunch, November 12, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/13/zuckerberg-claims-99-of-facebook-posts-authentic-denies-fake-news-there-influenced-election/. 51.That was Alex Stamos, who technically reported to Sheryl Sandberg, whose responsibilities included protecting users. 52.Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination (New York: Harper, 2021). 53.Ibid.

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“EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Cambridge Analytica Whistle-Blower Christopher Wylie.” 15.Meghan Bobrowsky, “Facebook Disables Access for NYU Research into Political-Ad Targeting,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-cuts-off-access-for-nyu-research-into-political-ad-targeting-11628052204. 16.Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Executive Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499. 17.Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Braces Itself for Trump to Cast Doubt on Election Results,” New York Times, August 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/technology/facebook-trump-election.html. 18.Kevin Roose, Mike Isaac, and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth,” New York Times, November 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/technology/facebook-election-misinformation.html. 19.In 2020, Rappler began working with Sinan Aral and his team at MIT, as well as researchers at several other universities at home and abroad. 20.Bonz Magsambol, “Facebook Partners with Rappler, Vera Files for Fact-Checking Program,” Rappler, April 12, 2018, https://www.rappler.com/technology/social-media/200060-facebook-partnership-fact-checking-program/. 21.Manuel Mogato, “Philippines Complains Facebook Fact-Checkers Are Biased,” Reuters, April 16, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-facebook-idUSKBN1HN1EN. 22.Jordan Robertson, “Fake News Hub from 2016 Election Thriving Again, Report Finds,” Bloomberg, October 13, 2010, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-13/fake-news-hub-from-2016-election-thriving-again-report-finds#xj4y7vzkg. 23.“EXCLUSIVE: Russian Disinformation System Influences PH Social Media,” Rappler, January 22, 2019, https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/investigative/221470-russian-disinformation-system-influences-philippine-social-media/. 24.Craig Timberg, “Facebook Deletes Several Fake Chinese Accounts Targeting Trump and Biden, in First Takedown of Its Kind,” Washington Post, September 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/22/facebook-deletes-several-fake-chinese-accounts-targeting-trump-biden-first-takedown-its-kind/; Ben Nimmo, C.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

With each buzz and beep of our phones, each automatically downloaded video, each new contact popping up in our digital networks, we get just a glimmer of a vast new world that is, frankly, beyond most people’s understanding, a bizarre land of information and misinformation, of trends and tweets, and of high-speed surveillance technology that has become the new normal. Just think: Russian election-hacking; hate-mongering Twitter feeds; identity theft; big data; fake news; online scams; digital addiction; self-driving car crashes; the rise of the robots; creepy facial recognition technology; Alexa eavesdropping on our every conversation; algorithms that watch us work, play, and sleep; and companies and governments that control them. The list of technology-driven social disruption is endless—and all of it has appeared in just the past few years.

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We are experiencing a crisis of trust in this country; we’ve lost faith in our institutions, our leaders, and the very systems by which society is governed. As tempting as it might be to point a finger straight at the White House, this is not all about the current administration. For one, research shows that the declining trust in liberal democracy has coincided with the rise of social media.8 Part of this has to do with the fake news problem—which academic studies have found is 70 percent more likely to be shared than real news.9 But the fall in trust also has to do with a sense that the game is rigged, and that there is now an even wider social and economic chasm dividing the haves and have-nots, a divide created not just by Wall Street, but by Silicon Valley, too.10 In 2008, Washington bailed out the largest and most powerful banks and left ordinary homeowners to take losses.

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Schmidt was also a key adviser in digital efforts for both the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, using Google’s might to help the former get elected, and exerting policy influence afterward that is worrisome, to say the least.25 While this obviously isn’t problematic in the same way that allowing the Trump campaign to spread racist dog whistles and fake news during the 2016 elections was, it underscores the point that these companies hold undue influence over our political system as a whole, in ways that undermine public trust.26 Schmidt is certainly not alone in playing both sides of the political fence. Take a look at the first meeting of Silicon Valley’s tech titans with Donald Trump in 2017, and you’ll see Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook, and many other avowed Democrats leaning in to the president, literally.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying happens to be what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means that bad actors are amplified. If we want something different to happen, then the way money is earned has to change. In the wake of the 2016 elections in the United States, Facebook, Twitter, Google Search, and YouTube10 announced policy changes to combat dark ads, malicious fake news, hate speech, and so on. Regulators have also introduced requirements such as identifying political advertisers. Just as I was finishing this book, Facebook announced that it will deemphasize news in its feed; the journalism world celebrated, for the most part, because now it might become freer to connect to audiences on its own terms.

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This is yet another ubiquitous problem that’s as hard to see as air. Here’s some positive spin: The fact that independent journalism is in trouble in BUMMER’s shadow is a sign of its integrity. Journalists have successfully held themselves to higher standards than social media influencers, but they have also paid a price. Now the real news is called “fake news,” because by the standards of BUMMER, what is real is fake; in BUMMER, reality has been replaced by stupid numbers. POD PEOPLE Another way to illuminate the tricky degradation of context is to notice online situations in which it is not a problem, at least not yet. A part of the online world that hasn’t destroyed its own context—at least as I write, in 2018—is podcasting.

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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_identity_model_of_deindividuation_effects, but please promise me you won’t become a jerk in an edit war about this entry, okay? If you want to read relevant research from a scientist working for Facebook, see the work of Justin Cheng: https://www.clr3.com/. 4.   http://leesmolin.com/writings/the-trouble-with-physics/ 5.   Shout-out to Tim Wu. 6.   https://www.recode.net/2016/12/29/14100064/linkedin-daniel-roth-fake-news-facebook-recode-podcast 7.   http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/smartphone-addiction-is-part-of-the-design-a-1104237.html 8.   When you’re not on BUMMER it becomes possible to be tough and yet not a jerk. What I hope is happening in this book is that I’m using salty language and getting emotional, and yet I don’t vilify and condemn people.

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

absence of emotions: DB’s imagined scenario 1, 2, 3; negative consequences of 1; in science fiction 1, 2, 3, 4 acting work: actor/character relationship 1; emotional labour 1 action representation network (brain) 1 adolescence and early adulthood: brain development 1; crushes 1, 2; intense emotions 1; nightmare frequency 1, 2; safe exposure to negative emotions 1, 2; social media use 1 see also infancy and childhood affect: definition and components 1; versus basic emotions 1 airport security, facial recognition technology 1 altruism 1, 2 amygdala (brain region): and dreaming 1; and emotional regulation 1, 2; and emotions processing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; gender differences 1; influence of testosterone 1; and memory formation 1; as part of olfactory system 1 AND model of nightmare production 1 anger: as ‘basic’ emotion 1, 2; and colour red 1, 2; DB’s anger during grief 1, 2, 3; facial expression of 1, 2; as ‘masculine’ 1(fn); and motivation 1, 2 see also negative emotions angular gyrus (brain region) 1, 2 anosmia (inability to smell) 1 anterior cingulate cortex (brain region) 1, 2, 3, 4 anterior olfactory nucleus (brain region) 1 anxiety: caused by work 1; performance anxiety 1; social anxiety 1, 2, 3; and status 1; vagus nerve stimulation treatment 1 see also negative emotions; stress apatheia (ultimate goal of Stoicism) 1 appraisal theory 1, 2 approach-attachment behaviour 1 approach versus avoid motivation 1, 2 arguments with romantic partner 1 arousal (component of affect) 1, 2, 3 asexuality 1 @AstroKatie (Katherine Mack) 1 attachment during early childhood 1, 2 see also parent emotional bond attention restoration, and colour green 1 auditory cortex (brain region) 1, 2(fn) auditory processing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5(fn) autism 1, 2 automated voices and announcements, annoyance caused by 1 avatar therapy 1 avoid versus approach motivation 1, 2 babies in the womb, playing music to 1, 2 baby-parent emotional bond 1, 2, 3 see also attachment during early childhood Bain, Alexander 1 Baron-Cohen, Simon 1 Barrett, Lisa Feldman 1, 2 basal ganglia (brain region) 1 basic emotions theory 1, 2, 3, 4 BDSM (sexual practice) 1, 2 belief perseverance 1 Bell, Charles 1, 2 bias: confirmation bias 1, 2, 3; fading affect bias 1, 2, 3; ingroup versus outgroup bias 1; negativity bias 1, 2 Blackmore, Chris 1, 2, 3 blinking, by cartoon characters 1 blood sugar, effect on emotions 1 blue colour, associations and effects 1, 2, 3 body, emotions experienced in see physiology-emotion connection body language: communicating emotion 1, 2, 3, 4; mimicry 1; missing from communication technologies 1 brain: body’s influence on 1; competing resource demands 1, 2, 3; development 1; distinguishing what is real/not real 1, 2; emotions as conscious or subconscious processes 1; gender differences (beliefs and experimental studies) 1; influence of oestrogen and testosterone 1; left brain/right brain facts and myths 1, 2, 3(fn), 4(fn); lobotomies 1; mirror neurons 1, 2, 3, 4; nervous and endocrine system regulation 1; neurotransmitters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; reward pathway and system 1, 2, 3, 4; somatic marker hypothesis 1; spindle cells 1; synapses 1, 2; triune model 1, 2 see also cognition (thinking); learning (of information); memory(ies) brain, functional regions: action representation 1; auditory processing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5(fn); cognition 1, 2, 3, 4; disgust 1; emotional regulation 1, 2; emotions (overview) 1, 2, 3; fear 1; imagination 1; intention processing 1; language processing 1; love 1, 2; lust 1, 2; memories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; motivation 1, 2; olfactory processing 1, 2; visual processing 1, 2, 3 see also specific brain regions brain scans, limitations for studying emotions 1 brainstem 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 breastfeeding 1, 2 Broca’s area (brain) 1 Brown, Thomas 1, 2 Buddhism 1 bullying online 1 burnout 1, 2 Bushman, B.J. 1 bystander effect 1 cancer awareness, role of news and media 1 canned laughter, annoyance caused by 1, 2 categories and types of emotion: basic emotions (theory) 1, 2, 3, 4; identified by James McCosh 1 see also identifying and defining ‘emotions’ cats and other pets, emotional attachment to 1 caudate nucleus (brain region) 1 celebrity endorsements 1, 2, 3, 4 cerebellum (brain region) 1, 2, 3 childbirth, role of oxytocin 1 childhood see infancy and childhood chilli, enjoyment of pain caused by 1 cigarette smoke, DB’s memories and associations 1, 2 cognition-emotion relationship see emotion-cognition relationship cognition (thinking): brain regions associated with 1, 2, 3, 4; effect of love on 1; executive control 1, 2, 3; ‘flow’ state 1; and intrusive thoughts 1; and motivation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and social relationships 1, 2 see also learning (of information) cognitive dissonance 1 colours: cultural associations 1; in DB’s friend’s home 1, 2; emotional response to 1; and visual processing 1, 2, 3 communicating and sharing emotions: machine detection of emotions 1, 2; nonverbal information 1, 2, 3; online versus in-person 1, 2; at work 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 see also emotional contagion; empathy; facial expressions and emotions communication technologies see phone calls; social media and online communication; therapeutic applications of technologies; video calls confirmation bias 1, 2, 3 conformity 1, 2, 3, 4 consciousness, evolution of 1 consolidation of memories 1, 2, 3, 4 conspiracy theories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 see also deception; misinformation and ‘fake news’ constructed emotions theory 1, 2 corpus callosum (brain region) 1 cortex/neocortex (brain region) (in general) 1 see also specific regions of the cortex cortisol 1 cross-race effect 1 crushes, in adolescence 1, 2 crying: DB’s (in)ability to cry 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; gender differences 1; induced by TV and films 1; types and functions of tears 1 cuteness and cute aggression 1 cyberbullying 1 dancing 1 Darwin, Charles 1, 2 deception: automated voices and announcements 1; response to 1, 2; self-deception 1 see also manipulation of emotions; misinformation and ‘fake news’ defining ‘emotions’ 1, 2, 3, 4 deindividuation and ‘mob mentality’ 1 depression: caused by work 1, 2; gender differences 1; and gut microbiome 1; and memory 1; post-natal depression 1, 2; vagus nerve stimulation treatment 1 Diana, Princess of Wales, impact of death 1 digestive system, influence of 1, 2 disgust: as ‘basic’ emotion 1, 2; brain region associated with 1; and colour green 1; facial expression of 1, 2; and horror 1; and memory 1; and suppressed motivation 1 see also negative emotions doctors, emotional aspects of work 1 dopamine 1 drama therapy 1 dreams and nightmares: AND model 1; bizarre nature of 1, 2; DB’s bad dreams 1, 2, 3; due to COVID-19 pandemic 1, 2; and emotion processing 1; Freud’s interpretations 1; and memory consolidation 1; and mental health 1; post-traumatic 1; prevalence of nightmares 1; recurring 1; threat simulation theory 1 Dunbar’s number (of social relationships) 1 dysgranular field (brain region) 1 dysphoria 1 see also depression e-learning, motivation in 1 earworms 1 Ekman, Paul 1, 2, 3, 4 Eleri, Carys 1 embarrassment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 see also negative emotions emojis and emoticons 1 emotion-cognition relationship: appraisal theory 1, 2; in attention and focus 1, 2, 3, 4; belief perseverance 1; cognitive dissonance 1; competition for brain’s resources 1, 2; confirmation bias 1, 2, 3; distinction recognised by Stoics 1; in effect of emotions experienced 1; in empathy 1; in ‘flow’ state 1; interrelatedness (in general) 1, 2, 3, 4; in learning and information processing 1, 2, 3; in love 1; motivated reasoning 1; in motivation 1, 2, 3; negativity bias 1, 2; role of imagination 1; shared evolutionary origin 1; in stage fright 1 emotion-memory relationship: appraisal theory 1, 2; emotions triggered by memories 1, 2, 3, 4; fading affect bias 1, 2, 3; happy memories being more detailed 1; for implicit memories 1; later emotions changing memories 1, 2, 3; longevity and potency of emotional memories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; in memory consolidation 1, 2; in PTSD 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; role of nightmares 1; suppressing emotional memories 1 emotional contagion: dangers of ‘mob mentality’ 1; versus empathy 1; evolutionary importance 1; from groups of people 1, 2, 3; from music 1, 2, 3; neurological mechanism for 1; from social media 1 emotional detachment/suppression at work 1, 2, 3, 4 emotional manipulation see manipulation of emotions emotional processing 1, 2 emotional regulation, brain regions responsible for 1, 2 emotional relationships: attachment during early childhood 1, 2; friendships 1, 2; one-sided see parasocial (one-sided) relationships; parent-baby emotional bond 1, 2, 3; role of neurotransmitters 1, 2; romantic see romantic relationships; see also social relationships emotions: causing change 1; as conscious/subconscious processes 1; historical study of 1; identifying and defining 1, 2, 3, 4; language of 1, 2 see also categories and types of emotion; communicating and sharing emotions; emotion relationship; emotion relationship; negative emotions; physiology connection; positive emotions; specific emotions empathy: and autism 1, 2; in babies 1; and body language mimicry 1; versus emotional contagion 1; evolutionary importance 1, 2, 3; influence of own emotions on 1; as ingrained 1, 2; ingroup versus outgroup bias 1; versus mentalising (theory of mind) 1; neurological mechanism for 1, 2, 3, 4; and physical pain 1; in romantic relationships 1; as selfish/unselfish 1 endocannabinoids 1 endocrine system 1 endorphins 1, 2 envy 1, 2 see also negative emotions episodic memories 1, 2, 3 evaluative conditioning 1 excitation transfer theory 1 executive control 1, 2, 3 see also cognition (thinking) existential dread, as a motivator 1 explicit memories 1 extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation 1 Facebook: DB’s use of 1, 2; research into emotional manipulation 1, 2, 3 see also social media and online communication faces, seeing in inanimate objects 1 facial colour changes 1 facial expressions and emotions: in artificial/CGI faces (uncanny valley) 1; automated emotion recognition 1; in cartoon characters (blinking) 1; cross-cultural similarities and differences 1, 2; difficulties distinguishing between emotions without context 1, 2, 3; early writings on 1; Ekman’s work 1, 2, 3, 4; ‘invisible’ emotions 1; involuntary nature of expressions 1, 2, 3, 4; online curation of emotions portrayed 1 facial paralysis, and empathy 1 facial recognition, cross-race effect 1 facial recognition technology 1 fading affect bias 1, 2, 3 ‘fake news’ see misinformation and ‘fake news’ fandom 1, 2 see also parasocial (one relationships fear: as ‘basic’ emotion 1, 2; brain region associated with 1; enjoyment of 1, 2; facial expression and colour 1, 2; as first emotion 1; of flying 1; and horror 1; and imagination 1; and motivation 1, 2, 3; in PTSD 1; smell of (in sweat) 1 see also negative emotions films and TV causing negative emotions 1, 2, 3, 4 Firth-Godbehere, Richard 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 flat Earth conspiracy theory 1, 2 ‘flow’ state 1 flying, fear of 1 football shirts, red colour’s competitive advantage 1 Freud, Sigmund 1, 2 friendships 1, 2 see also emotional relationships; social relationships frosty atmospheres, emotional contagion 1, 2 funerals: crying at 1; of DB’s father 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; emotional contagion at 1, 2; live streaming 1, 2 gender differences: adolescent crushes 1(fn); attitudes towards infidelity 1; in brains (beliefs and experimental studies) 1; in brains (DB’s impossible experiment) 1; in emotional regulation and expression 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; ‘maternal instinct’ 1; mental health problems 1; other physiological differences 1; societal influences 1 gender discrimination 1, 2, 3 goal distraction 1 green colour, associations and effects 1, 2, 3 grief: DB’s acceptance of emotions 1; DB’s anger 1, 2, 3; DB’s attempts to disguise grief 1; DB’s emotional confusion 1, 2, 3; DB’s (in)ability to cry 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; DB’s motivation and productivity 1, 2; DB’s need to talk after funeral 1; at death of Princess Diana 1; emotional processing 1, 2; shared grieving 1; stages of 1 see also negative emotions guilt 1 see also negative emotions habituation 1, 2 ‘hangry’ behaviour 1 happiness 1 hippocampus (brain region): and dreaming 1; and emotional regulation 1; and emotions processing 1, 2, 3; and imagination 1; and memory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and navigation 1 Holmes and Rahe stress scale 1, 2 Holmes, Sherlock (analogy for action representation) 1 hormones: cortisol 1; digestive 1, 2; effect of tears on 1; influence on the brain (and emotions) 1; oestrogen 1, 2; oxytocin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; testosterone 1, 2, 3; vasopressin 1, 2, 3 see also endocrine system horror (emotion) 1 horror movies 1, 2, 3 hypothalamus (brain region) 1, 2, 3 hysteria 1 Icke, David 1 identification, in parasocial relationships 1 identifying and defining ‘emotions’ 1, 2, 3, 4 imaginary friends 1 imagination and mental imagery 1, 2 imitation of observed actions 1 implicit memories 1 impression management 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 infancy and childhood: attachment with primary caregiver 1, 2; breastfeeding 1, 2; DB’s memories of 1, 2; emotional experiences 1; empathy in babies 1; imaginary friends 1; importance of sense of smell 1; learning from media characters 1; nightmare frequency 1, 2; oxytocin in newborns 1; parent-baby emotional bond 1, 2, 3 see also adolescence and early adulthood inferior frontal cortex (brain region) 1, 2 inferior parietal cortex (brain region) 1 infidelity, emotional versus sexual 1 insular cortex (insula) (brain region) 1, 2, 3, 4 intelligence, and brain anatomy 1 intention processing 1 intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation 1 intrusive thoughts 1 Izard, Carroll E. 1 jealousy 1 Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth 1 language of emotions 1, 2 language processing 1 learning (of information): from media characters 1; motivation 1, 2; from other people 1, 2; processing demands and information prioritisation 1, 2; from senses 1 LeDoux, Joseph 1 left brain/right brain facts and myths 1, 2, 3(fn), 4(fn) limbic system (brain region) 1, 2, 3, 4 lobotomies 1 Lomas, Tim 1 London taxi drivers, brain study 1 losing oneself in a book/film 1 love: brain regions associated with 1, 2; demands on the brain 1; effect on cognition 1; for family and friends 1, 2(fn); role of dopamine 1; romantic love 1, 2, 3 see also romantic relationships lust and sexual attraction: asexuality 1; brain regions associated with 1, 2; and romantic relationships 1, 2; Stoics’ rejection of 1, 2; suppression of 1 Mack, Katherine (@AstroKatie) 1 mammal brain (region) 1, 2, 3, 4 manipulation of emotions: by authorities 1; for marketing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; response to 1; by social media 1; by traditional news and media 1, 2, 3, 4 marketing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 McCosh, James 1 medical work, emotional aspects 1 memory(ies): brain regions associated with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; changeable nature of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; connections with objects 1, 2, 3, 4; consolidation 1, 2, 3, 4; DB’s memories of early childhood 1, 2; DB’s memories of his father 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; episodic memories 1, 2, 3; explicit memories 1; fading affect bias 1, 2, 3; forgetting memories 1; and imagination 1; implicit memories 1; and music 1; procedural memories 1; reminiscence bump 1; retroactive memory enhancement 1; semantic memories 1; and sleep 1; and smell(s) 1, 2, 3, 4; suppression of 1; as synapses 1, 2; working memory 1; Zeigarnik effect 1 see also emotion relationship mental health/illness: and social media 1; and status 1; therapeutic applications of technologies 1 see also anxiety; depression; PTSD; schizophrenia mental imagery and imagination 1, 2 mentalising (theory of mind) 1, 2 mirror neurons 1, 2, 3, 4 mirroring body language 1 misinformation and ‘fake news’: about COVID-19 pandemic 1, 2; David Icke’s space lizards 1; flat Earth theory 1, 2; and social media/internet 1, 2, 3, 4; susceptibility to 1 see also deception ‘mob mentality’ (deindividuation) 1 Moebius syndrome (facial paralysis) 1 monkey experiments, mirror neurons 1 Morgan, Matt 1 motivated reasoning 1 motivation: approach-attachment behaviour 1; approach versus avoid motivation 1, 2; brain regions associated with 1, 2; and cognition 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; DB’s experiences during grief 1, 2; and emotions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation 1; and novelty 1, 2, 3, 4 motivational salience 1 music: dancing 1; DB’s emotional response to 1, 2, 3, 4; differentiating between voice and instruments 1; earworms 1; emotional contagion from 1, 2, 3; emotional response to 1, 2; evolutionary significance 1, 2; and memory 1 musical expectancy 1, 2 navigation, role of hippocampus 1 negative emotions: and attention/focus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and creativity 1; emotion processing 1, 2; feeling good whilst experiencing 1, 2, 3; induced by TV and films 1, 2, 3, 4; and intrusive thoughts 1; and memory 1, 2, 3; as more impactful than positive emotions 1; negativity bias 1, 2; and novelty 1; and performance 1 see also specific emotions negativity bias 1, 2 nervous systems: enteric (‘second brain’) 1; parasympathetic 1, 2, 3; regulation by brain 1; somatic and autonomic 1; sympathetic 1, 2, 3 neurotransmitters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 news and media (traditional): credibility 1, 2, 3, 4; emotional content 1, 2, 3, 4; precursors to 1 see also conspiracy theories; misinformation and ‘fake news’; social media and online communication nightmares see dreams and nightmares noises, emotional response to 1, 2, 3 see also music novelty 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 objects, and memories 1, 2, 3, 4 oestrogen 1, 2 olfactory bulb and cortex (brain region) 1, 2, 3 olfactory system 1, 2, 3, 4 one-sided relationships see parasocial (one-sided) relationships online communication see social media and online communication online learning, motivation in 1 orbitofrontal cortex (brain region) 1, 2 oxytocin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 pain (physical): and empathy 1; enjoyment of 1, 2 paracingulate sulcus (brain region) 1 parasocial (one-sided) relationships: adolescent crushes 1, 2; benefits 1, 2; ending the relationship 1; with fictional characters 1, 2, 3, 4; identification with the object 1; with imaginary friends 1; losing oneself in a narrative 1; meeting the object 1; negative aspects 1; neurological mechanisms 1; with people you haven’t met 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 parasympathetic nervous system 1, 2, 3 Parch (TV drama), actor’s experiences 1 pareidolia 1 parent-baby emotional bond 1, 2, 3 see also attachment during early childhood ‘passions’ 1, 2, 3 pathos 1 performance anxiety (stage fright) 1 personality, influence of early experiences 1, 2 phone calls: DB’s last call to father 1; lack of nonverbal emotional cues 1; walking around during 1 physiology-emotion connection: body influencing emotion 1; emotion influencing the body 1; somatic marker hypothesis 1 see also crying Pickle (DB’s cat) 1 Pixar movies 1, 2(fn), 3 positive emotions: and attention/focus 1, 2; and memory 1, 2 see also specific emotions ‘Positive Lexicography’ project 1 post-natal depression 1, 2 posterior parietal cortex (brain region) 1, 2 prefrontal cortex (brain region): cognitive functions 1, 2, 3; and emotional regulation 1, 2; and emotions processing 1, 2; and imagination 1; influence of testosterone 1; and memory 1; and mentalising (theory of mind) 1; and motivation 1, 2 pride 1 procedural memories 1 processing (negative) emotions 1, 2 Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time 1 psycho-emotional tears 1, 2 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 racism: cross-race effect 1; and oxytocin 1 rage see anger red colour, associations and effects 1, 2, 3 relationships see emotional relationships religious perspectives on emotions 1 reminiscence bump 1 reptile brain (region) 1 ‘resting bitch face’ 1 retroactive memory enhancement 1 reward, and motivation 1 reward pathways of brain 1, 2, 3, 4 Ridley, Rosalind 1 Rippon, Gina 1, 2, 3 romantic relationships: adolescent crushes as preparation for 1; attitudes towards infidelity 1; disagreements and disputes 1; emotional connection between partners 1, 2; empathy versus problem ‘fixing’ in 1; long-term relationships 1, 2; love in 1, 2, 3; negative emotions in 1; online versus in-person 1; and own identity 1, 2; physical attraction in 1, 2; role of oxytocin 1; stress associated with losing partner 1, 2; trumpeting on social media 1 see also emotional relationships sadness: as ‘basic’ emotion 1; and colour blue 1, 2; enjoyment of 1, 2, 3; facial expression of 1 schadenfreude 1, 2 schizophrenia 1 scientific method 1, 2 scientists: motivations 1, 2, 3; popular portrayal as lacking emotion 1 self-deception 1 semantic memories 1 Sesame Street (TV) show, learning from 1 sex differences see gender differences sexism see gender discrimination sexual activity, BDSM 1, 2 sexual attraction see lust and sexual attraction sharing emotions see communicating and sharing emotions Simpsons, The (TV show), blinking in 1(fn) Singer, Tania 1 sleep 1, 2, 3 see also dreams and nightmares smell(s): anosmia (inability to smell) 1; DB’s memories of cigarette smoke 1, 2; and emotions 1, 2; evolutionary importance 1, 2, 3; and memory 1, 2, 3, 4; olfactory system 1, 2, 3, 4 social anxiety 1, 2, 3 social media and online communication: adolescents 1; adults/older people 1; emojis and emoticons 1; and emotional contagion 1; impression management 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; lack of nonverbal emotional cues 1, 2; live streaming funerals 1, 2; machine detection of emotions 1; negative aspects 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; online versus in-person emotions and personae 1; positive aspects 1, 2; versus real-world interactions, cognitive demands 1; and reward 1, 2, 3; and self-deception 1; and self-validation 1, 2, 3; and status 1, 2 see also conspiracy theories; Facebook; misinformation and ‘fake news’; news and media (traditional); video calls social relationships: cognitive load associated with 1, 2; Dunbar’s number 1; friendships 1, 2; one-sided see parasocial (one-sided) relationships; see also emotional relationships somatic marker hypothesis 1 spicy food, enjoyment of pain caused by 1 spindle cells 1 Spiner, Brent 1 sports kit, competitive advantage of wearing red 1 SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) programme 1 stage fright 1 stalkers 1 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series): Data actor’s experience of fans 1; Data’s inability to choose ice-cream flavour 1 Star Trek (TV series): Stoicism of Vulcans 1, 2; universal use of English language 1 Starbucks (branding) 1 status: and emotions 1; and social media 1, 2; subjective status and mental health 1 Stoics and Stoicism 1, 2 stress: benefits of green environments for 1; caused by uncertainty 1; caused by work 1, 2; coping mechanisms 1; cortisol 1; Holmes and Rahe stress scale 1, 2; PTSD 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and status 1; Yerkes-Dodson curve 1 see also anxiety; negative emotions striatum (brain region) 1 study of emotions (historical) 1 suicide 1, 2 superior temporal cortex (brain region) 1, 2, 3, 4 suppression of emotions: during disagreements with romantic partner 1; in learning and decision making (as impossible) 1; at work 1, 2, 3, 4 supramarginal gyrus (brain region) 1 surprise 1, 2 sympathetic nervous system 1, 2, 3 synapses (neuron connections) 1, 2 taxi drivers, brain study 1 tears, types and functions of 1 teenage years see adolescence and early adulthood temporal lobe (brain region) 1, 2 testosterone 1, 2, 3 thalamus (brain region) 1, 2, 3 theories of emotions see basic emotions theory; constructed emotions theory theory of mind (mentalising) 1, 2 thinking see cognition (thinking) threat simulation theory 1 transportation phenomenon 1 triune brain model 1, 2 TV and films causing negative emotions 1, 2, 3, 4 types of emotion see categories and types of emotion uncanny valley 1 uncertainty, unpleasant nature of 1 vagus nerve 1 valence (component of affect) 1, 2 vasopressin 1, 2, 3 video calls: DB’s call with friends after father’s funeral 1; lack of nonverbal emotional cues 1 virtual reality (VR) 1 visual cortex (brain region) 1, 2 visual processing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 see also colours voice characteristics, and communicating emotion 1 volcano/cupcake scenario (competing motivations) 1 wine tasting and appreciation 1 work and workplaces: communicating the wrong emotions at work 1; DB’s job embalming cadavers 1, 2, 3(fn); emotional aspects of medical work 1; emotional detachment/suppression 1, 2, 3, 4; emotional labour of acting work 1; mental health problems caused by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; performance appraisals 1, 2; wellbeing initiatives 1, 2 working memory 1 yawning, as contagious 1 Yerkes-Dodson curve 1 Zeigarnik effect (tendency to forget completed tasks) 1 ‘zone,’ state of being in 1 Zoom calls see video calls About the Author Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist, blogger, sometimes-comedian and author.

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Exploring my own grief and unpicking why I was going through what I was going through took me to some very unlikely places. It also raised a plethora of intriguing questions. Why do we humans look the way we do? Why do our brains see what they see? How come music affects us the way it does? What propels a lot of scientific discovery? How come our modern world is plagued by misinformation and ‘fake news’? Emotions, it turns out, are the answer to all of the above – and much more besides. My investigations into this all-pervasive aspect of our inner lives took me to the dawn of time, and the end of the universe. To the boundaries of fantasy and reality. From the most basic processes of life to the cutting edge of technology, and everything in between.

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As anyone who’s ever been online will undoubtedly recognise, the ‘news’ you encounter may well be ‘fake’. It turned out that emotion is at the heart of this phenomenon, one I felt compelled to look into because, as well as the many drastic consequences it’s had for our whole society, it ended up making the most painful period of my life even worse. Fake news, real views: how emotion and technology undermine reality Grief is a very emotional experience. This is hardly a revelation at this point. But there’s a difference between knowing something in theory, and it actually happening to you. That’s how I finally understood that grief isn’t just prolonged sadness, one omnipresent emotional state, but made up of many different ones.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies. New York: Oxford University Press. 75. Shorenstein Center. May 2017. Combatting Fake News: An Agenda for Research and Action. https://shorensteincenter.org/combating-fakenews-agenda-for-research/. 76. www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/europe/trump-fake-news-dictators .html. 77. M. Mitchell Waldrop. 2017. ‘News feature: The genuine problem of fake news.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences 114 (48): 12631–12634. 78. Knight Foundation. 2017. American Views: Trust, Media and Democracy. Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey. https://kf-site-production.s3.amazonaws .com/publications/pdfs/000/000/242/original/KnightFoundation_ AmericansViews_Client_Report_010917_Final_Updated.pdf. 79.

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There has long been concern about an erosion of trust in political parties, parliaments and governments in Western societies.74 This is also where populism might be expected to have the strongest impact. For example, repeated rhetorical claims of ‘fake news’ by President Trump and White House spokespersons have sought to construct an alternative reality portraying facts as fungible and journalists as the partisan tool of an arrogant elite.75 This phrase has spread to many dictators when rejecting critical news reports, including Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Syrian president Bashar al-­Assad, Myanmar government officials dismissing news about genocide, and by Russia’s Foreign Ministry and the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily.76 The fake news narrative from Trump, combined with social media users actually being targeted by Russian misinformation campaigns, is widely believed to have eroded public trust in the news media.77 For example, Gallup polls report that most Americans say that it is harder to be well informed and to determine which information is accurate today, with social media ‘bubbles’ reinforcing partisan polarization among like-­minded networks.78 To examine the trends, we turn to the Eurobarometer surveys which have monitored institutional trust in political parties, national parliaments and national governments in EU member states from 2001 to 2017.

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As unpacked fully in chapter 3, populist rhetoric makes two core claims about how societies should be governed.5 First, populism challenges the legitimate authority of the ‘establishment.’ It questions pluralist beliefs about the rightful location of power and authority in any state, including the role of elected representatives in democratic regimes. Favorite targets include the mainstream media (‘fake news’), elections (‘fraudulent’), politicians (‘drain the swamp’), political parties (‘dysfunctional’), public-­sector bureaucrats (‘the deep state’), judges (‘enemies of the people’), protests (‘paid rent-a-mob’), the intelligence services (‘liars and leakers’), lobbyists (‘corrupt’), intellectuals (‘arrogant liberals’) and scientists (‘who needs experts?’)

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

. … In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation.’89 Some 82 per cent of middle-school students could not tell a news story from an advertisement. The Swedes have developed teaching materials to educate kids about fake news, online propaganda and doctored imagery. Teenagers in Ukraine – perhaps the country most assaulted by propaganda trolls – are taking classes on media literacy to good effect: students who participated in a pilot programme were twice as alert to hate speech and 18 per cent better at spotting fake news.90 In Denmark, ‘Trolls in Your Feed’ is a publication for high-school kids, part of a push there against Russian disinformation.91 Classes, including cautionary study of false news reports, are working their way into school curricula in parts of the United States.92 In parallel, fact-checking projects have also taken off.

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v=XrOAy6PfYlYwww.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse 82 www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/you-have-identified-70-objects-taken-child-sexual-abuse-imageswww.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/your-help-we-are-21-000-steps-closer-to-saving-child-sexual-abusewww.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2017/08/28/stop-child-abuse-2nd-update/ 83 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/04/22/creating-impact-a-year-on-stop-child-abuse-trace-an-object/ 84 www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/241-victims-of-child-sexual-abuse-safeguarded-thanks-to-global-law-enforcement-efforts 85 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians_in_the_Baltic_states 86 www.thedailybeast.com/the-baltic-elves-taking-on-pro-russian-trolls 87 www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-48401922/how-finland-fights-the-fake-news-trolls 88 disinfoportal.org/governments-countering-disinformation-the-case-of-sweden/ 89 stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:fv751yt5934/SHEG%20Evaluating%20Information%20Online.pdfamp.usatoday.com/amp/2769781002?__twitter_impression=true 90 www.npr.org/2019/03/22/705809811/students-in-ukraine-learn-how-to-spot-fake-stories-propaganda-and-hate-speech?t=1553365503768 91 euvsdisinfo.eu/trolls-in-your-feed/ 92 www.cjr.org/special_report/students-of-truth.php 93 reporterslab.org/category/fact-checking/ 94 www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-46828293/debunking-fake-news-in-nigeria 95 fullfact.org/blog/2019/jun/how-fact-checking-works/ 96 www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/10/covid-19-monitoring-the-global-slowdown/ 4 MICE CATCH CAT 1 Urban, op. cit., pp. 199–202. 2 www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43315636 3 www.wired.com/story/roman-dobrokhotov-insider-russia-gru-bellingcat/?

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In hindsight, the phone-hacking scandal had a lasting impact, deepening an existing stereotype of journalists as a sleazy elite, both corrupt and corrupting. This reputation, which fails to distinguish between the ruthless reporters and the responsible, has been exploited by politicians (most notoriously President Donald Trump), with convenient dismissals of facts as ‘fake news’. As for Brown Moses, the phone-hacking scandal stood as a vital first stop, one that helped shape the Bellingcat method. I knew with absolute clarity that our work must stand in opposition to the worst traditional journalism. Our sourcing would remain as open to public scrutiny as possible. Political agendas should have nothing to do with our work.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Tetlock, author of Superforecasting “Whether you are wondering how frauds like Enron, Theranos, and FTX managed to fool so many people for so much of the time or just want to know how to protect yourself from the Next Big Fleece, Simons and Chabris have got you covered in this tour of how con artists, hoaxers, and troll farms prey on human cognitive weaknesses.” —Gary Marcus, author of Guitar Zero, Kluge, and Rebooting AI “In an era when more information is available to us than ever before, when claims of ‘fake news’ might themselves be fake news, Simons and Chabris offer a vital tool to not only inoculate ourselves against getting infected by misinformation, but also prevent us from spreading it to others.” —David McRaney, author of How Minds Change “The vast menagerie of scams detailed in Nobody’s Fool makes for entertaining—albeit frightening—reading.

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Many online vendors routinely manipulate their product and business ratings on Amazon, Yelp, and other sites. Companies worth millions or billions of dollars sell nothing but tools for cheating—from bots and cheats for online games to prewritten papers and test answers for college courses. And around the world, political campaigns increasingly traffic in fake news and conspiracy theories or at best do not care whether their claims are true or false.7 Over the course of writing Nobody’s Fool, we studied hundreds of examples of deception of all sorts and applied our understanding of cognitive psychology to identify recurring features and emergent patterns.

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The challenge comes in realizing when we need to check more and figuring out how to go about it. Here’s a straightforward example of how it works. SUPREMELY FAKE “It’s not the tweets, it’s the retweets that get you in trouble.… You see something that looks good and you don’t investigate it.” In a social media world of fake news and political disinformation, those are wise words (and ironic ones, considering who said them). Political disinformation goes nowhere unless its recipients spread it to their friends, and they spread it to theirs, and so on—which makes it critical to short-circuit this process when it reaches us.8 One of Donald Trump’s first acts on assuming the presidency in 2017 was to nominate a successor to Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief. This is perhaps no more evident than in the rise in prominence of “fake news” and disinformation. The concept of “fake news,” an intentionally false story planted for financial or political gain, is hundreds of years old. It has included such legendary practitioners as Orson Welles, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst. Disinformation is different than fake news in that the story has some true elements, embellished to spin a particular narrative. Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence.

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Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence. Disinformation is even more powerful because the confirmable facts in the story make it feel like the information has been vetted, adding to the power of the narrative being pushed. Fake news isn’t meant to change minds. As we know, beliefs are hard to change. The potency of fake news is that it entrenches beliefs its intended audience already has, and then amplifies them. The Internet is a playground for motivated reasoning. It provides the promise of access to a greater diversity of information sources and opinions than we’ve ever had available, yet we gravitate toward sources that confirm our beliefs, that agree with us.

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Every bet we make in our lives depends on our beliefs: who we believe will make the best president, if we think we will like Des Moines, if we believe a low-fat diet will make us healthier, or even if we believe turkeys can fly. Being smart makes it worse The popular wisdom is that the smarter you are, the less susceptible you are to fake news or disinformation. After all, smart people are more likely to analyze and effectively evaluate where information is coming from, right? Part of being “smart” is being good at processing information, parsing the quality of an argument and the credibility of the source. So, intuitively, it feels like smart people should have the ability to spot motivated reasoning coming and should have more intellectual resources to fight it.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

By one estimate from Columbia Journalism Review, over a six-day period near the end of the campaign, the New York Times ran as many front-page stories about Clinton’s emails as it did about all policy issues over the sixty-nine days immediately preceding the election.5 I don’t think we ever will have a fully clear idea of the impact of “fake news” during the last presidential election, but keep in mind that only 14 percent of Americans reported that social media was their main source of electoral news. When it comes to opinions about elections, Facebook has nothing close to a monopoly, as it competes with family influences, private conversations, cable news, talk radio, email, books, and many other sources. Or look at the broader electoral picture. The Democratic Party did quite poorly with respect to governorships and state legislatures, and it does not seem that Facebook fake news or Russian-bought propaganda played a major role in those races.

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Coming from another direction, Nicholas Carr wrote a book arguing that Google is partly responsible for the decline in our memories—why remember facts when you can just search for them? He asserted outright that Google makes us stupider. More recently, social media companies have been blamed for the ascent of Donald Trump, the renaissance of racism, “fake news,” and the collapse of appropriate democratic discourse. The framing of “great stuff for free” has been replaced by “the product is us.” Hostility toward American big business is nothing new, but of course the key question is to what extent the critics are correct. For the most part, to continue my love letter to American business, I would like to speak up for the tech companies, especially the big ones.

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When it comes to Facebook news stories, Russian-manipulated content has received a lot of attention in recent times. I view that as a minor problem; the amount of money spent on such ads seems to have been quite small, at the time about 0.1 percent of Facebook’s daily advertising revenue. Many of the reports of “fake news” following the 2016 election strike me as misrepresentations. Most of us probably saw the clickbait headlines about how many people clicked on or liked totally false stories on Facebook, but as a share of total interactions with Facebook, under generous assumptions, that was only about 0.0006 percent of user actions.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

He wanted to dismiss outright the notion that those stories had had any effect on how the electorate voted. “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it is a very small amount of the content—the idea that influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,”3 Zuckerberg said. His voice grew stronger as he continued. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news.” The statement, taken out of context, made headlines around the world. Facebook feeds were inundated with false news.

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Employees who worked on the News Feed team raised the issue with managers, only to be told that false news didn’t run afoul of Facebook rules. This didn’t sit well with them. “I was grinding my teeth over that; we were seeing all these junk sites sitting really prominently in people’s feed. We knew people were opening Facebook and seeing totally fake news stories at the top of their home page, but we kept being told that there was nothing we could do—people could share whatever they wanted to share,” recalled one former News Feed employee. At a meeting with his manager in early June, he pointed out that many of the sites promoting false or misleading articles on Facebook appeared to be employing dubious methods to promote their stories.

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He appeared as stunned as the rest of the team. Trump’s victory put Facebook and the nation into uncharted territory, he said. He warned that Facebook would be blamed for the swell of misinformation on the site ahead of the election. Some DC employees privately thought the company deserved the blame, that its lax policing of fake news had in fact helped elect Trump. We’re in this together, Kaplan said. He hadn’t endorsed the candidate. Many of his friends were “Never Trumpers,” Republicans who had taken vows to fight against Trump’s candidacy. And of course, it didn’t help that Sandberg, one of Clinton’s “Hillblazers” (the campaign’s designation for those who donated or raised at least $100,000 for the former secretary of state), had aligned herself so closely with the Clinton campaign.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

So major affairs of state are being decided not by the national interest, nor even by the interests of major groups within the nation, but by the financial interests and/or ego of the man in the White House. Is America amazing, or what? 17 On the Media BEYOND FAKE NEWS AFTER THE 2016 ELECTION, AS PEOPLE ASKED HOW SUCH A THING COULD happen, there was a lot of talk about the role of “fake news”—conspiracy theories and false claims spreading through social media. For example, Pizzagate—the claim, based on nothing, that high-ranking Democratic officials were connected with a child sex ring involving a Washington pizzeria—spread widely over the Internet, leading among other things to death threats to restaurant owners.

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Politics Trump and the Aristocracy of Fraud Stop Calling Trump a Populist Partisanship, Parasites, and Polarization Why It Can Happen Here Who’s Afraid of Nancy Pelosi? Truth and Virtue in the Age of Trump Conservatism’s Monstrous Endgame Manhood, Moola, McConnell, and Trumpism 17. ON THE MEDIA Essay: Beyond Fake News Bait-and-Switch Triumph of the Trivial Is There Any Point to Economic Analysis? The Year of Living Stupidly Hillary Clinton Gets Gored 18. ECONOMIC THOUGHTS Essay: The Dismal Science How I Work The Instability of Moderation Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic Credits Index ARGUING with ZOMBIES INTRODUCTION The Good Fight Punditry was never part of the plan.

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In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed. Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming—evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists—a “gigantic hoax.” What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy?

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

See also the compendium published by the Los Angeles Times under the title Our Dishonest President. Many Americans did not see Enemy: Michael M. Grynbaum, “Trump Calls the News Media the ‘Enemy of the American People,’ ” NYT, Feb. 17, 2017. “Fake news”: “Trump, in New TV Ad, Declares First 100 Days a Success,” NYT, May 1, 2017; Donald Trump, Tweet, Jan. 6, 2018: “the Fake News Mainstream Media”. Cf “The Kremlin’s Fake Fake-News Debunker,” RFE/RL, Feb. 22, 2017. In the Russian model See Matthew Gentzkow, “Polarization in 2016,” Stanford University, 2016. The politics of eternity tempts 1930s as ideal: Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon”; Timothy Snyder, “Trump Is Ushering In a Dark New Conservatism,” TG, July 15, 2017. 1929 and 0.1%: Saez and Zucman, “Wealth Inequality,” 3.

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For Aristotle “oligarchy” meant rule by the wealthy few; the word in this sense was revived in the Russian language in the 1990s, and then, with good reason, in English in the 2010s. Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word “fake,” as in “fake news.” This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed it as his own; but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began its career in the United States. It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real. The Russian campaign to fill the international public sphere with fiction began in Ukraine in 2014, and then spread to the United States in 2015, where it helped to elect a president in 2016.

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For a profound description of the undoing of the psychological preconditions to democratic politics, see Schlögel, Entscheidung in Kiew, 17–22. Though internet platforms Facebook products: Elizabeth Dwoskin, Caitlin Dewey, and Craig Timberg, “Why Facebook and Google are struggling to purge fake news,” WP, Nov. 15, 2016. 56 million: Craig Timberg, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” WP, Nov. 24, 2016. Russians promote Fox and Breitbart: Eisentraut, “Russia Pulling Strings.” The “pizzagate” Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.,” WP, Dec. 6, 2016; Ben Popken, “Russian trolls pushed graphic, racist tweets to American voters,” NBC, Nov. 30, 2017; Mary Papenfuss, “Russian Trolls Linked Clinton to ‘Satanic Ritual,’ ” HP, Dec. 1, 2016.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Examining their social media consumption and mapping stories to existing lists of “fake news,” they estimated that more than a quarter of Americans had been exposed to at least one fake news article in that period. Though this is a large number, the actual volume of engagement with fake news sites is actually quite low. As a share of visits to “hard news” sites, less than 2 percent of visits involved engagement with a fake news article. More troubling is that some people are much more at risk of encountering and sharing disinformation online. The most significant predictor of fake news sharing behavior is age: older people are much more likely to pass along fake news stories to their friends.

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The goal is to undermine the ability of people to make a choice or judgment with clarity about the verifiable facts. Concerns about the spread of disinformation on social media burst into public view with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Teenagers in the Macedonian town of Veles were paid up to $8,000 per month each to operate approximately a hundred pro-Trump fake news sites with innocuous-sounding names such as USADailyPolitics.com. Russia’s Internet Research Agency, one of the “troll factories,” served as an industrial-scale manufacturer of disinformation. According to Twitter, the IRA operated 3,814 accounts, and individual operators were responsible for creating a high volume of content daily.

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Two additional things are different now, both of which matter for the prospects of building an effective regulatory regime for internet platforms. The first is the level of partisan polarization. It’s difficult to imagine parties on opposite ends of the political spectrum coming to agreement on what constitutes fake news and misinformation, when hateful language becomes incitement to violence, and whether a curation process is politically neutral. The second is that legislators historically justified the regulation of broadcasting in terms of the physical limits of airspace that created spectrum scarcity. Because there wasn’t enough broadcast spectrum to enable a fully competitive market, broadcasters were expected to serve the public interest as well as their own commercial interests.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

“Voices of the Women’s March: Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem, Madonna, Alicia Keys, Janet Mock, and More.” 2017. Democracy Now, January 23. www.democracynow.org/2017/1/23/voices_of_the_womens_march_angela. Wagner, Alex. 2017. “Trump vs. the Very Fake News Media.” The Atlantic, February 17. www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trump-vs-the-very-fake-news-media/516561/. Ware, Doug G. 2017. “Trump Deflects Blame for Yemen Raid That Killed U.S. Navy SEAL.” UPI, February 28. www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2017/02/28/Trump-deflects-blame-for-Yemen-raid-that-killed-US-Navy-SEAL/3241488319168/. Weinstein, Edwin A. 1981.

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The following well-known quotes, which we’ve organized into categories—some of them overlap multiple categories—compiled by Michael Kruse and Noah Weiland for Politico Magazine (“Donald Trump’s Greatest Self Contradictions,” May 5, 2016) illustrate his extreme present hedonistic penchant for off-roading from his script and/or saying or tweeting whatever pops into his mind, making things up, repeating fake news, or simply lying: DEHUMANIZATION • “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition” (The Art of the Deal, 1987). • “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us.

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For example, not only is Obama a Muslim born in Kenya but, according to Trump, he had a Hawaiian government bureaucrat murdered to cover up the truth about his birth certificate (“How amazing, the state health director who verified copies of Obama’s birth certificate died in a plane crash today. All others lived,” Trump said); Antonin Scalia was murdered (“[T]hey say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow”); later, fake news websites sponsored by the Russians laid this “murder” at Hillary’s feet; and Ted Cruz’s father aided the Kennedy assassination, the mother of all conspiracy theories (“What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible”). And still the world was shocked when Trump accused Barack Obama of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

(What was seen by conspiracy subscribers as a linchpin was that Podesta was once invited over email to a dinner by a nonprofit organization’s government relations head who’d noted that her stepgrandchildren would likely be playing in the pool.) Soon it was being spread around in the ecosystem of fake news, including Infowars, and even was tweeted by soon-to-be national security adviser Mike Flynn. On Reddit, members of conspiracy-theory-heavy subreddits piled onto r/pizzagate. R/pizzagate’s problems were not limited to disseminating fake news and wild theories, as well as spoofs of these theories, provided by lulz-seeking trolls. The Reddit community team noted instances of doxing—and warned moderators their community could be subject to a ban.

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While Reddit was secretly investigating, and keeping mum to the public on its findings, outside researchers determined that during the lead-up to the election, there’d been not just an uptick, but a 1,600 percent increase in links on conservative subreddits to what they’d dubbed “controversial” media—dubious news sources that spread hyperbole, unverified claims, and highly opinionated articles framed as truth. Republican forums had spread fake news at a rate sixteen times higher than prior to the election cycle—or at any other time in the past decade, researchers found. Certain conservative subreddits (such as r/The_Donald and r/Conservative, the two major hubs, and r/HillaryForPrison, an extreme anti-Clinton forum) were home to 80 percent of all fake news on Reddit, during and after the 2016 election cycle, they determined. From the outset of Trump’s presidency, instances remained high. Reddit wouldn’t admit anything of this sort publicly until six months later.

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Just six minutes after his first Tripathi tweet, Luke Russert tweeted again, saying, “It’s still early w unconfirmed reports, but if Redit [sic] was right with the Sunil Tripathi theory, it’s changed the game 4ever.” Reddit wasn’t right. Three years before social networks would fuel a vicious cycle of fake news—often aided by Russian disinformation outlets, domestic right-wing meme warriors, and politically minded propagandists—Reddit had seeded an entirely incorrect and highly damaging news cycle. Two hours later, around 5 a.m. the entire theory fell apart. NBC reported that Tripathi was not a suspect.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

During the economic recovery, however, most economists did not recognize the flashbulb quality of the September 2001 attacks, which encouraged a contagious constellation of narratives and may have profoundly affected US businesses and the US economy.20 The Ubiquity of Fake News In attempting to be vivid, storytellers often resort to fiction or fake news, thereby providing amplified tales. The history of narratives shows that “fake news” is not new. In fact, people have always liked amusing stories, and they spread stories that they suspect are not true, as for example in urban legends. In fact, people often spread titillating stories without making any clear moral decision whether they are spreading falsehoods or not. Fake news often makes an impression on people because the brain processes that implement reality monitoring are imperfect.

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All of these sites have built their reputation by debunking fake news rather than by reporting all sides of a controversy without taking sides, which was once common in the mainstream news media. Unfortunately, most people do not read these fact-checking websites. In addition, their credibility has recently been compromised by fake news designed to harm their reputations, leading some members of the general public to give up the hope of ever finding the real truth. What conclusions can we draw? Given its presence over the centuries and millennia, fake news seems to be part of the normal human condition. Fake performances, fake stories, and fake heroes are ubiquitous.

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New narratives might be interpreted as exogenous, helping us identify additional quasi-controlled experiments. In fact, the gold discoveries and wars that Friedman and Schwartz emphasized likely were exogenous because they were made possible by innovations in popular narratives, such as gold rush stories or fake news about foreign conspiracy. We must be wary of many (but not all) economists’ supposition that the causality always runs from economic events to narratives, and not the other way around. There has been a lively debate about the impact of self-fulfilling prophecies in economics. Sociologist Robert K.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Similarly, when Trump, after the 2016 election, accused half the press corps of being “fake news,” he was beginning a process that would lead his supporters to doubt everything they read and watched in the mainstream press. But he was also doing something else. He was appropriating a term that had been used by communications scholars to describe a very real phenomenon: manufactured propaganda that is designed to seem like real news but is entirely made-up. Fake articles like that had been a boon to Trump, including one particularly viral one that falsely reported that the pope had endorsed him. But now, thanks to his appropriation of the term “fake news,” we were all robbed of a useful phrase to describe the phenomenon.

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“Forces opposed to justice”: Olúfmi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 199. “There is a resistance to memory”: Jacqueline Rose, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 120. “the biggest fake news story”: Dana Kennedy, “‘Biggest Fake News Story in Canada’: Kamloops Mass Grave Debunked by Academics,” New York Post, May 27, 2022. He left a long, rambling manifesto: Maxine Joselow, “Suspect in Buffalo Rampage Cited ‘Ecofascism’ to Justify Actions,” Washington Post, May 17, 2022. “I’m struck by the similarity”: Julian Brave NoiseCat @jnoisecat, tweet, May 16, 2022, Twitter. 14.

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Maybe it can drive a whole society mad. “Abuse of power begets conspiracy allegations, and the men and women of conspiratorial capital at least partly have themselves to blame for the extreme and fictitious allegations made against them,” Marcus Gilroy-Ware, a digital journalism scholar, writes in After the Fact? The Truth About Fake News. Sarah Kendzior, in her 2022 book They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, also explores the way impunity for real conspiracies helps fuel the rise of fantastical beliefs. The conspiracy theories swirling about the Great Reset may well be a case in point. When they started showing up at the early anti-lockdown protests, they were presented as if a great secret was being revealed.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

But here’s the bigger problem: in a world where trust has eroded sharply, where our government doesn’t work, and where companies that once guaranteed jobs for life are now either outsourcing them or hiring robots, Trump’s lies can seem minor in comparison to the more systemic breach of trust voters are feeling. Once-trusted news organizations are now thrust into competition with dubious online purveyors of disinformation, with both being accused of peddling “fake news.” The public’s store of trust in institutions is being depleted, and without resolving that breakdown, our democracy will continue to deteriorate at the hands of politicians and media that tell them what they want to hear. Trust—particularly trust in our institutions—is a vital social resource, the true lubricant of all human interaction.

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Consider how Facebook’s secret algorithm chooses the news to suit your ideological bent, creating echo chambers of like-minded angry or delighted readers who are ripe to consume and share dubious information that confirms their pre-existing political biases. It’s why during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, a group of teens in Macedonia could produce fake news articles, which made claims like that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump, which generated more likes, shares, and advertising dollars than real news items produced by fully funded and researched news outlets. And it’s not just that, for example, Facebook and Google have become such large social hubs.

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Perhaps inevitably, consumers are turning to ad-blocking software, with some 600 million mobile and desktop devices using these services as of early 2017, a trend that will leave labor-intensive newsrooms starved for the funds they need to produce quality journalism. The result of all this is an ever-diminishing quality of information and a distorted set of incentives that makes it profitable for “fake news” providers to capture markets and earn ad dollars—essentially by lying, both with the false content they deliver to readers and the false Internet traffic data they share with advertisers. This in turn gives outsized influence to people who deliberately misinform for power or profit. Whatever your politics, we can all agree that plunging confidence in the quality of information, in an environment in which once undisputed facts are subject to bias and debate, is insidiously harmful to the democratic process and society at large.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The firm experimented with scaled online disinformation, fake news, and mass profiling. It worked with Russian agents and employed hackers to break into opposition candidates’ email accounts. Soon enough, having perfected its methods far from the attention of Western media, CA shifted from instigating tribal conflict in Africa to instigating tribal conflict in America. Seemingly out of nowhere, an uprising erupted in America with manic cries of MAGA! and Build the wall! Presidential debates suddenly shifted from policy positions into bizarre arguments about what was real news and what was fake news. America is now living in the aftermath of the first scaled deployment of a psychological weapon of mass destruction.

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Petersburg, giving presentations in Russian and describing Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to build a psychological profiling database of American voters. We had Palantir executives coming in and out of the office. We had a major Russian company with ties to the FSB probing for information about our American data assets. We had Nix giving the Russians a presentation about how good we were at spreading fake news and rumors. And then there were the internal memos outlining how Cambridge Analytica was developing new hacking capacity in concert with former Russian intelligence officers. In the year after Steve Bannon became vice president, Cambridge Analytica started deploying tactics that eerily foreshadowed what was still to come in the 2016 American presidential election.

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Elizabeth Denham, the U.K. information commissioner, was so incensed by Facebook’s actions that she made a rare appearance the next day on British news, issuing a statement that Facebook’s actions would “potentially compromise a regulatory investigation.” The reaction on both sides of the Atlantic was instant and explosive. I was called before the parliamentary inquiry into “fake news and disinformation.” It would be the first of many public and secret hearings, covering everything from Cambridge Analytica’s use of hackers and bribes to Facebook’s data breach to Russian intelligence operations. Mark D’Arcy, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent covering the hearing, said, “I think the [DCMS committee] hearing with Chris Wylie is, by a distance, the most astounding thing I’ve seen in Parliament.”

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Gnosticism, which dates at least to the second century CE, is the path Christianity did not take, most of its texts destroyed as heretical, most of its ideas forgotten until the 1945 discovery in Egypt of thirteen ancient books in a sealed clay jar. Or maybe not so much forgotten as bastardized over the centuries into countless conspiracy theories, the deep-seated belief that there exist truths they—there is always a they in all these ersatz Gnosticisms, from the bishops and bureaucrats of the early Church to the modern media peddling fake news—do not want us, the people, to perceive. There’s something almost democratic in the modern American distortion of Gnosticism. “Recognize what is before your eyes,” the Gospel of Thomas advises, “and that which is hidden will be revealed.” One needs no diplomas to know truth, no “data” contrived by “experts.”

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“I am the one whom they call the Law,” declares “The Thunder,” “and you have called me Lawlessness.” Yes. Both. The power and the pique, at the same time. Trump was for his followers what Gnostics called “The Depth,” or, perhaps more aptly, “The Abyss.” Gnostics believed that what other Christians considered God was a “demiurge”—fake news, a front, an entity deluded into believing itself the source of power because it had constructed the material world. In the gospel of Trump, that was the bureaucracy of government. Cut the red tape, drain the swamp, deregulate—let the Trump within you be Trump—and the true depth of the divine is revealed.

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“Word up, Lord!” called a believer. Would it have helped if I raised my hand—know-it-all—and said that Guam, according to numerous reputable sources (on my phone) was already home to roughly 170,000 U.S. citizens? That Tierra del Fuego was an archipelago split between Argentina and Chile? No. Fake news. Americans in Guam? That was as believable as Joe Biden winning California. So it went. Hillary, we learned, had secretly already been executed. What, you’ve seen her since? Green screens. Big Tech trickery, the name we give witchcraft in the twenty-first century. And there are, in fact, two United States, the one that “lives in our hearts” and the wicked one, which is actually a corporation.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Plenty of lines can be drawn between 2008 and the political upheavals of 2016.7 The financial crisis also played a decisive role in politicising a younger generation on the left, who made an important contribution to Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected electoral surge in 2017.8 The effect of tech platforms on liberal democracies has been feverishly discussed. Following Britain’s 2016 referendum and Trump’s election victory, liberals fixated on the malign power of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Russian ‘troll farms’ and Vladimir Putin to sway election outcomes by planting ‘fake news’ in front of the eyeballs of easily persuaded swing voters. The lack of any editorial bottlenecks or regulation meant that a kind of information anarchy had broken out, heralding a ‘post-truth’ world in which nobody could tell truth from lies any longer. The fine-grained psychographic profiling techniques facilitated by Facebook meant that democracy could now be ‘hacked’ by targeting critical voters with precisely the right message to influence their vote.

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The data deluge The current threat to democracy is often seen to emanate from new forms of propaganda, with the implication that lies are being deliberately fed to a naive and over-emotional public. The simultaneous rise of populist parties and digital platforms has triggered well-known anxieties regarding the fate of truth in democratic societies. Fake news and internet echo chambers are believed to manipulate and ghettoise certain communities, for shadowy ends. Key groups – millennials or the white working class, say – are accused of being easily persuadable, thanks to their excessive sentimentality. This diagnosis exaggerates old-fashioned threats while overlooking new phenomena.

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While it is true that arguments rage over dodgy facts and figures (concerning climate change or the details of Britain’s trading relations), many of the most bitter controversies of our news cycle concern the framing and weighting of different issues and how they are reported, rather than the facts of what actually happened. The problem we face is not, then, that certain people are oblivious to the ‘mainstream media’, or are victims of fake news, but that we are all seeking to see through the veneer of facts and information provided to us by public institutions. Facts and official reports are no longer the end of the story. Such scepticism is healthy and, in many ways, the just deserts of an establishment that has been caught twisting the truth too many times.

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

Whenever I hear demands for a book to be banned, my first thought is invariably: ‘How can I get hold of a copy?’ The same principle applies to disinformation. The term ‘fake news’ is now often deployed as a strategy to delegitimise alternative viewpoints. But even in cases where deception is unambiguously the motive, censorship usually has the unintended effect of accelerating the dissemination of the material in question. Many purveyors of ‘fake news’ rely on the narrative that they are brave truth-tellers fighting back against oppressive forces who would see them silenced. It is therefore far better to discredit false testimony than to suppress it and thereby re-enforce disingenuous claims to victimhood.

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Worse still, the increased polarisation of politics means that many social media users whose views happen to align with big tech are cheering on the deterioration of their own freedoms because, for now, the impact is only being felt by their opponents. Tribal allegiances are blinding people to the long-term effects of corporate hegemony. While it is true that social media companies have been subjected to governmental pressure to monitor ‘hate speech’ and ‘fake news’ on their platforms, there has also been a markedly paternalistic shift in the way in which their speech codes are formulated. Twitter, for instance, once saw itself as ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, and its CEO Jack Dorsey boasted that ‘Twitter stands for freedom of expression’, but a recent New York Times interview with the company’s co-founder Evan Williams suggests that this commendable ideal no longer applies: ‘I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,’ Williams said.

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Index A abuses of state power 67 academic freedom 60–3 Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Williams) 63 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 21, 22 Almansor (Heine) 94 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 19, 93 Ancient Greeks 58 ‘anecdotal evidence’ 32 anti-censorship campaigners 17 anti-Semitism 18–19, 66, 80 Arendt, Hannah 72 Areopagitica (Milton) 3–4 ‘art’ 56 artists 55–8 Associated Press 50 Atwood, Margaret 26 Auschwitz 80 authoritarianism 89 avoidance of conflict 35–6 B Barrett, Lisa Feldman 70 ‘Battle of Cable Street’ 20 Benn, Tony 69 Berkeley, University of California 33 Bernstein, Eduard 97 big tech corporations 11–13, 45 ‘blackshirts’ 20 blasphemy 51 Boghossian, Peter 74 ‘bonfire of the vanities’ 55 books censors 4 destruction 94 humanistic culture 9–10 moral or immoral 83 Botticelli, Sandro 55 Boyle, Danny 84 Bradbury, Ray 11 Brexit 67 British Library 95 C cancel culture 25–30, 42–3, 63, 96 Cardozo, Benjamin 33 Catholic Church 9 Cato Institute 28 Cave, Nick 27 Censored (Coleman) 87 censorship and the censors 85 and criticism 16, 24 and the Internet 13 metaphor of sunlight 44 of printed texts 4 right-leaning tabloids 7 right-wing talking point 6 and social media 11, 45 tech giants 13 Charbonnier, Stéphane (‘Charb’) 50, 51, 53 Charlie Hebdo 50, 51–3 ‘Charter 77’ committee 3 Chomsky, Noam 26 Christakis, Erika 61 Christakis, Nicholas 61–2 ‘Clean Up TV’ campaign 83 Clinton, Chelsea 79 Coleman, Paul 87 College of Policing 88 comedians and comedy 49–50, 56 see also satire Communications Act 2003 (UK) 66, 89 Communications Decency Act 1996 (US) 12 concept creep 46–7, 68 consent 75 Cope, Edward Drinker 74 Cox, Jo 82 Crash (Cronenberg) 84 criticism 16, 24, 32, 57 Cronenberg, David 84 ‘crowded theatre’ argument 22–4 Crown Prosecution Service 88 ‘culture wars’ 2, 63–4 D Danning, Gordon 81 Darwin, Charles 74 Davis, Daryl 17–18, 69 ‘Day of Absence’ protests 62 debating defeated ideas 68 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 10 decolonising authors 96 ‘Decolonising Working Group,’ British Library 95 Defending My Enemy (Neier) 19 democratic accountability 11 ‘despotism of custom’ (Mill) 57 dictatorships 90 ‘direct-effects model’ 84 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88 disinformation 85 Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (Paine) 18 diversity 33 ‘dog whistle’ 16 Dorsey, Jack 12 dystopian fiction 11 E Eddo-Lodge, Reni 27–8 emotional and intellectual comfort 37 emotional pain 75 ‘The English People’ (Orwell) 59 Enlightenment 10 European Court of Human Rights 87 European Union referendum (2016) 59 Evergreen State College 62 F Facebook 12, 13 ‘fact-checking’ 13 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) 11 ‘fake news’ 12, 85 fascism 32–3, 67–8 feminism 71 First Amendment of the United States Constitution 10, 11 First Principles (Spencer) 43 forced conversions 43 Foucault, Michel 73 Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) 61 Founding Fathers 10, 11 France 50 Frankfurt School 83 ‘free speech crisis’ 89 ‘Free Speech Is Killing Us’ (Marantz) 81–2 French Revolution 10 Fritsch, Theodor 66 G Galileo 4 ‘gaslighting’ 25–6 gender identity 30 gender-neutral pronouns 89 gender self-identification 26, 71 Goebbels, Joseph 66, 80, 94 Gopnik, Adam 72 ‘gramophone mind’ (Orwell) 97 ‘grossly offensive’ online speech 89 H Haidt, Jonathan 70, 71 Hall, Radclyffe 84 Hardy, Thomas 75 Harper’s Magazine 26–7 Hate Crime Operational Guidance (College of Policing) 88 ‘hate crimes’ 88 ‘hate incidents’ 88 ‘hate speech’ 12, 19, 87–91, 96–7 ‘hate speech’ laws 22, 52–3, 66–7, 87 Havel, Václav 3 Hazlitt, William 43, 60 Heine, Heinrich 94 higher education 60–1 see also universities historical discrimination 33 Hitchens, Christopher 3 Hitler 10, 66 Hobbes, Thomas 6 Holland, Tom 73–4 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 22–3 Holocaust denial 68 House of Commons 82 humanistic culture 9–10 Humberside Police 1 Hutus 77 I identity issues 33–4 identity-obsessed activism 83 ‘identity quakes’ 74 inciting violence 77–85 Internet 13, 45, 96 see also social media Is Free Speech Racist?

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

Hudson, “Nostalgia and the Swamp: Aging Politics in the Age of Trump,” Generations, Winter 2019, https://www.asaging.org/blog/nostalgia-and-swamp-aging-politics-age-trump. 16. David Z. Hambrick and Madeline Marquardt, “Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News,” Scientific American, February 6, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cognitive-ability-and-vulnerability-to-fake-news/; Andrew Guess, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker, “Less Than You Think: Prevalence and Predictors of Fake News Dissemination on Facebook,” Science Advances, January 9, 2019, https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586. 17. Grayson K. Vincent and Victoria A. Velkoff, “The Next Four Decades: The Older Population in the United States: 2010 to 2050,” U.S.