In The News

Guardian: Wealth of Our Collective Data

Chris Hughes April 28, 2018
Individuals constantly produce and share data. “We share all this data about ourselves because we like the services these companies provide, and business leaders tell us we must to make it possible for those services to be cheap or free,” explains Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, for the Guardian. Shareholders of tech and other firms benefited, and the profits add incentives for less data...

New York Times: Bolton Used Cambridge Analytica’s Data

Matthew Rosenberg March 24, 2018
The Guardian and the New York Times recently reported that the London-based consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested more than 50 million Facebook profiles and assessed them for targeting with political advertising. Days later, Donald Trump fired his national security adviser and selected John Bolton, 69. In 2014, Bolton created a political action committee that paid more than $1 million to...

The Observer: Facebook Profiles Harvested

Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison March 19, 2018
A whistleblower has exposed how Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm, relied on a software program and Facebook user profiles to target voters with political advertisements. The number represents about a quarter of the US electorate. “Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on...

Quartz: Teacher in Ghana Teaches Windows on Blackboard

Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu March 2, 2018
A teacher in Ghana posted photographs of himself on Facebook teaching his students about the Windows computer operating system. The students lack computers, so Richard Appiah Akoto makes detailed drawings on the chalkboard and they copy the diagrams in their notebooks. His posts went viral: “His photo was seen as both a bit of ironic fun about life in Africa but also as a source of inspiration...

The Daily Beast: Inside Twitter’s Bot Purge

Taylor Lorenz February 22, 2018
In a crackdown on mass automatic posts, Twitter has deleted thousands of accounts. “The pulldown took place quite literally in the middle of the night, without warning or explanation from the company,” explains Taylor Lorenz for the Daily Beast. “Leading right-wing trolls and conspiracy theorists, many of whom woke up this morning to discover that their follower numbers had plunged by the...

RAND Corporation: Truth Decay

Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich February 7, 2018
Too many in US leadership and the general public rely on feelings rather than rational analysis, facts and lessons from history, and such trends explain increasing rejection of contributions to US prosperity by education, science or globlaization. Four trends mark what Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich label as a decay in truth: disagreement over facts and data, blurred boundaries between...

Foreign Affairs: How Sharp Power Threatens Soft Power

Joseph S. Nye Jr. February 5, 2018
Authoritarian regimes strive to interfere with democratic governments via social media and other information warfare. Such interference can be regarded as “sharp power” as opposed to “soft power,” or government’s reliance on culture and values to enhance strength. “Over the past decade, Beijing and Moscow have spent tens of billions of dollars to shape public perceptions and behavior around the...