by Alina Utrata Up until last week, most people hadn’t heard of the voice chatroom app Clubhouse—popular mostly with LA celebrities and Silicon Valley elites (and venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested tens of millions of dollars in the platform). The reason the app gave off such an air of exclusivity was because not…More
Social Media Disinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy: It’s more complicated than that
Julia Rone: So I got my Astra Zeneca jab on Thursday morning. After a tough Thursday evening with 38.8 fever and a headache, a missed flight and feeling tired on Friday, I feel much better today even though I still try to be careful. The possibility for a fever was explained in the information sheet…More
Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign
John Naughton: Yochai Benkler and a team from the Berkman-Klein Centre have published an interesting study which comes to conclusions that challenge conventional wisdom about the power of social media. “Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation”, they write, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects…More
The flight from WhatsApp
John Naughton: Not surprisingly, Signal has been staggering under the load of refugees from WhatsApp following Facebook’s ultimatum about sharing their data with other companies in its group. According to data from Sensor Tower Signal was downloaded 8.8m times worldwide in the week after the WhatsApp changes were first announced on January 4. Compare that…More
Silencing Trump and authoritarian tech power
John Naughton: It was eerily quiet on social media last week. That’s because Trump and his cultists had been “deplatformed”. By banning him, Twitter effectively took away the megaphone he’s been masterfully deploying since he ran for president. The shock of the 6 January assault on the Capitol was seismic enough to convince even Mark…More
What Tech Calls Reading
A Review of FSG x Logic Series by Alina Utrata Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) and the tech magazine Logic teamed up to produce four books that capture “technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and…More
Public networks instead of social networks?
We need state-owned, interoperable, democratically governed online public networks. From the people for the people.More
Is the UK really going to innovate in regulation of Big Tech?
On Tuesday last week the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) outlined plans for an innovative way of regulating powerful tech firms in a way that overcomes the procedural treacle-wading implicit in competition law that had been designed for an analogue era. The proposals emerged from an urgent investigation by the Digital Markets Taskforce, an…More
Great expectations: the role of digital media for protest diffusion in the 2010s
The decade after the 2008 economic crisis started with great expectations about the empowering potential of digital media for social movements. The wave of contention that started from Iceland and the MENA countries swept also Europe, where hundreds of thousands Spanish protesters took part in the Indignados protests in 2011 and a smaller but dedicated…More
Seeing Like a Social Media Site
The Anarchist’s Approach to Facebook When John Perry Barlow published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” nearly twenty-five years ago, he was expressing an idea that seemed almost obvious at the time: the internet was going to be a powerful tool to subvert state control. As Barlow explained to the “governments of the Industrial…More
