23 August 2018 — RT
Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.
When WikiLeaks exploded onto the scene a decade ago, it briefly seemed like the internet could create a truly open society. Since then, Big Brother has fought back.
23 August 2018 — TRNN
Digital media owners are silencing the left; now it’s Alex Jones’ turn to be silenced. How do we define the public commons when it’s all privately owned?
10 August 2018 — WSWS
In July 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an exposure of the fact that changes to Google’s search algorithms had massively slashed traffic to left-wing, anti-war and socialist publications. Over the course of dozens of articles, we established that Google, together with the other technology monopolies, was engaged in a campaign of censorship of oppositional viewpoints, in close collaboration with the US intelligence apparatus.
21 May 2018 — Dissident Voice
Dear Frankie Boyle,
I’d prefer not to be writing this as an open letter, but you didn’t leave me much choice: I can no longer engage with you on Twitter because you blocked me (and many hundreds of others, it seems) for criticising the first episode of your New World Order TV show on Friday.
Since then, having purged your Twitter feed of critics, you have created a series of straw men. In the worst, you have suggested that those unhappy with the show are really closet racists for objecting to the fact that you spent half of your 30-minute schedule allowing your guests, led by David Baddiel, to flay Jeremy Corbyn for a supposed anti-semitism “crisis” in the Labour party. Presumably that offers you a comfortingly circular proof of Labour’s anti-semitism problem.
28 April 2018 — WSWS
This is the first part in a two-part series
In recent months, Google, Facebook and Twitter have signed agreements with the Mexican National Electoral Institute (INE), the organization charged with carrying out elections in Mexico, in what amounts to a massive campaign to manipulate the outcome of the July 1 general elections in the world’s tenth most populous country.
11 April 2018 — Return of the Public
Facebook is once again in the news. Last month a joint investigation by the Observer, the New York Times and Channel 4 revealed that a UK company, Cambridge Analytica, had used information about Facebook’s users to target voters during Donald Trump’s successful campaign to become president in 2016. But the threat that the data giants’ business model poses to individual autonomy and to democratic process is not news.
10 April 2018 — FAIR
Facebook “failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals” (London Observer, 3/17/18).
After decades of regulatory neglect, Big Tech is finally coming under the microscope.
Facebook is under fire for (among other things) its involvement with Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics firm funded by hedge fund billionaire and major Republican party donor Robert Mercer and formerly led by President Trump’s ex–campaign manager and strategist Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica harvested data from over 87 million Facebook profiles (up from Facebook’s original count of 50 million) without the users’ consent, according to a report by the London Observer (3/17/18) sourced to a whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica until 2014.
9 April 2018 — OpenMedia
Facebook just made the stunning admission that 100 percent of its 2 billion users have likely had their personal data stolen by “malicious actors.”[1]
That’s right. One hundred percent. If you’re on Facebook, then it’s a virtual lock that your data has been stolen.
5 April 2018 — FAIR
Washington Post (4/2/18): “Wading into controversy is a key strategy for Russian propaganda bots.”
One could forgive the average reader for thinking reporters covering bots had been replaced by bots. The formula is something we’ve seen a million times now: After a controversial story breaks, media outlets insist that “Russian bots” used the controversy to “sow discord” or “exploit tensions”; a “Russian bot dashboard” is offered as proof. (These “dashboards” let one see what Russian bots—automated online persona controlled by the Kremlin—are allegedly “pushing” on social media.)
1 February 2018 — Media Lens
Open a corporate website on any given day and you will find someone, somewhere blaming social media for something. No claim is too absurd.
Last week, journalist Sean Williams, who writes for the New Yorker, New Republic and Wired, tweeted us in a state of high anxiety:
‘I just want you to know you’re ruining the national dialogue and pushing more people towards right wing populism. Really.’
