Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

undoing radicalization is not as simple as filling people’s heads with “accurate” facts. A radicalized person will not — cannot — accept them... you need to first make the radicalized person... capable of not feeling threatened, unsafe, and wounded ... It’s very, very hard. It takes social bonds to be restored somehow — oft through therapy, educat…

The vote marked the culmination of a targeted, 11-day information operation that was amplified by computational propaganda techniques and aimed to change both public perceptions and the behavior of American lawmakers...Computational propaganda... the use of [ICTs] to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”... #releaset…

a report published with the Council of Europe... offers better categorizations for the tangle of bad information ... more specific than “fake news” ... [for] The U.S. midterms ... build out a hub ... monitoring disinformation, connecting with newsrooms around the country... we can start scaling it globally in 2019... The benefit of having centrali…

Could hybrid crowdfunding allow public Institutions to support citizen-driven projects without killing them in the cradle?- 2nd post in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity

6th Scenario – More EuropeanismDemocracy needs an identity foundation that binds individuals into the demos... Europe does not have that. The proof?... There are no successful pro-European populists!The local and particular cannot be based on the general and universal.... There has to be something more ...

Financial incentive is key to Silverman’s understanding of fake news, which he defines as online misinformation that is completely false, created to deceive and economically motivated. If online misinformation is being created for ideological reasons it’s propaganda... delegitimising legitimate journalism... through delegitimising organisations t…

Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Propaganda warfare is increasingly shaping narratives, policies and lives around the world.

these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy... We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking …

the evidence of this orchestrated Russian intelligence effort to hack the outcome of the American election... seems flimsy at best... saying is that Russia took advantage of the social web’s desire to just share things without reading them. It may be true, but so does every other media outlet.

The CIA wants to make sure that the privacy rights of this fictional character aren’t violated.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

... resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards... a media division …

Do people really want to have a conversation with brands, or their government?

Yes. The Cult committee. That’s what the European Parliament calls their Committee on Culture and Education. - Yes, There IS EU Propaganda In Schools, And It’s Worse Than You Think

"a year after Russia swallowed Crimea, the EU is moving into the propaganda business in a bid to win an information war it is currently losing... the EU’s spin-team is to be largely made up of the same civil servants who have so miserably failed to convince the bloc’s own citizens of the benefits of Europe. Having worked with EU officials for alm…

Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU?

"“Fished out of the shadows, old news coverage in China’s media can provide clues to the family connections of government officials as reporters investigate their financial dealings.”"

How nice to see the Brussels Bubble meme continue to spread ... ;) "In a damning indictment of efforts in Brussels to promote stronger public attachment to the EU through the European Year of Citizens 2013, Emily O’Reilly said the campaign was “not succeeding”. ... the new office holders needed to be courageous enough to address the union’s demo…

Last year, in the runup to the first EuropCom conference, I gave it a bit of a hard time. My cynicism was confirmed by many I knew who went, describing it as a conference about Web2 and social media which allowed little or no participation. Oops.

This is the sort of post which could get me into trouble for a number of reasons. Particularly as I'm going to comment on the celebrations to be enjoyed next month at the Festival of Europe, where one can do everything from "seeing the political groups at work inside the European Parliament" to "experiencing a fest…