Overview: Politics

foreign pro-Trump troll farm was based in Romania... Facebook... didn’t see “clear evidence of financial motivation” or “clear links to known commercial actors...separate troll operation, tied to pro-Trump media organization Epoch Media Group, featured 303 Facebook accounts, 181 pages, 44 Facebook groups and 31 Instagram accounts... followed by mo…

This is a piece for people who have been part of the Q Anon movement... beginning to get tired ... starting to get skeptical... Q mostly stopped making specific predictions after a series of embarrassing failures... demanding that we all Trust the Plan and stop asking why Q is always wrong... There’s a reason you got scammed... why did you keep be…

Q claims to be a government insider exposing an entrenched, international bureaucracy that is secretly plotting all sorts of nefarious schemes against the Trump ... military or intelligence background ... various, but connecting, conspiracy theories... Trump ... battling a cabal of anti-American saboteurs ... overarching goals ... not clear... “…

The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…

“This hearing has made one fact clear to me. These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up. All need to be properly regulated ... their control of the marketplace allows them to do whatever it takes to crush independent business and expand their own power. This must end.”

Covid-19 case numbers are now spiking in many counties across West Texas ... [but] resolve of ... skeptics appears to be stiffening... the denial of facts is often rooted in identity and belonging, not in ignorance ...people who deny science ... trying to uphold membership in ... a political or religious affiliation or some other group ... a commu…

Amazon is accused of abusing its role as both a retailer and a platform hosting third-party sellers ... Apple ... unfairly using ... App Store to block rivals and to force apps to pay high commissions.... Facebook has a monopoly in social networking... Google... multiple antitrust allegations ... dominance in online advertising, search and smartph…

It’s official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016 presidential race. That’s from the US Elections Assistance Commission... your chance of having your vote simply go uncounted, “spoiled,” is 900% higher if you're Black than if you're white...Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes... 75,355 ballots were never counted... Mo…

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

advice on how to bring science to the attention of policymakers... dedicated to researchers and research organisations aiming to achieve policy impact... advice on new skills and practices for individual researchers, but also ... institutional change ... puts co-creation at the centre of Science for Policy 2.0, a more integrated model of knowledg…

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles... systematically exclude sources of information... exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs... work in entirely different ways... epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side...‘epistemic bubble’ …

unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their ... work... analyze ... ~50,000 papers and select the few dozen with the strongest connections to the origin paper.... arranged according to their similarity... papers that do not directly cite each other can be strongly connected and very clo…

Online communities are uniquely suited to promote wide-scale inclusion because of their collaborative rather than directive structure—they reward members for their unique contributions instead of forcing compliance to a standard... don’t just assume ... [they] will immediately foster widespread inclusion... prioritize investment ... [to] institut…

Newspaper newsrooms lost 45 percent of their employees between 2008 and 2017... growing number of “news deserts”: communities where there are no longer media outlets sending reporters to city-council meetings... Can a healthier news ecosystem be built? ... a role for government in ensuring citizen access to reliable information... “There was alw…

Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization... fretted about the incoherence of their identities ... There were liberal Republicans ... opponents of civil rights and big government in the Democratic Party... 1976 ... Richard Nixon... proposed a universal health care ... created the Environmental Protection Agency... tighter i…

don’t think about “abolish the police” as merely a policy proposal... Think about it as a narrative ... to change how people think... an objective to rally behind... a lesson in how... the broader left ... needs to work on its storytelling skills as much as its policy proposals...“storytelling” [is] ... a three-act structure ... a character with a…

Trump signed an executive order ... easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were suppressing free speech when they suspended users or deleted posts... Twitter has doubled down... added fact-checking labels to ... spokesman for China’s foreign ministry ... tweets that falsely claimed a photo... was …

Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time... urged people to “get the facts”... a CNN story ... and ... bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies... Twitter determined that those unsubstantiated assertions could lead to voter confusion and that they merited a correc…

when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing... scarcity... leads you to take certain behaviors that in the short term help... in the long term only make matters worse... robs people of insight... in a hole, we sometimes dig ourselves even deeper...human brain is wired to respond to scar…

In less than a year... weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent... Capitalizing on that devotion is integral to Trump’s re-election ...all-enveloping digital campaign website... campaign app... a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trum…

When the history is written of how America handled the global era’s first real pandemic ... Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself...a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings…

coronavirus i... global rallying cry for ... white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe ... far-right populists on both continents ... using the outbreak to push their political agenda ...barrage of false messages [risk] ... feeding ... “infodemic” that makes it hard to separate fact from ficti…

the current crisis is drawing Europeans further apart and not closer together... divisions grow... between east and the west on democracy and the rule of law, or between the north and the south on economic solidarity... Europe dies when it just shrugs its shoulders at nation-first politics ... not a single event, but rather a process ... not wit…

social distancing ... led us to reconsider how we reach our audiences at scale ... through events... already conducted more than 15 large-scale virtual events... partner summit for over 4,000 attendees ... employee town hall with our CEO... Here’s what I’ve learned ...people show up to events to learn, network, and discover... to enable ... on a d…

each period,... had a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system... of experiencing being alive... The virus is rewriting our imaginations. impossible has become thinkable... we’re entering a new world... learning ... a new structure of feeling... we’ve been overdue for such a shift... out of synch with …

The virus is compelling our leaders to alter their habits, even their beliefs, in real time... a global battering of ideology. Proudly liberal democracies are instituting police states and economically conservative governments are applying de facto socialism... Brexit... derived its entire force from privileging political ideals over economics.…

why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews... Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects ... writing a news story with a lead, a coherent narrative, and a deadline is very different than writing an encyclopedia article...tension between the Wikipedia community... …

For businesses, delivering good customer service is ... imperative... for government entities to enhance the “citizen experience”... may be just as important...Governments... empathy economy model ... put residents and citizens at the core ... empathy economy is based on ... value created by AI and other innovations detect and simulate human emoti…