Overview: Politics

we needed to take investigative journalism and combine it with technology to build communities of action... I went from managing 1,000 journalists to 12 people...Our information ecosystem has already been destroyed. We’ve been poisoned... We were the third [news outlet] attacked... we stood up because we have no other business interests...In the o…

Member states have ‘no choice’ but to set up joint virus recovery fund... warned of the collapse of the EU as a “political project” unless it supports stricken economies such as Italy... a fund that “could issue common debt with a common guarantee” to finance member states according to their needs rather than the size of their economies... If we c…

We are a community of academics coming from different disciplines ... closely studied and contributed to previous (failed) institutional attempts ... to rethink the EU ... express our deepest concerns about the many unintended consequences stemming from ... the Conference on the future of Europe... raising expectations it can’t easily deliver on, …

big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016... struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020...foreign governments ... are now using ... bots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from hyperpartisan Americans... partisan groups in the United States have borrowed Russia’s 2016 playbook ... tough calls …

many organisations are not content to simply run a website, they want to run an online community too... I continually see the same mistakes...the harsh realities of running an online community [are] ... Community is about people and relationships, not technology. The technology is the easy part... it also takes commitment.... months to get off the…

there at least seven things that make this crisis very different... force the return of big government... one more demonstration of the mystique of borders, and will help reassert the role of the nation state within the European Union...The third lesson of the coronavirus relates to trust in expertise... Professionalism is back in fashion...Unfort…

In 2018, I wrote ... that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come... a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19... call them Generation C... shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks...More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza... stealthier... nations must ... identify infected…

Most current definitions of engagement are bimodal – someone is either engaged or they ‘re not...a limited view that hampers our ability to manage engagement in meaningful ways...Community management is the discipline of building technical and social environments in such a way that individuals can easily organize and collaborate to achieve an obje…

indie bookstores are thriving. The keyword is curation: by default... local and community-oriented... know the taste ... mood of the neighborhood... a good model for the modern aspiration economy...having taste to know what to buy... human curation... differentiator in fashion, food, travel, wellness, design, and an important value-add for tech pl…

Rep. Devin Nunes ... leading ally of President Trump, dismissed concerns about the coronavirus pandemic... Bernard B. Kerik, a Trump supporter ... tweeted that “this hysteria is being created to destabilize the country, and destroy” Trump....from Italy... Newt Gingrich offered a different perspective... Inside the Republican Party... a deep divide…

68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.... Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that...The partisan disconnect …

The von der Leyen Commission’s much anticipated White Paper ... sustained effort to forge a distinctive EU brand of AI... lack of focus ... on human rights... while there are multiple centres of engineering excellence... the raw investment numbers tell a demanding story...2016... EU investment was 3.2 bn euro. In North America, 12.1 bn... goal wit…

House Democrats ... environmental justice bill, a novel collaborative effort between lawmakers and local groups ... used ... PopVox to allow disparate environmental justice groups around the country to comment on the legislation... also met with hundreds of groups and hosted a daylong environmental justice summit on Capitol Hill...environmental ju…

the best skill to teach children is reinvention... the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind...once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds... We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function...too many schools focus on cramming information. In the p…

Higher levels of redistribution are favoured when luck is more important in the initial distribution of resources; when social groups are more homogeneous; when the group is at war; and when resources are abundant...Judgements ... carry moderate or high levels of moral conviction... Individuals are only weakly consistent ... political orientation …

Europe has repeatedly failed ... those failures have been the building blocks of Europe’s success. But ... Today’s noise isn’t simply another invitation for Europe to fail upward again. It’s the sound of Europe threatening to fall apart entirely...Postwar Europe is failing today because, for the younger generations, World War II is ancient history…

a social dynamic in which it becomes more beneficial to hold those views than not. It’s the feedback mechanism by which people are punished for expressing any kind of nuance, doubt or divergence... moral outbidding, unchecked, that corrodes a group from within...the vanity of small differences, and the punishing of people for the most minor transg…

the most successful ad that I’ve ever posted... a lot of it came from people being confused whether or not it was real...the Bloomberg campaign was offering social media influencers $150 to create content in support of Mr. Bloomberg ...

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

The union faces a double crisis of legitimacy... it is hard to sustain the fiction that ordinary citizens have a meaningful say over what happens in Brussels... If many voters don’t believe that they have much sway over what happens in their national capitals, the feeling of impotence is even more profound when it comes to Brussels.... the EU ... …

Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on... WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny ... that’s the bullshit economy... fraudulent advertising metrics and fake numbers ... to siphon cash through Facebook and Google’s ... counterfeit goods pass through Amazon... a financial crisis based on bu…

we’re headed for a miserable 24 months of purple prose, tediously long sermons and unneeded – and unheeded – speeches and moralising... a ‘Big European Moan’... Let’s capitalise on this rather jolly mood... minimising the institutional hijack and confusion ...European Parliament... traditional organisational blueprint ... plenaries, steering commi…

‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ will open this spring... will not be enough... also... a real democratic debate on the final text, so that it can be followed up... if there is to be a reform of the Treaties... to be ratified in all Member States...Referenda are ... not suitable for the ratification of a new treaty... not allow a debate on its…

to make participatory democracy a reality, it is essential to avoid only paying lip-service to the idea of participation — and give citizens a real say...European federalists are hoping to gain momentum for treaty change. Many member states are afraid of that very outcome...Citizens’ participation is being tested out far more commonly across Europ…

Europe needs a new mechanism for involving citizens, not another talking shop chaired by the Guy Verhofstadt... By raising expectations it can’t easily deliver on, it risks eroding citizens’ trust...won’t directly prepare treaty change... a preparatory process ... could lead the European council ... to initiate them... this time the conference is …

How the Conference on the future of Europe will look like? ... it's the European Parliament ... to offer 1st blueprint... in essence a Constitutional Convention model PLUS... 'plus' is so tiny that fails to capture ... vivacity of EU civil society ...prepare a set of “concrete recommendations” that may be turned into legislative and…

“Conference on the Future of Europe,”... if the commission and national governments get their way, it may be a useless exercise... the European Parliament... would create ... citizens’ assemblies ... of up to 300 people each... give citizens specific questions to wrestle with... should result in major changes in how the EU works... resembles the …

Most cookie consent pop-ups ... are likely to be flouting regional privacy laws... another piece of research ... also concluded a majority of ... cookie notices offer no meaningful choice to Europe’s Internet users — even though EU law requires one...if it’s configured to contain pre-ticked boxes that opt users into sharing data by default — requi…

Better Reykjavic platform ... encourage thoughtful debate for government improvement among citizens while avoiding vitriolic arguments...a new debate system with simple tweaks: Citizens must list arguments for and against ideas, and instead of replying to each other directly, they can only down-vote things ... forces users to create standalone poi…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…