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First POST: Snark vs. Smarm

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, December 6 2013

Tom Scocca's must-read "On Smarm"; Upworthy had 87 million visitors last month; President Obama promises NSA reforms; and much, much more. Read More

First POST: Root Causes

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, October 10 2013

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus: Just how far has the Obama administration strayed from its promise to be the most open and transparent in history?; how government procurement practices led to the HealthCare.gov mess; Ari Fleischer's Twitter meltdown; and much, much more. Read More

Sean Parker: New Technology Can Diminish The Dominance Of Money In Politics

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, March 13 2012

Sean Parker's string of investments in the political technology space in recent years are rooted in the belief that lowering the cost of electioneering is the key to diminishing the corrupting influence of money in ... Read More

Malcolm Gladwell: It Wasn't Liberté, Égalité, Facebook, Now Was It?

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, March 30 2011

In an interview on CNN with Fareed Zakaria, Malcolm Gladwell re-ups on the idea that the social nature of modern communications doesn't have much to do with revolutions. "I can't look in the past at social ... Read More

At TED, Al Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar Celebrates the Networked Arab World's Homegrown Revolutions

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, March 4 2011

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The Internet vs the TSA: Is Civil Disobedience Next?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, November 15 2010

Is America on the verge of an airport travelers rebellion against the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA)? Read More

Facebook Politics Comes to Pepper Pike

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, October 7 2010

I wondered, can online politics be local? In a comment, Jill Zimon, recently-elected member of the Pepper Pike (OH) City Council, says, yes, absolutely: Read More

Can Online Politics Be Local?

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, October 5 2010

What makes "Facebook politics" inadaquete, muses Princeton's Julian Zelizer, is that it's not tied to particular spot on the map, which has always been the point around which social organizing pivots: The most ... Read More

Which Revolution Will Be Twittered?

BY Alan Rosenblatt | Saturday, October 2 2010

Cross posted from Huffington Post "The revolution will not be televised," said Gil Scott Heron. He was right. Television did not end the Vietnam War and create global peace. But television did expose our nation to the ... Read More

Strong Ties, Weak Ties and Obama's "New Reality"

BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, October 1 2010

Former chief Obama campaign blogger Sam Graham-Felsen has a nice post up on Huffington Post today that's worth a read. It's notable especially because it validates a very tough criticism of Obama's political strategy ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

Another Co-Opted Hashtag: #MustSeeIran

The Twitter hashtag #MustSeeIran was created to showcase Iran's architecture, landscapes, and would-be tourist destinations. It was then co-opted by activists to bring attention to human rights abuses and infringements. Now Twitter is home to two starkly different portraits of a country. GO

What Has the EU Ever Done For Us?: Countering Euroskepticism with Viral Videos and Monty Python

Ahead of the May 25 European Elections, the most intense campaigning may not be by the candidates or the political parties. Instead, some of the most passionate campaigns are more grassroots efforts focused on for a start stirring up the interest of the European electorate. GO

At NETmundial Brazil: Is "Multistakeholderism" Good for the Internet?

Today and tomorrow Brazil is hosting NETmundial, a global multi-stakeholder meeting on the future of Internet governance. GO

Brazilian President Signs Internet Bill of Rights Into Law at NetMundial

Earlier today Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff sanctioned Marco Civil, also called the Internet bill of rights, during the global Internet governance event, NetMundial, in Brazil.

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tuesday >

Ruck.us Reboots As a Candidate Digital Toolkit That's a Bit Too Like Democracy.com

Ruck.us launched with big ambitions and star appeal, hoping to crack the code on how to get millions of people to pool their political passions through their platform. When that ambition stalled, its founder Nathan Daschle--son of the former Senator--decided to pivot to offering political candidates an easy-to-use free web platform for organizing and fundraising. Now the new Ruck.us is out from stealth mode, entering a field already being served by competitors like NationBuilder, Salsa Labs and Democracy.com. And strangely enough, Ruck.us seems to want its early users to ask Democracy.com for help. GO

Armenian Legislators: You Can Be As Anonymous on the 'Net As You Like—Until You Can't

A proposed bill in Armenia would make it illegal for media outlets to include defamatory remarks by anonymous or fake sources, and require sites to remove libelous comments within 12 hours unless they identify the author.

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Founder Durov On Being Ousted From "Russian Facebook": "Some of What We Managed Is Already Impossible to Undo"

On Monday Pavel Durov, the founder of “Russian Facebook” VKontakte, announced that he was fired—and that he learned of the dismissal from the news media.

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monday >

The Good Wife Looks for the Next Snowden and Outwits the NSA

Even as the real Edward Snowden faces questions over his motives in Russia, another side of his legacy played out for the over nine million viewers of last night's The Good Wife, which concluded its season long storyline exploring NSA surveillance. In the episode titled All Tapped Out, one young NSA worker's legal concerns lead him to becoming a whistle-blower, setting off a chain of events that allows the main character, lawyer Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), and her husband, Illinois Governor Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), to turn the tables on the NSA using its own methods. GO

The Expanding Reach of China's Crowdsourced Environmental Monitoring Site, Danger Maps

Last week billionaire businessman Jack Ma, founder of the e-commerce company Alibaba, appealed to his “500 million-strong army” of consumers to help monitor water quality in China. Inexpensive testing kits sold through his company can be used to measure pH, phosphates, ammonia, and heavy metal levels, and then the data can be uploaded via smartphone to the environmental monitoring site Danger Maps. Although the initiative will push the Chinese authorities' tolerance for civic engagement and activism, Ethan Zuckerman has high hopes for “monitorial citizenship” in China.

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The 13 Worst Bits of Russia's Current and Maybe Future Internet Legislation

It appears that Russia is on the brink of passing still more repressive Internet regulations. A new telecommunications bill that would require popular blogs—those with 3,000 or more visits a day—to join a government registry and conform to government-mandated standards is expected to pass this week. What follows is a list of the worst bits of both proposed and existing Russian Internet law. Let us know in the comments or on Twitter if we missed anything.

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thursday >

Mastercard Funding New Mobile-Based Financial Services in Kenya (Updated)

MasterCard is funding a Grameen Foundation initiative to bring financial services to the poor and the unbanked in Kenya.

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Transparency and Public Shaming: Pakistan Tackles Tax Evasion

In Pakistan, where only one in 200 citizens files their income tax return, authorities published a directory of taxpayers' details for the first time. Officials explained the decision as an attempt to shame defaulters into paying up.

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