First POST: Catalysts
BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, April 30 2015
Bernie Sanders is running for president; will the sun set on the Patriot Act June 1?; legacy media and technology platforms have crawled into bed together and nobody knows what will happen next; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Bubbling
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, April 29 2015
Social media is for news (in case you didn't already know); glimpses into our bright, shiny future; also, Bernie Sanders expected to announce his run soon; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Rising
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, April 28 2015
Why #FreddieGray hasn't trended nationally on Twitter, yet; American whistleblowers support the Surveillance State Repeal Act; dueling foundations on transparency; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Overreaching
BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, April 24 2015
Why the FCC balked at the Comcast-TimeWarner deal; Sheryl Sandberg wants Hillary Clinton to lean into the White House; the UK's Democracy Club brings a lot more information to election season; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Glass Half Full
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, April 21 2015
A new Pew study on open government data in the US; the FOIA exemption ruffling transparency advocates' feathers; social media bot farms; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Busting Loose
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, April 7 2015
More than 2 million people definitely know who Edward Snowden is now; CanTheySeeMyDick.com; Rand Paul is running for president; and much, much more. Read More
With Fiskkit, Anyone Can Criticize the Media
BY Jessica McKenzie | Wednesday, April 1 2015
Wouldn't it be nice if there was only one day a year that people were wrong on the Internet? Unfortunately, that's simply not the case. And the problem doesn't stop with fake news. (Although that in itself is such a problem that The Washington Post puts out a fake news roundup every Friday.) There are more insidious problems in media: biased wording, overly general, overly simplistic or unsupported claims, and false assertions. These are just a few of the things that one can flag on the new social media platform, Fiskkit, which recently won the 2015 Launch Fest Social Impact Award. Read More
First POST: Cowed
BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, March 23 2015
TedCruz.com for president; Meerkat fever; who does Facebook work for (probably not you); Medium, "the billionaire's typewriter"; and much, much more. Read More
The Rising Fight Against ISIS on Social Media
BY Onnik James Krikorian | Thursday, March 12 2015
Typical Twitter profile pictures used by ISIS supporters (Photo courtesy J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan)
In 2013, Humera Khan, Executive Director of D.C.-based think tank Muflehun, watched as a teenager was radicalised and recruited on Twitter. “Over the course of two years,” she recently recounted for Foreign Affairs, “that individual went from an activist championing minority rights to supporting Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), and in a final shift of allegiance, to one of the the largest distributors of ISIS propaganda. He is now in Syria.” Despite reporting the case to the law enforcement agencies in the United States, Khan says her warnings fell on deaf ears. But in the wake of a sophisticated online media campaign that includes a number of gruesome videos of beheadings, governments are starting to take the use of social media by groups such as ISIS more seriously.
Read MoreMark Pesce on "Hypercivility" at @CivicHall
BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, February 26 2015
A week ago, digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a talk here at Civic Hall on the topic of "Hypercivility." As you will see from watching the video, it's an extension of years of research and thinking he has done on the effects of hyperconnectivity on our world. Be forewarned, this is not an "easy" talk to watch or digest. While Pesce definitely has our social-media-powered "Age of Outrage" on his mind, he grounds his talk in a much more serious place: post-genocide Rwanda, which he recently visited. Read More