In 2018, Buzzfeed released a video of Barack Obama (or at least it looked like Barack Obama) calling President Trump a “total and complete dipshit.” The video was what’s known as a deepfake: the product of an advanced form of algorithmic video...
Legend has it that when the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was nearing his final moments in November of 1831, he purportedly uttered the following words: “Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn’t understand me.” This...
On February 24, 2021, Lisa Nandy and Yvette Cooper – both senior MPs in the U.K. Labour party – used their Twitter accounts to share a thread by Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist specializing in nutrition.
I downloaded Nextdoor in March 2020. Nextdoor is an app and a website that aims to “connect neighbors to each other.” It offers a hyperlocal social network through which residents can share posts with people living within a mile or so from them. Its...
On 12 May 2020, 62 days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Facebook updated its COVID-19 policy. In this update, they included a particularly tedious sentence written in corporate legalese — a soul-crushingly...
On February 11, India’s Information and Technology Minister Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad made a speech about the Indian Government’s recent stand-off with Twitter. He stated that while social media platforms were respected for the revenue they bring...
Recently, there has been a lot of excitement surrounding the development of Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. An NFT is like a bitcoin, except that it represents something unique. While the cryptographic information associated with a bitcoin only...
Could media literacy have stopped the January 6th insurrection? If the American public had been better at checking their sources, at not sharing before they read, or at being more sceptical of what they see on their social media feeds, could that...
On Feb 13, 2021, several media outlets reported that Uttar Pradesh police had announced plans to monitor internet users’ pornography consumption, allegedly as as a move to curb crimes against women. Clarity around the program is severely lacking...