A news story that falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine caused the death of an American doctor was the most viewed article on Facebook in the US for the first three months of 2021. Instead of going public about the platform promoting such misinformation, Facebook held back on publishing the...
One insidious way to torture the detainees at Guantanamo Bay was to blast music at them at all hours. The mixtape, which included everything from Metallica to the Meow Mix jingle, was intended to disorient the captives and impress upon them the futility of resistance. It worked: This...
Some people in the US seem surprised that a form of cultural chaos is spreading far more rapidly than the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19. It’s the predictable consequence of three convergent phenomena: American individualism, the confrontational forms of expression it takes through social...
Deepfake technology undermines any hope of once again conducting national conversations on the basis of observable reality. Imagine, on the day before the 2020 presidential election, that someone posts a video of the Democratic candidate talking before a group of donors. The candidate admits to...
Evading discussion with our neighbors while taking refuge in our echo chambers contributes to the problems facing America. Recently, the prevalence of divisive rhetoric and the polarizing effects of online platforms have spurred calls for greater empathy in political discourse. Some people have...
With the decay of codes of media ethics we need to be smarter than ever when choosing information we are willing to trust. Donald Trump’s no-holds-barred electoral campaign, punctuated by pyrotechnic rally performances, used the media to generate waves of shock, ridicule and admiration...
Distraction, fixation with standardized tests and ballooning debt put students on the road to intellectual serfdom. For more than a century, the Statue of Liberty has symbolized America’s myth of freedom and prosperity. As per myth, America is the hallowed land where immigrants from all over...
Is there anything sophisticated in the way that IS deploys social media or are they using simple propaganda means? With current media attention centered on the military campaign against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, another key focus point over recent months has been the group’s...
Can Ello stay true to its word and remain ad-free? Facebook can be its own worst enemy. The social network’s latest controversy over a requirement that account holders use their real names has angered transgendered individuals, artists and others who want to be known by aliases. The furor...
