The idea that social media bots and misinformation could influence our political conversation isn’t a new concept. The phrase “election hacking” has been thrown around and misused by numerous news outlets and pundits to describe the use of bots and junk news on social media and their potential effects upon elections in the US, UK, Germany,…
Thus far, Republican’s in Congress have been unwilling to remove the Senate filibuster in order to help advance their legislative agenda. Despite swiftly removing the filibuster for nominations in order to push through Trump’s Supreme Court nomination, Neil Gorsuch, and calls from Trump to use the ‘nuclear option’. As Matt Yglesias pointed out in the…
Lisa-Maria Neudert of the Computational Propaganda Project was our guest for today’s show. The Computational Propaganda Project is a research group that has spent the last year looking at the way bots on social media and “junk news” (aka fake news) have affected and attempted to influence elections in Germany, France, the US, and the UK. Sadly…
We live in a broken system, that’s not to say it is beyond repair or utterly dysfunctional, but it does not work for the majority of people. We have massive wealth and income inequality here in the UK and even greater wealth and income inequality in the US. These problems have been exacerbated significantly since the…
During the lead-up to the 2017 General Election, the Conservatives mentioned proposals to heavily censor the internet in order to curb terrorism. They had already been vocal about their desires to prevent encryption on services like WhatsApp in an attempt to stop terrorists sending untraceable messages and in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing,…
South Park may be a cartoonish, poorly drawn parody of society, but more often than not they manage to cut through and make some fantastic insights into the way in which the world works. The clip above from the season 20 finale depicted an idea called “Trevor’s Axiom” (we can’t find a source for the…
