Pacific Standard interviewed me about my new “cheap speech” paper. … Continue reading
Category Archives: social media and social protests
I have written this draft for SSRN (forthcoming, in the First Amendment Law Review’s symposium on “Distorting the News: ‘Fake News’ and Free Speech“). Here is the abstract: In a remarkably prescient article in a 1995 Yale Law Journal symposium … Continue reading
NYT: Imagine you’re a millionaire or billionaire with strong political views and a desire to spread those views to the masses. Do you start a think tank in Washington? Funnel millions to a shadowy “super PAC”? Bankroll the campaign of … Continue reading
David Ingram for Reuters: The laws that prohibit foreign nationals from spending money to influence U.S. elections do not prevent them from lawfully buying some kinds of political ads on Facebook and other online networks, campaign finance lawyers said. The … Continue reading
Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Charlotte Goodman fascinating NYT oped: With the help of two software engineers, Erika Pheby and Kyle Buttner, we designed a chatbot, a smart computer program that deployed an adaptable script. In the two days ahead of … Continue reading
Reuters reports. … Continue reading
Politico: With Georgia’s special House election going down to the wire, it’s no shock that Twitter is saturated with Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel. But what is surprising is just how much of the traffic traces to a … Continue reading
Jim Rutenberg NYT column: Of course, Watergate unfolded in a much simpler time in the media industry. There were three major news networks and PBS; a major paper or three in every city; and a political dynamic in which leaders … Continue reading
Jeremy Peters for the NYT: But as the journey of that one tweet shows, misinformed, distorted and false stories are gaining traction far beyond the fringes of the internet. Just 14 words from Mr. Posobiec’s Twitter account would spread far … Continue reading
Charlie Savage reports for the NY Times. I’ve been debating this issue with others on my Twitter account. … Continue reading
Really disturbing from Paste Magazine: Now let’s see exactly what’s up here. Together, we’re going to Google the phrase “trump no evidence collusion.” (And because Google searches change over time, I’ll drop screenshots of my results here.) What will emerge is … Continue reading
Charlie Warzel for BuzzFeed: Twitter is certainly clogged with bots — a number of which are designed to elegantly spread information that’s far from credible and push narratives. Scholars at Oxford suggest bots accounted for 18 percent of Twitter’s traffic … Continue reading
Farhad Manjoo in the NYT: Specifically, Twitter often acts as the small bowel of digital news. It’s where political messaging and disinformation get digested, packaged and widely picked up for mass distribution to cable, Facebook and the rest of the … Continue reading
Ken Vogel for Politico: Weintraub’s interest was piqued by an article published last week by TIME magazine that revealed intelligence officials had evidence that Russian agents bought Facebook ads to disseminate election-themed stories. It also indicated that congressional investigators were … Continue reading
Phillip Howard and Robert Gorwa WaPo oped (that I missed last week): This month, one of the most important intelligence documents about Russian interference in the U.S. election emerged. But it didn’t come from the National Security Agency or the … Continue reading
Zoe Tillman for BuzzFeed: Five people who disrupted proceedings at the US Supreme Court to protest the Citizens United decision pleaded guilty on Thursday to two misdemeanor charges, one month after losing a constitutional challenge to part of the case. … Continue reading
Important but depressing. … Continue reading
Dan Balz for WaPo: In more innocent times, the rise of the Internet was seen by many people as a boon to democracy. Disruptive, yes, but the Web broadened the flow of information, introduced new voices into the political debates, … Continue reading
Nate Persily has written this article for the Journal of Democracy. Here is the abstract: The 2016 presidential election represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of the legacy institutions that had set bounds for U.S. politics in the postwar … Continue reading
Some on the right have claimed that the complaint filed by Twitter (via Seth Waxman) seeking to block the Trump administration from forcing Twitter to reveal the identity of a Twitter user critical of the government (and perhaps working for … Continue reading
Bauer blogs. … Continue reading
Must-read Tom Edsall in the NYT: As the forces of reaction outpace movements predicated on the ideal of progress, and as traditional norms of political competition are tossed aside, it’s clear that the internet and social media have succeeded in … Continue reading
Tony Mauro for the NLJ: A federal appeals panel on Friday upheld the law barring anyone from making “a harangue or oration” at the U.S. Supreme Court—the latest in a series of rulings protecting the high court from protesters inside … Continue reading
From the joint intelligence report at page 2: We assess the influence campaign aspired to help President-elect Trump’s chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to the President-elect. When it appeared to Moscow … Continue reading
AP: Several NAACP protesters led by their national president were escorted away in handcuffs by police after staging a sit-in Tuesday at the Alabama office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, the nominee for U.S. attorney general, the civil rights group said. … Continue reading
Charlotte Observer reports. … Continue reading
Zoe Tillman for BuzzFeed News: On April 1, 2015, five men and women were arrested for demonstrating inside the US Supreme Court. One by one, they stood up at the start of arguments before the justices and spoke or sang … Continue reading
NYT: An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University. The chatbots … Continue reading
BuzzFeed: In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, … Continue reading
Must-read Farhad Manjoo NYT: On Monday, both Google and Facebook altered their advertising policies to explicitly prohibit sites that traffic in fake news from making money off lies. That’s very likely a worthwhile fix, even if it comes too late. … Continue reading
NYDN reports. … Continue reading
A Twitter user complained about dirty tricks using tweets telling voters they can vote by text from home. (They can’t). Twitter says it won’t remove the items. Bad policy. UPDATE: TPM reports the account has been suspended. … Continue reading
Recode: A huge percentage of election-related talk on Twitter isn’t coming from humans. It’s coming from bots. And the majority of those bots are gunning for Trump to win the race, according to a paper released yesterday from Oxford University’s … Continue reading
NYT: People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.” “If … Continue reading
Nick Corasaniti has written this article for the NYT. … Continue reading
BuzzFeed: Hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed News. The review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected from … Continue reading
NYT: She had seen her face superimposed on the body of a concentration camp inmate. She had been called “a slimy Jewess.” She had been told she “deserved the oven.” One anonymous individual had electronically harassed her for 19 hours … Continue reading
WSJ: Hillary Clinton is hoping to use Pokémon Go to catch voters. At a rally on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton talked about the game phenomenon, saying “I don’t know who created ‘Pokemon Go,’ but I’ve tried to figure out how we … Continue reading
Mark Buchanan for Bloomberg View. … Continue reading
Tabatha Abu el-Haj for Slate. … Continue reading
Tabatha Abu el-Haj has written this oped for the Philly Inquirer. It begins: As Philadelphia prepares for the coming protests related to the Democratic National Convention – especially those that will proceed without authorization – it is worth remembering that … Continue reading
Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. … Continue reading
Trip Gabriel for the NYT: The divisive nominating contests have produced countercurrents of deep resentment in both parties. And next month, that bitterness could spill into the streets in large protests just when Republicans and Democrats — and the host … Continue reading
Some thoughts I wrote while Donald Trump supporters were being violently attacked in San Jose. … Continue reading
WaPo: A federal judge sentenced a former Florida postal worker to four months in prison Thursday for his gyrocopter flight last year to the U.S. Capitol, a campaign finance protest cited in recent demonstrations that led to 1,200 arrests in … Continue reading
What if you scheduled a major set of events about the most troubling aspects of our democracy and few outside those already active on the issue even knew? … Continue reading
WaPo: A backlash against monied interests in politics that has buoyed the White House bids of Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is reverberating far beyond this year’s presidential race. The huge sums swamping campaigns have prompted voters … Continue reading
USA Today reports. … Continue reading
Gizmodo: Inside Facebook, the political discussion has been more explicit. Last month, some Facebook employees used a company poll to ask Zuckerberg whether the company should try “to help prevent President Trump in 2017.” Every week, Facebook employees vote in … Continue reading
Paul Blumenthal for HuffPo. … Continue reading