Technology
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Technology Amplified Disinformation, Now It Must Demonetize It
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Cameron Harris took a $5 investment and made it $22,000 in less than 3 months. No, he’s not the most impressive investor of his generation, he’s the founder of the fake news site ChristianTimesNewspaper.com. Despite voting for Trump, Cameron claims in a New York Times interview that his motivations were…
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Maybe We Should Make Some Rules Here: A Framework for Social Media
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Article co-authored by Ellie Vorhaben. This piece comes as a follow up to a prior article concerning Facebook’s limited legal liability from the whistleblower. We’ve watched the same scene play out over and over. Reporters reveal another negative impact of social media. Outrage and handwringing ensue. Then a mix of…
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Try Accuracy Prompts to Reduce the Spread of Misinformation Online
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The rapid dissemination of inaccurate information––otherwise known as misinformation––within the online news media ecosystem has become a subject of pressing concern. As media consumption habits move increasingly online, the pernicious effects of misinformation on readers’ long-term beliefs are particularly alarming. Research shows that mere exposure to misinformation leads to belief…
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Reining in Big Tech: Updates to the Antitrust Regime
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Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced new legislation to the U.S. Senate earlier this year in response to perceived continuous overreach by American technology companies. This legislation aims to modify sections of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 that define unethical business practices and uphold workers’ rights. Critics argue that the…
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Green Technology Might Just Be Enough to Save Us
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Plenty of reasons for optimism emerged from this year’s COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The United States is back in the Paris Agreement, both China and the US have pledged to reduce carbon emissions (Friedman 2021), and many other countries have made additional pledges, including cutting methane emissions and phasing…
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Towards A More Transparent Regulation for Online Targeted Ads
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Mohamed Suliman is a researcher at Northeastern University Civic AI lab with a degree in engineering he is also a regular contributor to Global Voices where he writes about tech issues. Big tech companies are notoriously secretive about how they operate online advertisements. Often they release only the minimal data…
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When Even the SEC Can’t Police Bad Behavior: The Facebook Whistleblower
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When you think about corporations harming society, Facebook tends to jump to the top of the list. Whether fomenting civil unrest or enabling ethnic cleansing, the world’s largest social network seems to be at the mercy of a barrage of negative headlines. The recent testimony by whistleblower Frances Haugen in…
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Human Behavior: The Missing Element of the Biden Cybersecurity Executive Order
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On May 12th, in the aftermath of the SolarWinds cyber-attack, President Biden signed an Executive Order (EO) to strengthen the United States’ cybersecurity infrastructure and practices. The order covered a broad list of topics, including new policies, processes, and technologies to strengthen the security of Federal and private assets. However,…
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Are GrubHub and DoorDash the Next Vertical Monopolists?
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While much of the US economy limped through 2020, one sector saw enormous growth: food delivery apps, like Grubhub and DoorDash. Their premise is simple, in exchange for providing a payment platform and delivering the food, these delivery apps take a percentage of the revenue on every sale. Since the…
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The Policy Road to Climate Goals
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The global transport sector constitutes a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions — nearly 72% of this derived from road transport. Since many countries remain heavily reliant on fossil fuel-powered vehicles for road transportation despite advances in technology, road transportation must play an outsize role to achieve the Paris Accord goal…
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How AI is Changing Human Communication
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In 2013, the science-fiction drama Her questioned whether communication with artificial intelligence could be indistinguishable from communication with humans. While this day is yet to come, AI is increasingly facilitating human-to-human communication. This phenomenon is AI-Mediated Communication (AI-MC), which Jeffrey T. Hancock, Mor Naaman, and Karen Levy define in their recent paper as…