Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter helped right-wing populists take power. Can they now help rein them in?
The Spread of Global Hate
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Facebook
Beating Back the Far Right Globally
It’s time to resurrect a global anti-fascist consensus to name, shame, and throw these guys out of the game.
Big Tech’s Heavy Hand Around the Globe
Facebook and Google’s dominance of developing-world markets has had catastrophic effects. U.S. regulators should take note.
Data Privacy Is a Human Right. Europe Is Moving Toward Recognizing That.
Mark Zuckerberg played dumb when Congress pressed him on privacy protections. But he should know better — the EU is already forcing his hand.
Will Facebook Remake the World?
When I traveled through Eastern Europe in the wake of the 1989 revolutions, I carried a computer and a portable printer. I typed up my dispatches, printed them out, and sent them back to my employers by air mail. Even with the lag time of a week or more, my reports on conversations with activists, academics, and politicians remained fresh. Email, after all, was still rudimentary in 1990. The World Wide Web was still three years in the future. Blogs wouldn’t debut until four years after that. Change was rapid in Eastern Europe in 1990. But for both activists and observers, the printed word still carried enormous weight.
Iran’s Twitter Revolution
“Everybody try to film as much as poss[ible] today on mobiles…these are eyes of world,” declared a posting on user Persiankiwi’s Twitter page. The poster urged Iranians to take to the streets on Monday, June 15, and document the government-sponsored crackdown against rallies in support of demands by Mir Hossein Mousavi, the primary reformist challenger. Mousavi allegedly lost in an apparent landslide of nearly two-to-one against incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s recent presidential election.