Why WhatsApp and Instagram are just names now

In Lazer’s study of Twitter, age had an effect on someone’s likelihood to share fake news, but political orientation was the strongest factor. Among Twitter users who were on the left or center of the political spectrum, less than 5 percent shared fake content. But 11 percent on the right, and 21 percent on the extreme right, did so.

WHEN HE STARTED out, Carroll was an underdog, facing off against a corporation with ties to the president of the United States and backed by billionaire donor Robert Mercer. If he lost, Carroll would be on the hook for the opposing team’s legal fees, which he wasn’t quite sure how he’d pay.

But if he won, Carroll believed he could prove an invaluable point. He could use that trove of information he received to show the world just how powerless Americans are over their privacy. He could offer up a concrete example of how one man’s information—his supermarket punch card, his online shopping habits, his voting patterns—can be bought and sold and weaponized by corporations and even foreign entities trying to influence elections.

More than 95,000 complaints have been filed with EU countries since the bloc’s flagship data protection laws took effect eight months ago, the executive European Commission said Friday.

The complaints have already triggered three financial penalties, including France’s record 50 million euros fine Monday on US giant Google for not doing enough inform users on how their data is used.

Among these links is an alleged “geopolitical expert” named Adam Garrie, who writes for websites known to spread misleading claims, and who has been quoted extensively in online posts and interviewed by news networks with links to Iran and Russia. (READ: Don’t let ‘experts’ online fool you: Here’s how)

Garrie has also been identified in a research paper by New Knowledge about the Russian IRA as being part of the “broader propaganda ecosystem.” He is a contributor to globalresearch.ca, geopolitica.ru, and eurasianaffairs.net – all segments of the disinformation networks connected to the IRA and Russia. A Russian IP address is traceable from the last two sites.

It seems to me there is little reason to imagine that the people who run large technology companies have any vested interest in allowing pre-digital folkways to interfere with their 21st-century engineering and business models, any more than 19th-century robber barons showed any particular regard for laws or people that got in the way of their railroads and steel trusts.

Nor is there much reason to imagine that the technologists who run our giant consumer-data monopolies have any better idea of the future they’re building than the rest of us do.

But if ranking stories based on clicks or likes was disastrous, ranking online publishers’ credibility brings its own set of problems. Not least of these is that credibility means different things to different people, and even the best-intentioned arbiters will be subject to both their own biases and outside pressure. The hope is that these systems rebalance the incentives facing online news companies. The risk is that they simply replace one set of self-interested media clearinghouses with another.

For starters, it could create an updatable list of rumors and fact-checks, similar to what Facebook uses to identify misinformation in its news feed. Each phone could regularly receive a portion of this list tailored to match what the user would be likely to see (based on metadata the app already collects, such as location). Whenever users post or receive a link or rumor that’s on the list, WhatsApp could display a fact-check, related article or other context, just as Facebook has started to. It could even warn them before they share known misinformation. The beauty of this approach is that it doesn’t require WhatsApp to collect any new information about anyone. It maintains privacy while directly addressing misinformation.

Here in the US, putting body cameras on police officers and cellphone cameras in the hands of everyone else hasn’t done much to alter the way police brutality is understood by juries or prosecutors. And even in scenarios with infinitely lower stakes and vastly better footage, we can all see the same thing while seeing completely different things: Consider how useless video replay can be in sports, and how much more furious people are with the officiating in the age of the instant review.

There are a lot of options on the table, and now would seem to be the right time to start pursuing them, especially given the frequent correspondence between the decline of a country’s free press and the decline of its democracy. To the barricades, comrades.