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A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.

the growing desire of corporations and governments to know and store ever more data about everyone

About 70% of the digital universe is generated by individuals, but its storage is then predominantly the job of corporations. From emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, it is corporations that are storing information on behalf of consumers.

actions in the offline world that individuals carry out which result in digital content being created by organisations – from cashpoint transactions which a bank must record to walking along the pavement, which is likely to result in CCTV footage

"unstructured"

"You talk to a kid these days and they have no idea what a kilobyte is. The speed things progress, we are going to need many words beyond zettabyte."

Socioeconomic inequality matters because it strengthens the belief that some people are worth much more than others. Those at the top seem hugely important and those at the bottom are seen as almost worthless. In more unequal societies we come to judge each other more by status and worry more about how others judge us. Research on 28 European countries shows that inequality increases status anxiety in all income groups, from the poorest ten percent to the richest tenth. The poor are affected most but even the richest ten percent of the population are more worried about status in unequal societies

being at the bottom of the social ladder feels the same whether you live in the UK, Norway, Uganda or Pakistan. Therefore, simply raising material living standards is not enough to produce genuine wellbeing or quality of life in the face of inequality

Psychotic symptoms such as delusions of grandeur are more common in more unequal countries, as is schizophrenia. As the graph below shows, narcissism increases as income inequality rises, as measured by ‘Narcissistic Personality Inventory’ (NPI) scores from successive samples of the US population.

Those who live in more unequal places are more likely to spend money on expensive cars and shop for status goods; and they are more likely to have high levels of personal debt because they try to show that they are not ‘second-class people’ by owning ‘first-class things.’

by examining our evolutionary past and our history as egalitarian, cooperative, sharing hunter-gatherers, we dispel the false idea that humans are, in their very nature, competitive, aggressive and individualistic. Inequality is not inevitable and we humans have all the psychological and social aptitudes to live differently.

inequalities of outcome limit equality of opportunity; differences in achievement and attainment are driven by inequality, rather than being a consequence of it

inequality is a major roadblock to creating sustainable economies that serve to optimise the health and wellbeing of both people and planet.  Because consumerism is about self-enhancement and status competition, it is intensified by inequality. And as inequality leads to a societal breakdown in trust, solidarity and social cohesion, it reduces people’s willingness to act for the common good. This is shown in everything from the tendency for more unequal societies to do less recycling to surveys which show that business leaders in more unequal societies are less supportive of international environmental protection agreements.

The UK charity we founded, The Equality Trust, has resources for activists and a network of local groups. In the USA, check out inequality.org. Worldwide, the Fight Inequality Alliance works with more than 100 partners to work for a more equal world. And look out for the new global Wellbeing Economy Alliance this autumn.

Inequality creates the social and political divisions that isolate us from each other, so it’s time for us all to reach out, connect, communicate and act collectively. We really are all in this together. 

There are very real consequences from a white supremacist holding the highest office in the land. There are very real consequences to Trump using the bully pulpit to foster hate on the basis of almost every human characteristic, be it race, faith, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, gender, or class

The policies of the Trump administration cannot be divorced from the rhetoric of the Trump administration. The rhetoric and the policies are both driven by xenophobia, Islamaphobia, misogyny and white supremacy. And if the government is going to treat diverse and marginalized communities as subhuman so will everyone else

We have to be prepared for much worse from the Trump administration because this is what he has said that he would do all along. It is naïve and foolish of us to think that he is not going to follow through on his promises.

It is dystopic. I have met with survivors who have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. One survivor, Tanya Gersh, described to me how she rarely says hello to strangers and is not as gregarious and outgoing as she used to be. She described to me how after she was viciously trolled by white supremacists in Whitefish, Montana. There were something like 700 forms of communication such as emails, social media messages, voice mails. She told me she had to have a conversation with her ten year old about the Holocaust and how every Jewish parent struggles with when to have that conversation with their children about anti-Semitism. Hate crimes that target individuals send a community wide message that its members are not welcome. This undermines feelings of safety and security. It is  called "vicarious trauma." For example the vandalism and arson of house of worship, the targeting of organizations, student groups, campus communities or even state sponsored forms of hate are also designed to terrorize whole communities and groups of people. We also know that hate literally kills people by making communities physically and emotionally sick.

There are many victims of hate crimes who out of fear remain silent. Hate crimes are very underreported in America. The stats do not capture the scale of the problem.

The War on Terror must stop as well because I don’t think you can separate what the United States does abroad with what it does to its own people — especially nonwhites, Muslims, and other marginalized and discriminated against communities. Justice also involves archiving this moment, documenting what survivors and their communities have experienced

there is no one size fits all answer. It should ultimately be determined by the survivors. In my book there are survivors  who forgave the aggressors and culprits in open court and elsewhere because they don’t believe that prison is the answer. There are others who felt otherwise. But overwhelmingly the survivors that I met are open to reconciliation so long as there is accountability

American consumers spent five hours per day on their mobile devices, and showed a dizzying 69% year-over-year increase in time spent in apps like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The prevalence of apps represents a concrete example of the movement away from the old notion of accessing the Internet through a browser and the new reality of the connected world and its myriad elements – news, social media, entertainment – being with us all the time

“In the 90s and even through the early 2000s, for many people, there was this way of thinking about cyberspace as a space that was somewhere else: it was in your computer. You went to your desktop to get there,” Weigel says. “One of the biggest shifts that’s happened and that will continue to happen is the undoing of a border that we used to perceive between the virtual and the physical world.”

While many of us think of the smartphone as a portal for accessing the outside world, the reciprocity of the device, as well as the larger pattern of our behavior online, means the portal goes the other way as well: it’s a means for others to access us

Weigel sees the unfettered access to our data, through our smartphone and browser use, of what she calls the big five tech companies – Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon – as a legitimate problem for notions of democracy

an unfathomable amount of wealth, power, and direct influence on the consumer in the hands of just a few individuals – individuals who can affect billions of lives with a tweak in the code of their products

“This is where the fundamental democracy deficit comes from: you have this incredibly concentrated private power with zero transparency or democratic oversight or accountability, and then they have this unprecedented wealth of data about their users to work with,”

the rhetoric around the Internet was that the crowd would prevent the spread of misinformation, filtering it out like a great big hive mind; it would also help to prevent the spread of things like hate speech. Obviously, this has not been the case, and even the relatively successful experiments in this, such as Wikipedia, have a great deal of human governance that allows them to function properly

We should know and be aware of how these companies work, how they track our behavior, and how they make recommendations to us based on our behavior and that of others. Essentially, we need to understand the fundamental difference between our behavior IRL and in the digital sphere – a difference that, despite the erosion of boundaries, still stands

“Whether we know it or not, the connections that we make on the Internet are being used to cultivate an identity for us – an identity that is then sold to us afterward,” Lynch says. “Google tells you what questions to ask, and then it gives you the answers to those questions.”

It isn’t enough that the apps in our phone flatten all of the different categories of relationships we have into one broad group: friends, followers, connections. They go one step further than that. “You’re being told who you are all the time by Facebook and social media because which posts are coming up from your friends are due to an algorithm that is trying to get you to pay more attention to Facebook,” Lynch says. “That’s affecting our identity, because it affects who you think your friends are, because they’re the ones who are popping up higher on your feed.”

Making a buck from the alt-right is quite simple. Get a blog or a YouTube channel. Then under the guise of political dialogue or pseudo-science, start spouting hate speech. You'll soon find followers flocking to your banner.

Publish a crappy ebook explaining why SJWs Always Lie. Or teach your followers how to “think like a silverback gorilla” (surely an arena where the far right already triumph?) via a pricey seminar. Launch a Kickstarter for a badly drawn comic packed with anti-diversity propaganda. They'll sell by the bucketload to followers eager to virtue-signal their membership in the rank and file of the alt-right

the seemingly bottomless reservoirs of white male victimhood

nowhere is there a better supply of the credulous than among the angry white men who flock to the far right. Embittered by their own life failures, the alt-right follower is eager to believe they have a genetically superior IQ and are simply the victim of a libtard conspiracy to keep them down

We're barely in the foothills of the mountains of madness that the internet and social media are unleashing into our political process. If you think petty demagogues like Jordan Peterson are good at milking cash from the crowd, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Because he was just the beginning – and his ideology of the white male victim is rapidly spiralling into something that even he can no longer control

The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.

Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. This capability gap is eminently exploitable; why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology? This leaves us in a terrible position, because there are so many more points of failure

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle. But as social platforms grew, acquiring standing audiences in the hundreds of millions and developing tools for precision targeting and viral amplification, a variety of malign actors simultaneously realized that there was another way. They could go straight for the people, easily and cheaply. And that’s because influence operations can, and do, impact public opinion. Adversaries can target corporate entities and transform the global power structure by manipulating civilians and exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities at scale. Even actual hacks are increasingly done in service of influence operations: stolen, leaked emails, for example, were profoundly effective at shaping a national narrative in the U.S. election of 2016.

The substantial time and money spent on defense against critical-infrastructure hacks is one reason why poorly-resourced adversaries choose to pursue a cheap, easy, low-cost-of-failure psy-ops war instead

Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases (Brexit) and clear indications of it in others (Duterte). They’ve targeted corporations and industries. And they’ve certainly gone after mores: social media became the main battleground for the culture wars years ago, and we now describe the unbridgeable gap between two polarized Americas using technological terms like filter bubble. But ultimately the information war is about territory — just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

If an operation is effective, the message will be pushed into the feeds of sympathetic real people who will amplify it themselves. If it goes viral or triggers a trending algorithm, it will be pushed into the feeds of a huge audience. Members of the media will cover it, reaching millions more. If the content is false or a hoax, perhaps there will be a subsequent correction article – it doesn’t matter, no one will pay attention to it.

The 2014-2016 influence operation playbook went something like this: a group of digital combatants decided to push a specific narrative, something that fit a long-term narrative but also had a short-term news hook. They created content: sometimes a full blog post, sometimes a video, sometimes quick visual memes. The content was posted to platforms that offer discovery and amplification tools. The trolls then activated collections of bots and sockpuppets to blanket the biggest social networks with the content. Some of the fake accounts were disposable amplifiers, used mostly to create the illusion of popular consensus by boosting like and share counts. Others were highly backstopped personas run by real human beings, who developed standing audiences and long-term relationships with sympathetic influencers and media; those accounts were used for precision messaging with the goal of reaching the press. Israeli company Psy Group marketed precisely these services to the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign; as their sales brochure put it, “Reality is a Matter of Perception”.

This shift from targeting infrastructure to targeting the minds of civilians was predictable. Theorists  like Edward Bernays, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan saw it coming decades ago. As early as 1970, McLuhan wrote, in Culture is our Business, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

Combatants are now focusing on infiltration rather than automation: leveraging real, ideologically-aligned people to inadvertently spread real, ideologically-aligned content instead. Hostile state intelligence services in particular are now increasingly adept at operating collections of human-operated precision personas, often called sockpuppets, or cyborgs, that will escape punishment under the the bot laws. They will simply work harder to ingratiate themselves with real American influencers, to join real American retweet rings. If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.

Attempts to legislate away 2016 tactics primarily have the effect of triggering civil libertarians, giving them an opportunity to push the narrative that regulators just don’t understand technology, so any regulation is going to be a disaster.

The entities best suited to mitigate the threat of any given emerging tactic will always be the platforms themselves, because they can move fast when so inclined or incentivized. The problem is that many of the mitigation strategies advanced by the platforms are the information integrity version of greenwashing; they’re a kind of digital security theater, the TSA of information warfare

Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better AI will rewrite the playbook yet again — perhaps the digital equivalent of  Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures – thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups

platforms aren’t incentivized to engage in the profoundly complex arms race against the worst actors when they can simply point to transparency reports showing that they caught a fair number of the mediocre actors

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation. We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.

We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.

Unceasing information war is one of the defining threats of our day. This conflict is already ongoing, but (so far, in the United States) it’s largely bloodless and so we aren’t acknowledging it despite the huge consequences hanging in the balance. It is as real as the Cold War was in the 1960s, and the stakes are staggeringly high: the legitimacy of government, the persistence of societal cohesion, even our ability to respond to the impending climate crisis.

Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts, or stopping some Russian bots, and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure – easily as critical as the integrity of our financial markets.

The video ends by displaying a future vision of Russian expansion that includes most of Europe (notably not Turkey), the Middle East and Asia

According to Nox Influencer, Bright Side alone is earning between $314,010 and 971,950 monthly, and 5-Minute Crafts is earning between $576,640 and $1,780,000 monthly through YouTube partner earning estimates. As a privately held company, TheSoul Publishing doesn’t have to disclose its earnings. But all the Cypriot-managed company has to do to earn money from YouTube is meet viewing thresholds and have an AdSense account. AdSense, a Google product, just requires that a company have a bank account, an email address and a phone number. To monetize to this magnitude of revenue, YouTube may have also collected tax information, if TheSoul Publishing organization is conducting what it defines as “U.S. activities.” It’s also possible that YouTube verified a physical address by sending a pin mailer.

According to publicly available information from the YouTube channels themselves—information provided to YouTube by the people who set up and operate the channels at TheSoul Publishing—as of August 2019, 21 of the 35 channels connected to TheSoul Publishing claim to be based in the U.S. Ten of the channels had no country listed. Zodiac Maniac was registered in the U.K, though TheSoul Publishing emphasizes that all of its operations are run out of Cyprus.

 Now I’ve Seen Everything was the only channel registered in the Russian Federation. That channel has more than 400 million views, which, according to the analytics tool Nox Influencer, come from a range of countries, including Russia and Eastern European and Central Asian countries—despite being an English-language channel

In another video on Smart Banana, which has more than 1 million views, the titular banana speculates on “12 Countries That May Not Survive the Next 20 Years”—including the United States, which the video argues may collapse because of political infighting and diverse political viewpoints

Facebook pages are not a direct way to increase profit unless a company is actively marketing merchandise or sales, which TheSoul Publishing does not appear to do. The pages coordinate posting, so one post will often appear on a number of different pages. To a digital advertiser, this makes perfect sense as a way to increase relevance and visibility, but it’s far from obvious what TheSoul Publishing might be advertising. Likewise, there’s no obvious financial benefit to posting original videos within Facebook. The company did not meaningfully clarify its Facebook strategy in response to questions on the subject.

Facebook forbids what it describes as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as its head of cybersecurity describes in this video. While TheSoul’s Publishing’s behavior is clearly coordinated, it is unclear that any of its behavior is inauthentic based on information I have reviewed.

One thing that TheSoul is definitely doing on Facebook, however, is buying ads—and, at least sometimes, it’s doing so in rubles on issues of national importance, targeting audiences in the United States. The page Bright Side has 44 million followers and currently lists no account administrators located in the United States, but as of Aug. 8, 2019, it had them in Cyprus, Russia, the United Kingdom, El Salvador, India, Ukraine and in locations “Not Available.” It used Facebook to post six political advertisements paid for in the Russian currency.

the point here is not that the ad buy is significant in and of itself. The point, rather, is that the company has developed a massive social media following and has a history of at least experimenting with distributing both pro-Russian and paid political content to that following

TheSoul’s political ads included the one below. The advertisement pushes viewers to an article about how “wonderful [it is] that Donald Trump earns less in a year than you do in a month.” The advertisement reached men, women, and people of unknown genders over the ages of 18, and began running on May 15, 2018. TheSoul Publishing spent less than a dollar on this advertisement, raising the question: why bother advertising at all?

the revelation that thousands of agents have access to a searchable database without public oversight is a new development in what privacy advocates and some lawmakers warn could be an infringement of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

CBP officials declined, however, to answer questions about how many Americans’ phone records are in the database, how many searches have been run or how long the practice has gone on, saying it has made no additional statistics available “due to law enforcement sensitivities and national security implications.”

Law enforcement agencies must show probable cause and persuade a judge to approve a search warrant before searching Americans’ phones. But courts have long granted an exception to border authorities, allowing them to search people’s devices without a warrant or suspicion of a crime.

The CBP directive gives officers the authority to look and scroll through any traveler’s device using what’s known as a “basic search,” and any traveler who refuses to unlock their phone for this process can have it confiscated for up to five days.

CBP officials give travelers a printed document saying that the searches are “mandatory,” but the document does not mention that data can be retained for 15 years and that thousands of officials will have access to it.

Officers are also not required to give the document to travelers before the search, meaning that some travelers may not fully understand their rights to refuse the search until after they’ve handed over their phones