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Conservative historians asserted that relativists were ruining everything, that truth did exist. They criticized post-modernism as a mask for moral relativism, connected this immorality with the popular movements of the 1960s, and asserted their own moral primacy (the Moral Majority).

The platform of the Republican Party about climate change and health care, two of our most pressing issues, is just one big lie

The intersection of a Republican Party which sees no value in distinguishing between truth and lies and an emerging technology that makes spreading lies incredibly easy is a great political danger. Is there truth? Not if those in power in America don’t care.

The use of a fabricated story about Ukraine and Joe Biden is a set of lies, that then led to one of the greatest scenes of collective public lying in American history, the response of Republican Representatives and Senators to the impeachment.

We are being bombarded with carefully crafted lies throughout cyberspace, designed to distort the results of the 2020 election. False stories about Joe Biden and Ukraine have already spread virally to millions of people.

Disinformation spread by bots can come from anywhere on the globe. The technology is non-partisan.

today we suffer from a multiplication of lies as a Republican tactic to win elections.

Does this mean that there is no truth? That any statement can be shown to be untrue by people with a different point of view? Objectivity is impossible, so there is no objective truth

This line of thinking was taken up especially by literary scholars, who argued that every text has multiple, perhaps infinite meanings. There is no true interpretation of a piece of writing

When this was expanded into other disciplines, it became more confusing. Some historians argued that it is impossible to make a true historical statement. Every statement can have multiple, even contradictory meanings. Excellent examples of this would be stat

Over a 13-week period, our study allowed us to capture people’s assessments of fresh news articles in real time. Each day of the study, we relied on a fixed, pre-registered process to select five popular articles published within the previous 24 hours

The five articles were balanced between conservative, liberal and non-partisan sources, as well as from mainstream news websites and from websites known to produce fake news. In total, we sent 150 total articles to 90 survey respondents each

We also sent these articles separately to six independent fact checkers, and treated their most common response — true, false/misleading, or cannot determine — for each article as the “correct’’ answer for that article.

When shown an article that was rated “true” by the professional fact checkers, respondents correctly identified the article as true 62 percent of the time. When the source of the true news story was a mainstream news source, respondents correctly identified the article as true 73 percent of the time.

However, for each article the professional fact checkers rated “false/misleading,” the study participants were as likely to say it was true as they were to say it was false or misleading. And roughly one-third of the time they told us they were unable to determine the veracity of the article. In other words, people on the whole were unable to correctly classify false or misleading news.

four of the articles in our study that fact checkers rated as false or misleading were related to the coronavirus.

All four articles promoted the unfounded rumor that the virus was intentionally developed in a laboratory. Although accidental releases of pathogens from labs have previously caused significant morbidity and mortality, in the current pandemic multiple pieces of evidence suggest this virus is of natural origin. There’s little evidence that the virus was manufactured or altered.

Only 30 percent of participants correctly classified them as false or misleading.

respondents seemed to have more trouble deciding what to think about false covid-19 stories, leading to a higher proportion of “could not determine” responses than we saw for the stories on other topics our professional fact checkers rated as “false/misleading.” This finding suggests that it may be particularly difficult to identify misinformation in newly emerging topics

Study participants with higher levels of education did better on identifying both fake news overall and coronavirus-related fake news — but were far from being able to correctly weed out misinformation all of the time

In fact, no group, regardless of education level, was able to correctly identify the stories that the professional fact checkers had labeled as false or misleading more than 40 percent of the time.

Taken together, our findings suggest that there is widespread potential for vulnerability to misinformation when it first appears online. This is especially worrying during the current pandemic

In the current environment, misinformation has the potential to undermine social distancing efforts, to lead people to hoard supplies, or to promote the adoption of potentially dangerous fake cures.

our findings suggest that non-trivial numbers of people will believe false information to be true when they first encounter it. And it suggests that efforts to remove coronavirus-related misinformation will need to be swift — and implemented early in an article’s life-cycle — to stop the spread of something else that’s dangerous: misinformation.

I can imagine multiple groups, many of them proudly American, who might well want to manipulate a range of fake accounts during a riot or disaster to increase anxiety or fear.

Facebook, Google and Twitter, not Russia, have provided the technology to create fake accounts and false advertisements, as well as the technology to direct them at particular parts of the population.

There is no reason existing laws on transparency in political advertising, on truth in advertising or indeed on libel should not apply to social media as well as traditional media. There is a better case than ever against anonymity, at least against anonymity in the public forums of social media and comment sections, as well as for the elimination of social-media bots.

Those sanctioned include five members of Parliament -- Tom Tugendhat, Iain Duncan Smith, Neil O'Brien, Tim Loughton and Nusrat Ghani -- and two members of the House of Lords, David Alton and Helena Kennedy, as well as academic Joanne Smith Finley and barrister Geoffrey Nice.

Four entities were also named by Beijing: the China Research Group, Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, Uyghur Tribunal, and Essex Court Chambers, a leading London law firm.

While relations between Beijing and London have suffered as a result of the ongoing crackdown in Hong Kong, which the UK has suggested breaches a historic agreement with China, the new sanctions could send them to new lows.

When you learn a new piece of information through social media, think to yourself: “This may be true, but it also may be false,”

2. Find out who is making the claim.

When you encounter a new claim, look for conflicts of interest. Ask: Do they stand to profit from what they say? Are they affiliated with an organization that could be swaying them? Two other questions to consider: What makes the writer or speaker qualified to comment on the topic? What statements have they made in the past?

3. Watch out for the halo effect.

The halo effect, says Frans, “is a cognitive bias that makes our feeling towards someone affect how we judge their claims.

If we dislike someone, we are a lot more likely to disagree with them; if we like them, we are biased to agree.”

New scientific papers under review are read “blind,” with the authors’ names removed. That way, the experts who are deciding whether it’s worthy of publication don’t know which of their fellow scientists wrote it so they’ll be able to react free from pre-judgement or bias.

4. Look at the evidence.

Before you act on or share a particularly surprising or enraging story, do a quick Google search — you might learn something even more interesting.

5. Beware of the tendency to cherry-pick information.

Another human bias — confirmation bias — means we’re more likely to notice stories or facts that fit what we already believe (or want to believe).

When you search for information, you should not disregard the information that goes against whatever opinion you might have in advance.”

In your own life, look for friends and acquaintances on social media with alternative viewpoints. You don’t have to agree with them, or tolerate misinformation from them — but it’s healthy and balanced to have some variety in your information diet.

6. Recognize the difference between correlation and causation.

However, she says, “there is no evidence supporting these claims, and it’s important to remember that just because two things increase simultaneously, this does not mean that they are causally linked to each other. Correlation does not equal causality.”

In the early days of his campaign, Mr. Biden’s team envisioned setting up its own digital media empire. It posted videos to his official YouTube channel, conducted virtual forums and even set up a podcast hosted by Mr. Biden, “Here’s the Deal.”

those efforts were marred by technical glitches and lukewarm receptions, and they never came close to rivaling the reach of Mr. Trump’s social media machine.

So the campaign pivoted to a different strategy, which involved expanding Mr. Biden’s reach by working with social media influencers and “validators,

Perhaps the campaign’s most unlikely validator was Fox News. Headlines from the outlet that reflected well on Mr. Biden were relatively rare, but the campaign’s tests showed that they were more persuasive to on-the-fence voters than headlines from other outlets

the “Rebel Alliance,” a jokey nod to Mr. Parscale’s “Death Star,” and it eventually grew to include the proprietors of pages like Occupy Democrats, Call to Activism, The Other 98 Percent and Being Liberal.

2. Tune Out Twitter, and Focus on ‘Facebook Moms’

“The whole Biden campaign ethos was ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” Mr. Flaherty said. “There are risks of running a campaign that is too hyper-aware of your own ideological corner.”

As it focused on Facebook, the Biden campaign paid extra attention to “Facebook moms” — women who spend a lot of time sharing cute and uplifting content

“Our goal was really to meet people where they were,”

3. Build a Facebook Brain Trust

“When people saw a Fox News headline endorsing Joe Biden, it made them stop scrolling and think.”

Ultimately, he said, the campaign’s entire digital strategy — the Malarkey Factory, the TikTok creators and Facebook moms, the Fortnite signs and small-batch creators — was about trying to reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet that it still believed existed.

“I had the freedom to go for the jugular,” said Rafael Rivero, a co-founder of Occupy Democrats and Ridin’ With Biden, another big pro-Biden Facebook page.

“It was sort of a big, distributed message test,” Mr. Flaherty said of the Rebel Alliance. “If it was popping through Occupy or any of our other partners, we knew there was heat there.”

These left-wing pages gave the campaign a bigger Facebook audience than it could have reached on its own. But they also allowed Mr. Biden to keep most of his messaging positive, while still tapping into the anger and outrage many Democratic voters felt.

4. Promote ‘Small-Batch Creators,’ Not Just Slick Commercials

the Biden campaign found that traditional political ads — professionally produced, slick-looking 30-second spots — were far less effective than impromptu, behind-the-scenes footage and ads that featured regular voters talking directly into their smartphones or webcams about why they were voting for Mr. Biden.

“The things that were realer, more grainy and cheaper to produce were more credible.”

In addition to hiring traditional Democratic ad firms, the campaign also teamed up with what it called “small-batch creators” — lesser-known producers and digital creators, some of whom had little experience making political ads

5. Fight Misinformation, but Pick Your Battles

The campaign formed an in-house effort to combat these rumors, known as the “Malarkey Factory.” But it picked its battles carefully, using data from voter testing to guide its responses.

“The Hunter Biden conversation was many times larger than the Hillary Clinton email conversation, but it really didn’t stick, because people think Joe Biden’s a good guy,”

the campaign’s focus on empathy had informed how it treated misinformation: not as a cynical Trump ploy that was swallowed by credulous dupes, but as something that required listening to voters to understand their concerns and worries before fighting back

On the messaging app Signal, the page owners formed a group text that became a kind of rapid-response brain trust for the campaign.

“We made a decision early that we were going to be authentically Joe Biden online, even when people were saying that was a trap.”

I’d non-defensively ask them, ‘Do you know how Google works?’ ‘What do you think my news feed looks like? Do you know why yours looks that way?’”

I would expect the following to happen.’ I

cognitive dissonance.

is to acknowledge that some conspiracies do exist — Watergate, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s network of underage sexual abuse.

And if people better understood the mechanisms and the economics, maybe then you can talk about the content.”

Witnesses come forward, then victims. And journalists circle like sharks to get the story. I try to get them to think about concrete things and logistical details, including the bureaucracy that’s required to maintain these vast alleged plots.”

“Sometimes it’s about turning the ‘do your research’ paradigm back on them,” he said. “I never appeal to authorities like the government or mainstream media, but I subtly imply that what they’re saying doesn’t match the historical record, which works better than outright dismissing them.”

Unfortunately, social platforms are often the worst forum for talking about these thorny issues. In many cases, a face-to-face conversation is a better place to voice your concerns.

They can also allow participants to pick up on subtle facial and body language expressions — or tone of voice — that may dissolve tensions.

“There it is. Biden’s wearing a wire.” It’s actually just a crease in his shirt. And a popular meme among teens was the claim that Wayfair is shipping children in industrial-grade cabinets.

The main gist of QAnon is that elite satanic pedophiles are everywhere and they’re coming to get your kids. More specifically, pedophiles are everywhere among liberals, celebrities, and the media.

“Q is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” There are now 87 QAnon supporters who have run for Congress, and the first will be elected this November. “I think it’s something worth listening to and paying attention to.” And Trump refuses to push back against QAnon because QAnon loves Trump.

One of the major reasons QAnon is on the rise right now is because when the world is scary and uncertain, we are drawn to magical thinking.

Uncertainty produces anxiety, but you can counter that, in part, by understanding what to expect on Election Day this year.

This year, Dr. Tillery observed, there’s a significant chance the presidential election will not be called on Tuesday night.

“Voters should get some comfort from knowing that we do have counting procedures and auditing procedures and voter notification procedures that would make it better for us to be calm and let those processes play out,”

Other analog activities can help you cope, too. “Anxious thoughts race by,” Dr. Stosny said, “and the faster they go, the less realistic they get.” Instead of dwelling on them, write them out longhand; this will slow down and moderate their frenetic pace. Next to each source of fear, write down how you’ll respond to it.

68 percent of adults report finding the election to be a significant source of stress. This is due, at least in part, to the vitriol and name-calling exhibited by candidates,

“Humans are quite resilient,” she said. “There’s a strong possibility that you will be able to cope.”

f a family member approaches you with anger, try to respond with compassion. Consider setting a time limit on your political discussions, Dr. Lee said, agreeing in advance to a fun, shared activity when your time is up.

If you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, or need to take time out of a challenging conversation, go for a walk or run, and try to spend at least 30 minutes outside.

Be on the lookout for viral disinformation: Check the provenance of news articles or memes making polarizing political claims or calling the election before a mainstream news outlet has done so.

“One of the things Covid has made abundantly clear in so many aspects of our life is that we have a lot of cracks in the system,”

“This is the first step in a long journey of really reimagining what America is going to look like and what America is going to be about,” Ms. Holland said. “That’s not going to end when the voting does.”

68 percent of American adults said that the 2020 election was a “significant source of stress” in their lives. (Among Democrats, the figure was 76 percent; it was 67 percent for Republicans and 64 percent for Independents.) Across the board, 77 percent of Americans said they were stressed about the future of the country.

It’s very bumpy and you’re riding along the highway and you have pothole after pothole. The news cycle is probably under 30 minutes right now.”

“What we’re seeing among Democrats is the sense that ‘we were in this position four years ago, so we’re not getting our hopes up,’” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “Republicans are consistently more confident that the election is going to go the way they want.”

“Polls give people a false sense of security, and they think they don’t have to turn out to vote,” he said. “Is there going to be a peaceful transfer of power? That’s a big question. The big worry is that he won’t accept the results, or he’s going to incite violence.”

We’ve seen Russian actors intentionally use content posted by innocent Americans. We see other people post and share content from Russian campaigns. It doesn’t mean they’re actually connected. In fact, most times they’re not.

Influence operations are essentially weaponized uncertainty.

One of the most effective countermeasures in all of this is an informed public.

And there are so many opportunities to leverage that complexity to run a perception hack. A perception hack is an attempt to create a perception that there is a large scale influence operation when in fact there is no evidence to support it.

It’s our job to keep this debate as authentic as possible by putting more information and context out there. We can force pages that are pushing information to disclose who is behind them

We are living through a historic election with so many complex pieces to monitor. The piece that I and my team can help with is that we can make sure we secure this debate.

My counterpart at Twitter says I call him more than his mother does. We’re spending lots of time and exchanging information to try and stay ahead of this.

Between 2016 and next week we’ll have worked to protect more than 200 elections across the world. It’s critical to focus on next week, but we also have to remember Myanmar has an election five days later.

#BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.

On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”

#BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.

In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages

Stage 2: Seeding on Social MediaIn any manipulation campaign, the second stage involves campaign operators strategically spreading the hashtag across the media ecosystem.

Stage 1: OriginsFor more than a year, right-wing media and partisans have pushed “Biden crime family” as a viral slogan. Media manipulation campaigns are usually conjured in small, hidden spaces by a few operators with an agenda. But in this case, it was influential media and political personalities who got the ball rolling.

Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection.

But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was exaggerating the pandemic’s threat “to damage the Trump presidency.”

“The effect that we measure could be driven by the long-term message of Fox News, which is that the mainstream media often report ‘fake news’ and have a political agenda,” Simonov said. “This could result in lowering trust in institutions and experts, including health experts in the case of the pandemic.”

Our results indicate that a one standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with approximately 32 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14 and approximately 23 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28,

“If the results hold, the research demonstrates the influence that broadcast media can have on behavior,”

The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon

The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit.

The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.

These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.

There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil u

All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.

Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”?

Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?

Mark Zuckerberg’s start-up did not invent surveillance capitalism. Google did that. In 2000, when only 25 percent of the world’s information was stored digitally, Google was a tiny start-up with a great search product but little revenue.

By 2001, in the teeth of the dot-com bust, Google’s leaders found their breakthrough in a series of inventions that would transform advertising. Their team learned how to combine massive data flows of personal information with advanced computational analyses to predict where an ad should be placed for maximum “click through.”

Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.

Prediction was the first imperative that determined the second imperative: extraction.

Lucrative predictions required flows of human data at unimaginable scale. Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and, later, from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors

User ignorance was understood as crucial to success. Each new product was a means to more “engagement,” a euphemism used to conceal illicit extraction operations.

When asked “What is Google?” the co-founder Larry Page laid it out in 2001,

“Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data,” Mr. Page said. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”

Instead of selling search to users, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance medium for seizing human data

Company executives worked to keep these economic operations secret, hidden from users, lawmakers, and competitors. Mr. Page opposed anything that might “stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data,” Mr. Edwards wrote.

As recently as 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google’s algorithmic ranking operations in spreading corrupt information. “There is a line that we can’t really get across,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to understand truth.” A company with a mission to organize and make accessible all the world’s information using the most sophisticated machine systems cannot discern corrupt information.

This is the economic context in which disinformation wins

In March 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Google’s head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, as his second in command. Ms. Sandberg had joined Google in 2001 and was a key player in the surveillance capitalism revolution. She led the build-out of Google’s advertising engine, AdWords, and its AdSense program, which together accounted for most of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue in 2007.

A Google multimillionaire by the time she met Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg had a canny appreciation of Facebook’s immense opportunities for extraction of rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Ms. Sandberg explained

The company had “better data” and “real data” because it had a front-row seat to what Mr. Page had called “your whole life.”

Facebook paved the way for surveillance economics with new privacy policies in late 2009. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that new “Everyone” settings eliminated options to restrict the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.

Mr. Zuckerberg “just went for it” because there were no laws to stop him from joining Google in the wholesale destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit-maximizer willing to use his social network against society, then 2009 to 2010 would have been a good opportunity.

Facebook was the first follower, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models.

In 2021 these five U.S. tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization in the world.

As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information

Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.

Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic

The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.

Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American executives, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Even this radical doctrine did not reckon with the possibility of no rules.

With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.

The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.

Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement

Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.

Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.

when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalism’s revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.

All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations.

We can’t fix all our problems at once, but we won’t fix any of them, ever, unless we reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and trustworthy communications

The abdication of our information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic, because it obstructs solutions to all other crises.

Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other corporate actor in this new economic order set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry set out to destroy the earth.

like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have been willing to treat their destructive effects on people and society as collateral damage — the unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of perfectly legal economic operations that have produced some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism.

Where does that leave us?

Democracy is the only countervailing institutional order with the legitimate authority and power to change our course. If the ideal of human self-governance is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one solution: a democratic counterrevolution.

instead of the usual laundry lists of remedies, lawmakers need to proceed with a clear grasp of the adversary: a single hierarchy of economic causes and their social harms.

We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes

This means we move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and policing illegal content. Such “remedies” only treat the symptoms without challenging the illegitimacy of the human data extraction that funds private control over society’s information spaces

Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they will not affect the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.

Instead, discussions about regulating big tech should focus on the bedrock of surveillance economics: the secret extraction of human data from realms of life once called “private.

No secret extraction means no illegitimate concentrations of knowledge about people. No concentrations of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social speech or shape human behavior to favor their interests

the sober truth is that we need lawmakers ready to engage in a once-a-century exploration of far more basic questions:

How should we structure and govern information, connection and communication in a democratic digital century?

What new charters of rights, legislative frameworks and institutions are required to ensure that data collection and use serve the genuine needs of individuals and society?

What measures will protect citizens from unaccountable power over information, whether it is wielded by private companies or governments?

The corporation that is Facebook may change its name or its leaders, but it will not voluntarily change its economics.

In the middle of breaking news, when people are searching for information, some platforms can present more questions than answers. Although Wikipedia is not staffed with professional journalists, it is viewed as an authoritative source by much of the public, for better or for worse. Its entries are also used for fact-checking purposes by some of the biggest social platforms, adding to the stakes and reach of the work from Moore and others.

"Editing Wikipedia can absolutely take an emotional toll on me, especially when working on difficult topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other disasters," he said.

"I like the instant gratification of making the internet better," he said.

"I want to direct people to something that is going to provide them with much more reliable information at a time when it's very difficult for people to understand what sources they can trust."

"It is considered cool if you're the first person who creates an article, especially if you do it well with high-quality contributions," said Rasberry.

To help patrol incoming edits and predict misconduct or errors, Wikipedia -- like Twitter -- uses artificial intelligence bots that can escalate suspicious content to human reviewers who monitor content.

Rasberry, who also wrote the Wikipedia page on the platform's fact checking processes, said Wikipedia does not employ paid staff to monitor anything unless it involves "strange and unusual serious crimes like terrorism or real world violence, such as using Wikipedia to make threats, plan to commit suicide, or when Wikipedia itself is part of a crime.

Rasberry said flaws range from a geographical bias, which is related to challenges with communicating across languages; access to internet in lower and middle income countries; and barriers to freedom of journalism around the world.

"I've got many other editors that I'm working with who will back me, so when we encounter vandalism or trolls or misinformation or disinformation, editors are very quick to revert inappropriate edits or remove inappropriate content or poorly sourced content," Moore said.

While "edit wars" can happen on pages, Rasberry said this tends to occur more often over social issues rather than news.

Wikipedia also publicly displays who edits each version of an article via its history page, along with a "talk" page for each post that allows editors to openly discuss edits.

"If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it," the page said.

"If it was a paid advertising site or if it had a different mission, I wouldn't waste my time."