Meera Selva, University of Oxford for The Conversation Sri Lanka has temporarily banned social media and messaging apps in the wake of the coordinated Easter Sunday attacks on churches and hotels across the country, which killed at least 290 people.…
Carole Cadwalladr at TED2019 In an unmissable talk, journalist Carole Cadwalladr digs into one of the most perplexing events in recent times: the UK’s super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Tracking the result to a barrage of misleading Facebook…
One of the striking things about the official Skripal story is the way its more wildly improbable aspects have been released to the mainstream media over a long period, so as to manage their impact. So, for example, police acknowledgement…
By Craig Murray Tonight both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange are in jail, both over offences related to the publication of materials specifying US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both charged with nothing else at all. No matter…
William Dance, Lancaster University for The Conversatiom Intentionally false news stories were shared more than 35m times during the 2016 US presidential election, with Facebook playing a significant role in their spread. Shortly after, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that…
By George Monbiot for The Guardian Be it Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nigel Farage, blusterers and braggarts are rewarded with platforms that distort our political debate. If our politics is becoming less rational, crueller and more divisive, this rule of public life…
By Howard Richards Certainly, we all should be grateful to Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis. Nobody has worked harder or more intelligently for the common good. But gratitude does not entail agreement. That a lot of hard work and brain…
Last night the British Parliament affirmed its decision to take the Brexit process into its own hands, a saga which for too long has divided the population and deeply affected the economic and social well-being of the country. In consecutive…
Dionysios Demetis, University of Hull for The Conversation I can still recall my surprise when a book by evolutionary biologist Peter Lawrence entitled “The making of a fly” came to be priced on Amazon at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping). While…
Tax havens are locations around the world where wealthy individuals, criminals and terrorists, as well as governments and government agencies (such as the CIA), banks, corporations, hedge funds, international organizations (such as the Vatican) and crime syndicates (such as the…
