The Disinformers uncovers the people and the organizations behind the disinformation campaigns that began on social media with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reached a violent crescendo with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Edited by social media researcher Lance Porter, this vital collection of interdisciplinary scholarship analyzes how foreign interference destabilized political conversations, stoked racial tensions, and spread disinformation across ...

**An eye-opening look at the small communities of propagandists revolutionizing politics, culture, and society.“Essential and riveting reading.” —Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation**Invisible Rulers is about a profound transformation in power and influence that is altering our politics, our government, and even our relationships with friends and neighbors. Today, online propagandists increasingly shape public opinion and even control our rela...

**Learn how to fight against the disinformation campaigns imperiling American democracy in this empowering, pocket-sized guide from the author of How to Talk to a Science Denier.INSIDE THE WAR ON TRUTH: Explore the history of how disinformation has been weaponized to manipulate society.**The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of 70 years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee M...

The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project.A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not outgunning the enemy, but using new information technology to understand their motives and anticipate th...

**How did we become a world where facts—shared truths—have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, globally? How have we allowed the proliferation of alternative facts, hoaxes, even conspiracy theories, to destroy our trust in institutions, leaders, and legitimate experts? Best-selling journalist Steven Brill documents the forces and people, from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue to Moscow to Washington, that have created and exploited this world of chaos and divi...

“A prescient and important book. . . . Fascinating.”—The New York Review of BooksNo single invention of the last half century has changed the way we live now as much as the Internet. Alexander Klimburg was a member of the generation for whom it was a utopian ideal turned reality: a place where ideas, information, and knowledge could be shared and new freedoms found and enjoyed. Two decades later, the future isn’t so bright any more: increasingly, the Inter...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their mani...

A former Secretary of Homeland Security examines our outdated laws regarding the protection of personal information, and the pressing need for change.Nothing undermines our freedom more than losing control of information about ourselves. And yet, as daily events underscore, we are ever more vulnerable to cyber-attack.In this bracing book, Michael Chertoff makes clear that our laws and policies surrounding the protection of personal information, written for a...

For more than three hundred years, the world wrestled with conflicts that arose between nation-states. Nation-states wielded military force, financial pressure, and diplomatic persuasion to create "world order." Even after the end of the Cold War, the elements comprising world order remained essentially unchanged.But 2012 marked a transformation in geopolitics and the tactics of both the established powers and smaller entities looking to challenge the international community. That ...

The question of how Donald Trump won the 2016 election looms over his presidency. In particular, were the 78,000 voters who gave him an Electoral College victory affected by the Russian trolls and hackers? Trump has denied it. So has Vladimir Putin. Others cast the answer as unknowable. In Cyberwar, Kathleen Hall Jamieson marshals the troll posts, unique polling data, analyses of how the press used hacked content, and a synthesis of half a century of media effects literature to ar...

An accessible guide that breaks down the complex issues around mass surveillance and data privacy and explores the negative consequences it can have on individual citizens and their communities.No one is exempt from data mining: by owning a smartphone, or using social media or a credit card, we hand over private data to corporations and the government. We need to understand how surveillance and data collection operates in order to regain control over our digital fr...

Why do nations break into one another's most important computer networks? There is an obvious answer: to steal valuable information or to attack. But this isn't the full story. This book draws on often-overlooked documents leaked by Edward Snowden, real-world case studies of cyber operations, and policymaker perspectives to show that intruding into other countries' networks has enormous defensive value as well. Two nations, neither of which seeks to harm the other but neither of which trus...