**A critical reexamination of techno-optimism’s empty promises, and how the lessons of the past can help us regain control of our future."David Karpf has done us a great service by clearly and succinctly articulating the hollow rhetoric at the heart of Big Tech’s power. Vaporware, Inc. is equal parts funny and infuriating—I devoured most of it in a day. Let’s regulate Silicon Valley and tax these tech barons already!" —Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever

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 ...

Among the ways that digital media has transformed political activism, the most remarkable is not that new media allows disorganized masses to speak, but that it enables organized activist groups to listen. Beneath the waves of e-petitions, "likes," and hashtags lies a sea of data - a newly quantified form of supporter sentiment - and advocacy organizations can now utilize new tools to measure this data to make decisions and shape campaigns. In this book, David Karpf discusses the power and...

The Internet is facilitating a generational transition among American political advocacy organizations. This book provides a detailed exploration of how “netroots” advocacy groups - MoveOn.org, DailyKos.com, DemocracyforAmerica.com, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee - differ from “legacy” peer organizations. It also explains the partisan character of these technological innovations.

A critical reexamination of techno-optimism’s empty promises, and how the lessons of the past can help us regain control of our future.For thirty years, Silicon Valley leaders have promised dramatic technological innovation as long as we—the public, journalists, regulators, and policymakers—keep out of the way. The results have been great for Silicon Valley but haven’t gone so well for the rest of us. Venture capitalists and the companies they fund have amassed wealth, status, and p...

**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...