An in-depth exploration of social media and emergent technology that details the inner workings of modern propagandaUntil recently, propaganda was a top-down, elite-only system of communication control used largely by state actors. Samuel Woolley argues that social media has democratized today’s propaganda, allowing nearly anyone to launch a fairly sophisticated, computationally enhanced influence campaign. Woolley shows how social media, with its anonymity and cap...

Fake news posts and Twitter trolls were just the beginning. What will happen when misinformation moves from our social media feeds into our everyday lives?Online disinformation stormed our political process in 2016 and has only worsened since. Yet as Samuel Woolley shows in this urgent book, it may pale in comparison to what's to come: humanlike automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality, an...

An in-depth exploration of social media and emergent technology that details the inner workings of modern propagandaUntil recently, propaganda was a top-down, elite-only system of communication control used largely by state actors. Today, as Samuel Woolley argues, social media has democratized propaganda, allowing nearly anyone to launch a fairly sophisticated, computationally enhanced, propaganda campaign. Woolley shows how social media, with its anonymity and cap...

Fake news posts and Twitter trolls were just the beginning. What will happen when misinformation moves from our social media feeds into our everyday lives?Online disinformation stormed our political process in 2016 and has only worsened since. Yet as Samuel Woolley shows in this urgent book, it may pale in comparison to what's to come: humanlike automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality, an...

Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam. Ca...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind and current CEO of Microsoft AI“A fascinating, well-written, and important book.”—Yuval Noah Harari**“Essential reading.”—Daniel Kahneman“My favorite book on AI.”...

#1 New York Times Bestseller • More than 10 million Copies SoldIn this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the crap to show us how to stop trying to be ""positive"" all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people.For decades, we’ve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. ""F**k positivity,"" Mark Manson says. ""Let’s be honest, shit is f**...

"The revolution will be Twittered!" declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Wes...

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...

A fully updated paperback edition that includes coverage of the key developments of the past two years, including the political controversies that swirled around Facebook with increasing intensity in the Trump era. If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive s...

“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...

How we can evade, protest, and sabotage today's pervasive digital surveillance by deploying more data, not less—and why we should.With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today's pervasive digital surveillance—the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting t...