In a long post titled ‘You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to Tango”, Nick Clegg laid out this week his vision for the future of algorithmic ranking. …

What does misinformation have in common with climate change, Covid-19 or car accidents? They are all very real risks that humans consistently underestimate. In a recent episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain titled ‘Afraid of the wrong things’, editor Shankar Vedantam talked with psychologist Paul Slovic to explore the root causes…

Our feeds have become over the years — especially since one of their most adept user became President of the United States — our online lives’ public avenues, parks and streets. …

After five days of anxiously hitting CMD+R on the homepage of news websites, we finally know the name of the victor: Joseph R. Biden. Celebration in the streets is how I learned the news. I didn’t quite believe the result until both The New York Times and Fox News called…

In recent weeks, the spread of Covid-19 has led to the largest restrictions to physical liberties in a generation. In Hungary, the government passed a law that allows Viktor Orban to pass reforms on any topic without consulting Parliament. In the UK, gatherings of more than two people have been…

In his book published in June 2019, David Kaye argues that democracies in the West- for example Germany and France- are delegating the regulation of online speech to tech platforms, without oversight. In his mind, such precedents can encourage less democratic governments in the Global South to pass their own…

For someone who thinks about misinformation daily, the similarities between the spread of misinformation and the spread of the Coronavirus have been hard to ignore. In some ways that is unsurprising since some of the defensive measures tech platforms have built to counter misinformation were inspired by the study of…

Who decides which claims made on social media can be fact checked? Where does free expression end and harmful lies start? Is social media fundamentally compatible with free and fair elections? When studying the field of tech and democracy, it is never long before one encounters a philosophical dilemma. This…

When I joined Google in 2013, the company was regularly ranked number one employer globally and received millions of applications every year. Seven years and countless controversies later, attitudes towards Big Tech have drastically changed, a backlash which The Guardian and then more news outlets have referred to as “Techlash”. …