As Facebook sought to recover from its disastrous 2016 election season, company officials debated ways to curb distortions and disinformation on the platform. One of the most potentially powerful… Read more »
Do new faces in politics in Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Slovakia mean real change, New Eastern Europe asks. ‘Is this part of a wider trend that indicates deeper social transformation’,… Read more »
Did Central Europe’s democratic forces defeat one form of authoritarianism, but fail to anticipate other threats to freedom? The post-Cold War disruption in job markets, economic inequities, and disputes over… Read more »
“Despite the continued quantitative increase in the world’s democracies, the quality of the world’s democracies is eroding,” the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) concludes in its… Read more »
Protests broke out in Prague Saturday on the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution after courts confirmed that Prime Minister Andrej Babis collaborated with the StB, the Communist era secret… Read more »
The collapse of communism in Europe 30 years ago ended a broader social-democratic compact. Does the failure to refashion that compact explain varying degrees of democratic recession and resilience? NATO… Read more »
Authoritarians are resurgent because of the failure to create a new global system of democratic values, said former Solidarnosc leader and Polish president Lech Walesa. “Polish democracy in practical terms… Read more »
Russia’s human rights situation is getting worse with each passing year, says Tatanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch. The regime routinely “messes up” because it has destroyed almost all feedback… Read more »
A critical differentiator between traditional media and social media is how ‘targetcasting‘ is available only to a specific audience. Such secret targeting tears at the fabric of democracy, says Tom Wheeler, a… Read more »
As Soviet communism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the experience of Baltic “freedom fighters” like Vytautas Landsbergis of Lithuania and Lennart Meri of Estonia demonstrated the “almost unbridgeable… Read more »