Category: social media

How to stop the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’ from warping democracy

     

How to distinguish fact from fiction in an age where misinformation is dangerously pandemic? The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss asks, drawing on lessons from the nonprofit News Literacy Project and the educational… Read more »

Moscow in Movement: Record protests present new challenge to Putin’s dominance

     

An estimated fifty thousand people in Moscow (Moscow Times/CFR) protested the barring of independent candidates from the ballot in an upcoming local election in what was one of the country’s… Read more »

Information Disorder: disinformation, democracy and post-truth politics

     

  The European Union will spend €1.1 million on training diplomats to monitor fake news, amid growing alarm on Russian propaganda, EUobserver reports: The funds, as well as related measures… Read more »

Ways to neutralize Russia’s disinformation (at least partially)

     

  YouTube videos of police beatings on American streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on… Read more »

Scourge of Russian disinformation aims to undermine democracy

     

Western observers were quick to treat Valery Gerasimov’s articulation of the science of war as the blueprint for a future Russian hybrid attack against the west. From the proliferation of… Read more »

Liu Xiaobo ‘will be proven right in the end’: death exposes Western kowtowing to China

     

It came as little surprise when, after the death of the dissident Liu Xiaobo last week, China’s vast army of censors kicked into overdrive as they scrubbed away the outpouring of… Read more »

Ethiopia crackdown highlights ‘downside of authoritarian development’

     

  Ethiopia‘s government has declared a six-month state of emergency in the face of an unprecedented wave of violent protests, the BBC reports: Activists in the country’s Oromia region has… Read more »

Zimbabwe pastor shows ‘Power in our Pockets’

     

When he posted a protest video on Facebook, wrapping himself in the national flag, the Rev. Evan Mawarire (below, right) became one of Zimbabwe’s first social media stars, the embodiment… Read more »

Iranian activists use social media to demand justice, accountability

     

The public outcry over the rape and murder of six-year-old Afghan refugee Setayesh Ghoreishi (left) demonstrates how social media has allowed Iran’s civil society to hold accountable hardliners in the… Read more »