WikiLeaks (/ˈwɪkiliːks/) is an international non-profit organisation that publishes news leaks[3] and classified media provided by anonymous sources.[4] Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organisation Sunshine Press,[5] stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents in its first 10 years.[6] Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder and director.[7] Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief.[8][9] The group has released a number of prominent document caches. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war,[10] a report about a corruption investigation in Kenya,[11][12] and an operating procedures manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.[13][14] In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi Reuters journalists were among several civilians killed. Other releases in 2010 included the Afghan War Diary and the "Iraq War Logs". The latter release allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in "significant" attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force – Iraq, including about 15,000 that had not been previously published.[15][16] In 2010, WikiLeaks also released classified diplomatic cables that had been sent to the US State Department. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[17] In 2012, WikiLeaks released the "Syria Files," over two million emails sent by Syrian politicians, corporations and government ministries.[18][19] In 2015, WikiLeaks published Saudi Arabian diplomatic cables,[20][21] documents detailing spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on successive French presidents,[22][23] and the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a controversial international trade agreement which had been negotiated in secret. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, showing that the party's national committee favoured Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries, leading to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC.[26] These releases caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign, and have been attributed as a potential contributing factor to her loss in the general election against Donald Trump.[27] The U.S. intelligence community expressed "high confidence" that the leaked emails had been hacked by Russia and supplied to WikiLeaks. (cf Russian Interference In The 2016 Election) WikiLeaks said that the source of the documents was not Russia or any other state.[28] During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks (more)

Zeynep Tufekci: Why Aren't We Wearing Better COVID-19 Masks? We’d hoped that by 2021 supply chains would have ramped up enough to ensure that everyone had better masks. Cloth masks, especially homemade ones, were supposed to be a stop-gap measure. Why are so many of us still wearing them? (more)

Society Design of Karl Marx. (more)

Renee DiResta - Opinion Here’s how Russia will attack the 2020 election. We’re still not ready. In 1983, an anonymous letter from an author claiming to be an American scientist appeared in an Indian newspaper, asserting that the HIV virus raging across the world was a bioweapon released by the United States. Over the next several years, similar claims appeared in leftist and alternative newspapers around the world and ended up becoming widely believed among those predisposed to distrust the Reagan administration. As late as 2005, a study showed that 27 percent of African Americans still believed that HIV was created in a government lab. We now know that these claims were part of a massive Soviet disinformation campaign. (more)

Vanessa Molter, Renee DiResta, and Alex Stamos - Opinion | As Chinese propaganda on covid-19 grows, U.S. social media must act. According to official infection figures, China’s battle with the novel coronavirus appears to be slowing, though there is skepticism on the reliability of those numbers. But the struggle to control the global narrative is just beginning. A key battlefield in that campaign will be the platforms operated by America’s still-dominant Internet companies. (more)

The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the operation—code named Project Lakhta—was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections (more)

for the Presidential Election (more)

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters. The theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by someone using the name Q, who was presumably an American individual initially, but probably later became a group of people, claiming to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon (more)

a technique/practice of Attention Management for handling the Universal Inbox (more)

see Personalization

David Schmaltz connects the Pseudo-Science of Nutritionism (referring to Michael Pollan's new book) to Management Science and its pernicious BigWorld effects. parts 2 3 4 . (more)

She Warned of ‘Peer-to-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened. Renee DiResta watched on her laptop screen as lawyers representing Facebook, Google and Twitter spoke at congressional hearings that focused on the role social media played in a Russian disinformation campaign ahead of the 2016 election. (Presidential Candidates 2016) (more)

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), is a program within the transnational American non-profit educational organization Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims."[1] Paul Kurtz proposed the establishment of CSICOP in 1976 as an independent non-profit organization (before merging with CFI as one of its programs in 2015[2]), to counter what he regarded as an uncritical acceptance of, and support for, paranormal claims by both the media and society in general.[3] Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSI's fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, psychologists, educators and authors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Skeptical_Inquiry (more)

Timothy Allen Caulfield (born 1963) is a Canadian professor of law at the University of Alberta,[1] the research director of its Health Law Institute,[2][3] and current Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy.[4][5][6] He specializes in legal, policy and ethical issues in medical research and its commercialization. In addition to professional publications, he is the author of several books aimed at the general reader, the host of a television documentary series debunking pseudoscientific (pseudoscience) myths and is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Caulfield

Mike Caulfield: Misinformation Is a Norovirus and the Web Is a Cruise Ship (more)

Chris Dixon: The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle. People who’ve been in crypto for a long time view the space as evolving in cycles, alternating between periods of high activity and “crypto winters.” There have been three cycles so far. The first peaked in 2011, the second in 2013, and the third in 2017 (more)

Threatcast 2020: Our New Brainstorming Game To Explore Disinformation In The 2020 Election. As you may recall, a few years back, I helped design and run a large group election simulation game called “Machine Learning President.” The game explored what odd or surprising coalitions might form around a 2020 election, as well as the impact of both money and technology on the races. (more)

Crafting projects, Islam, and Russian propaganda – Data for Democracy. We spent last Friday night combing through Jonathan Albright’s dataset of posts from five Russian-linked Facebook pages, trying to track down related Instagram accounts. (more)

Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World. Contextual advertising had supported the print and broadcast media for decades, so this was the logical next step. What could possibly go wrong? (more)

Gloria Origgi: Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now. There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. (more)