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THREATS TO DEMOCRACY: FAKE NEWS AND FILTER BUBBLES

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THREATS TO DEMOCRACY: FAKE NEWS AND FILTER BUBBLES

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POLITICS IN A DIGITAL AGE: CLICKTIVISM AND ACTIVISM

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POLITICS IN A DIGITAL AGE: CLICKTIVISM AND ACTIVISM

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DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICES

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DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICES

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DIGITAL INEQUALITIES AND THE REPLICATION OF SOCIETAL ISSUES ONLINE

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DIGITAL INEQUALITIES AND THE REPLICATION OF SOCIETAL ISSUES ONLINE

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HAS THE INTERNET TRANSFORMED NOTIONS OF PRIVACY?

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HAS THE INTERNET TRANSFORMED NOTIONS OF PRIVACY?

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14. How 'clicktivism' has changed the face of political campaigns

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14. How 'clicktivism' has changed the face of political campaigns

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This article offers an optimistic approach in its discussion of how the internet enables activism, taking a quote from David Babbs, who says 'Where is the evidence that [online activism] doesn't work? I don't see it.'

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Since the last general election in 2010, participation in digital campaigning has grown significantly. Six million people in the UK have signed or started a digital petition on Change.org, a global website with headquarters in San Francisco, which launched in April 2012. And 3 million people in the UK are members of 38 Degrees, a web-based activist organisation founded in memory of the late campaigner and founder of the Body Shop, Anita Roddick.

The rise of "clicktivism", as it is often termed because people can support a cause at the click of a computer mouse, comes as membership of traditional campaigning organisations such as political parties and trade unions is at an all-time low. Less than 1% of the electorate - some 360,000 people - is a member of one of the three main political parties; a quarter of what party membership was 30 years ago. And only a quarter of the UK's workforce now belongs to a trade union; half of the 13 million members in 1979. Yet according to the annual British Social Attitudes survey, interest in politics is on the rise. In 1986, 29% of people said they were interested in politics either a "great deal" or "quite a lot". In 2012, this had increased to 36%. And as the 84.6% turnout at the Scottish referendum last week demonstrated, there is a huge appetite for politics.

John Coventry, Change.org's communications director, puts his organisation's rapid growth down to "stories of Davids and Goliaths - human stories of justice and fairness". However, he is insistent that its 6 million people are "users, not members". There is no manifesto and no central campaign direction, he points out: it is a campaigning tool, not a movement.

According to the organisation, of the 1,500 petitions started in the UK every month, almost 800 have achieved their desired outcome; the majority with less than 200 signatures. One such success story is that of Phill Wills and his son Josh. Two years ago Josh, 11, who has severe autism, was moved from the Royal Cornwall hospital - where he had been cared for because his behaviour had become unmanageable at home - to an assessment and treatment unit hundreds of miles away in Birmingham. NHS Kernow, a clinical commissioning group (CCG) in Cornwall, said it was not possible to provide the level of care that Josh needed near home. His parents have spent every weekend of the last two years travelling the 500-mile round trip required to see him. Josh has never met his baby sister.

In March, following advice from charity Mencap, Josh's father launched a petition on Change.org. Within two days, 10,0000 people had signed up and the family was on the phone to Nory Menneer, the clinical lead and programme manager for people with learning disabilities at the CCG. Three days later Wills was in a meeting with the CCG's chief executive, who appointed Menneer as a point of liaison for the family and commissioned a person-centred plan for Josh. Wills says Menneer has since become "a rock" for the family. Kernow CCG has since negotiated a care package with a local provider. The family has met care minister Norman Lamb and believes that Josh will be home in the new year.

Wills says he has never been interested in politics or campaigning, but he now wants to launch a campaign to help other families in his position. "I was afraid to speak out," he says. "I don't like to rock the boat - but the petition changed everything within a week. I'd do anything to stop other families going through the same experience."

Like Change.org, 38 Degrees has also had some notable victories. One of its big successes early on was the campaign to help stop England's publicly owned forests and woodland from being privatised. In 2011, half a million people put their name to its petition forcing the then environment secretary Caroline Spelman to do a U-turn.

"I guess you might call that a eureka moment," says 38 Degrees chief executive David Babbs. "I was praised as a strategic genius - but it was our members who had spotted the opportunity, not me. I just followed organisational principles. In fact, I was baffled when I saw they were champing at the bit to run a campaign on forests - I live in inner London and hadn't been in a forest in quite a while. It just goes to show that many heads are better than one."

"One of the weird things about being CEO of 38 Degrees is that I don't actually get to decide about what we campaign on," he adds. In contrast to Change.org, Babbs can't stop talking about members. The organisation is now 100% funded by its members. The average donation is £11. "There is a very strong line of accountability between us and our members. If we stop running the campaigns they ask us to, they stop donating and we can't pay our wages, " says Babbs, who has been obsessed with people power since marching against the Iraq war.

But the effectiveness of "clicktivism", which also includes people supporting charities by liking them on Facebook, has been criticised by politicians and charity ambassadors. MPs complain that it is not possible to deal with the "spam" - the volume of unsolicited phone calls and emails they receive. Some, such as Julian Lewis Conservative MP, for New Forest East, have closed their email accounts altogether and insist that voters write to them. And Danielle de Niese, a leading opera singer and ambassador for the International Rescue Committee has accused Facebook users of failing to grasp how much more they could do to help than by just passive clicking.

"Most politicians are suspicious of 38 Degrees," says Babbs. "Each of the three main parties have accused us of being in the back pocket of the others. They can't believe our members haven't been put up to it from someone inside the self-absorbed Westminster bubble - they think we are muscling in on their territory. Political parties are about central control and toeing the party line; we are about people making their own mind up and persistently knocking on the door of those in power."

He rejects the clicktivism label and denies that online activism can act as a displacement activity for deeper engagement. "Where is the evidence that it [online activism] doesn't work?"I don't see it. Go and take a walk in a forest that would have been sold off.

That critique is dangerously elitist - as if you have to earn your stripes as an activist. If you believe in democracy, surely the easier it is to participate in the better. That's the power of the internet."

Interestingly, one change that members are asking for is for the movement to do more campaigning offline. As part of its recent campaign against the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership, 38 Degrees experimented with a mapping tool to help interested members find others close by. Some 600 local groups were formed. Volunteers organised events - mostly public stalls - and went out in the streets leafleting, asking people to sign petitions and knocking on doors. Others spoke to the local press.

But doesn't this sound suspiciously like the actions of a political party? "I wouldn't know - I've never been part of one," Babbs replies. "We don't have a manifesto." 38 Degrees does, however, have its values painted on the ceiling of its office: democracy, peace, human rights, community, fairness, equality and sustainability.

Change.org is developing "decision makers", a digital tool that allows companies or elected representatives to respond directly by email to the people who have signed a petition. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, recently used it for the first time to respond to the campaign to reunite Asyha King with his parents. The mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias, is a big fan and has already responded to 46 petitions this way.

Brie Rogers Lowery, the UK director of Change.org, says: "The internet has created the biggest citizen megaphones ever, but not the headphones to help MPs listen and engage. But decision makers is creating a two-way dialogue with the public. Unlike a press release or social media post, the message ends up in the inbox of people who have already said they care about an issue, rather than broadcasting the message in the hope that some of the right people will see it."

The Electoral Reform Society is positive about the role digital campaigning can play in participatory democracy. "There's a huge amount of energy and excitement around digital campaigning, which shows that the problem with falling trust in representative politics is not one of apathy. Traditional representative politics is failing to adapt fully to the modern world," says spokesman Will Brett. "Digital campaigning shouldn't be seen as a threat but as a challenge."

The House of Commons is exploring how it can learn from developments in the digital world to become more effective in creating laws, scrutinising government and engaging citizens. Its Commission on Digital Democracy, launched last November by the speaker, John Bercow, is taking evidence from organisations, experts and the general public and will make recommendations in January.

Peter Stokes, deputy director of operations for Kernow CCG, is in no doubt that digital campaigning had a significant impact on its decision to relocate Josh Wills. He says: "Petitions can help stimulate debate between organisations. This petition re-energised our commitment to work together to find a swift resolution."
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How 'clicktivism' has changed the face of political campaigns | Emma Howard

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Since the last general election in 2010, participation in digital campaigning has grown significantly. Six million people in the UK have signed or started a digital petition on Change.org, a global website with headquarters in San Francisco, which launched in April 2012.

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All starting with a hashtag, this movement seeks to connect young people of colour and encourage them to share in their love of art and creativity. The movement demonstrates the emancipatory nature of online social networks, which empowers those in often marginalised groups, bolstering their sense of solidarity and community.

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Art Hoe is a new online movement encouraging people of colour to embrace art, creativity and visual culture. Search for the term on Tumblr or Instagram and you will see colour-blocked outfits, doodled-on selfies, black fashion icons, queer couples, hypercolour backdrops, blaxploitation posters and super-stylised selfies. The poster children of #arthoe include Hunger Games star Amandla Stenberg, stylist Rian Phin, illustrator and musician Jenelle Lewis and the rapper Babeo Baggins.

'Ho' was claimed by black people, and over the years it's been used so loosely it's become trivialised

Mars, a 15-year-old gender-fluid artist (and contributing a photographer for the popular teen-girl website Rookie), is one of the co-founders of a movement whose name is as much cause for offence as celebration. Mars argues that this is precisely the point. "'Art hoe' or 'art ho' is a term used by me and my co-founder Jam to empower and uplift participants of colour in this movement," Mars tells me via Skype. "'Hoe' is AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and is normally a derogatory way to refer to women - especially black women - as being promiscuous, within the male gaze. Using the term in an arbitrary way diminishes its harmful origin in light of something better." Mars talks like this throughout our conversation - part academic, part teenager, shifting between the language of intersectionality and slang LOLs.

For a movement with such a supportive ethos - Mars and Jam try to reblog every submission they're tagged in - why did they choose such a potentially offensive name?

"'Hoe' is derived from whore, which was used against sex workers," explains Mars. "Then 'ho' was claimed by black people, and over the years it's been used so loosely it's become trivialised. I have a lot of friends who strip, and they've been reclaiming the word. Like, 'You're a ho.' 'OK, I am a ho'. I've never heard 'art ho' without the 'e' outside my group of friends, but now I'm thinking out loud about how controversial and contradictory it is." The term was first coined by Babeo, founder of the rap group Barf Troop - @BabeoBaggins on Twitter - and adopted by Jam and Mars to pull together images that touched on their interests: queer culture, gender, identity politics and visual art. It was, Mars says, "a space for people like us" - the proud outsiders who want to express themselves through art.

But they're not the only ones using #arthoe. "It was getting co-opted by this little group of skinny, frail, white girls," Mars explains. "To belong in their group you had to have a $100 backpack, a $20 Japanese sketchbook - shit like that. When that came to my attention, we started to fight back and identify as a movement." The white-girl version of Art Hoe was, argues Mars, offensive and exclusive in a way theirs never was. "It seemed really classist - that you had to have this certain level of wealth. Jam and I are broke. It hurt me, because I don't have an income like that - I can't go and buy an expensive DSLR. My mum bought me a camera for $70 on Amazon and that was a lot for us. "People tried to use the 'angry black person' stereotype when I called them out on it; telling me it wasn't a big deal. But it felt like a big deal. People of colour are often denied artistic ability, or the things we birth into the world are stolen by white counterparts. I never intended Art Hoe to be that way."

Some feminists will still resist the use of a sexualised term like 'ho', even if it is with the aim of reclaiming it. Does Mars identify as a feminist? "I'm a womanist. If you're a woman of colour, or a woman in the LGBT community, you have more things on your back, basically. It's not just gender for you." One of those pressures is, of course, academic success. Mars is, I remember, still at school. "When my parents separated, my mum became a single mum, and a lot of the attention shifted on to my academic achievement." Mars is keen for Art Hoe to be more than just a hashtag with a teen following. "I'm focused on making people happy," Mars explains. "To tell people of colour they can do whatever they want. Art can change the world. Art is a kind of propaganda. It triggers a reaction in people. Hopefully this can trigger something great." Later that night, I get a direct message from Mars via Instagram. It is, of course, simply this: :)
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#Arthoe: the teens who kickstarted a feminist art movement

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Art Hoe is a new online movement encouraging people of colour to embrace art, creativity and visual culture. Search for the term on Tumblr or Instagram and you will see colour-blocked outfits, doodled-on selfies, black fashion icons, queer couples, hypercolour backdrops, blaxploitation posters and super-stylised selfies.

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The word 'still' says it all... will social media ever be a place free from racism and discrimination? Or will it always express, if not reflect, the state of society? This article explores the use of race data by Facebook's advertising algorithm.

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In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment or credit.

But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company's monitoring of the rental market.

Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users, such as African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers.

All of these groups are protected under the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to publish any advertisement "with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin." Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

Every single ad was approved within minutes.

The only ad that took longer than three minutes to be approved by Facebook sought to exclude potential renters "interested in Islam, Sunni Islam and Shia Islam." It was approved after 22 minutes.

Under its own policies, Facebook should have flagged these ads, and prevented the posting of some of them. Its failure to do so revives questions about whether the company is in compliance with federal fair housing rules, as well as about its ability and commitment to police discriminatory advertising on the world's largest social network.

Facebook's advertising portal lets users choose their audiences based on specific traits, demographics and behavior profiles. Our ad for an apartment rental excluded African Americans, Asian Americans and Spanish-speaking Hispanic audiences. It was approved in under a minute.

Housing, employment and credit are the three areas in which federal law prohibits discriminatory ads. However, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - the agency responsible for enforcing fair housing laws - told us that it has closed an inquiry into Facebook's advertising policies, reducing pressure on the company to address the issue. In a 2015 newspaper column, Ben Carson, now HUD secretary, criticized "government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality" in housing.

Facebook's failure to police discriminatory rental ads flies in the face of its promises in February that it would no longer approve ads for housing, employment or credit that targeted racial categories. For advertising aimed at audiences not selected by race, Facebook said it would require housing, employment and credit advertisers to "self-certify" that their ads were compliant with anti-discrimination laws.

Based on Facebook's announcement, the ads purchased by ProPublica that were aimed at racial categories should have been rejected. The others should have prompted a screen to pop up asking for self-certification. We never encountered a self-certification screen, and none of our ads were rejected by Facebook.

"This was a failure in our enforcement and we're disappointed that we fell short of our commitments," Ami Vora, vice president of product management at Facebook, said in an emailed statement. "The rental housing ads purchased by ProPublica should have but did not trigger the extra review and certifications we put in place due to a technical failure."

Vora added that Facebook's anti-discrimination system had "successfully flagged millions of ads" in the credit, employment and housing categories and that Facebook will now begin requiring self-certification for ads in all categories that choose to exclude an audience segment. "Our systems continue to improve but we can do better," Vora said.

About 37 percent of U.S. households rented in 2016, representing a 50-year high, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. On average, renters earn about half as much as homeowners, and the percentage of families with children that rent rather than buy has increased sharply in the past decade, the study said. Minority renters have long faced pervasive housing discrimination. A 2013 study by HUD found that real estate agents show more units to whites than to African Americans, Asians and Latinos.

Facebook has long been a popular destination for rental listings, on pages hosted by real estate brokers, property owners and building managers. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it had added two large providers of rental listings to its Facebook Marketplace service. "Marketplace is a popular place for people to look for a home to rent," Facebook product manager Bowen Pan said in a press release.

Facebook warns rental advertisers in its Marketplace section that " listings that discriminate against a protected class can be reported and will be removed from Facebook."

Facebook's anti-discrimination initiative was prompted by an article published last year by ProPublica. For that story, we bought a Facebook ad targeting house hunters. We were able to use Facebook's features to block the ad from being shown to anyone with an "affinity" for African American, Asian American or Hispanic people. Our ability to narrow the audience based on race raised the question of whether such ads violated the Fair Housing Act.

After ProPublica's article appeared in the fall of 2016, HUD, then under the Obama administration, began examining Facebook's practices. Facebook then said it would build an automated system to spot ads that discriminate illegally. "We take these issues seriously," Facebook Vice President Erin Egan wrote in a blog post. "Discriminatory advertising has no place on Facebook."

Read More

Facebook's system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other "ethnic affinities" from seeing ads.

In February, Facebook announced it had built its system and was rolling it out. The press lauded the announcement: " Facebook cracks down on ads that discriminate " was the Washington Post's headline.

Facebook has been under fire for other aspects of its automated ad buying system as well. Two months ago, the company disclosed that it had discovered $100,000 worth of divisive political ads placed by "inauthentic" Russian accounts. And in September, ProPublica reported that Facebook's ad targeting system allowed buyers to reach people who identified themselves as "Jew haters" and other anti-Semitic categories. Facebook pledged to remove the offending categories and to hire thousands more employees to enforce its ad policies.

"We're adding additional layers of review where people use potentially sensitive categories for targeting," Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said during Senate testimony earlier this month.

After Stretch's public statement, we wondered whether the ability to buy discriminatory housing ads had really been addressed. So we set out to buy an advertisement with the exact same targeting parameters as the ad we bought last year. The ad promoted a fictional apartment for rent and was targeted at people living in New York, ages 18-65, who were house hunting and likely to move. We asked Facebook not to show the ad to people categorized under the "multicultural affinity" of Hispanic, African American or Asian American.

(ProPublica generally forbids impersonation in news gathering. We felt in this instance that the public interest in Facebook's ad system justified the brief posting of a fake ad for non-existent housing. We deleted each ad as soon as it was approved.)

The only changes from last year that we could identify in Facebook's ad buying system was that the category called "Ethnic Affinity" had been renamed "Multicultural Affinity" and was no longer part of "Demographics." It is now designated as part of "Behaviors."

Our ad was approved within minutes.

Left: A screenshot of ad targeting categories ProPublica submitted and Facebook approved in 2016. Right: Categories ProPublica submitted and were approved in 2017, raising questions about what the social network has done to police discriminatory ads.

Then we decided to test whether we could purchase housing ads that discriminated against other protected categories of people under the Fair Housing Act.

We placed ads that sought to exclude members of as many of the protected categories as we could find in Facebook's self-service advertising portal. In addition to those mentioned above, we bought ads that were blocked from being shown to " soccer moms," people interested in American sign language, gay men and Christians.

We also tested whether it was possible to use geography as a way to target racial groups - a practice known as redlining. We bought a housing ad that targeted ZIP codes in Brooklyn whose residents are more than 50 percent non-Hispanic white people, according to the U.S. Census bureau. By definition, that meant the ad was not shown to Facebook users living in Brooklyn neighborhoods where minorities are a majority of the residents.

Facebook drew blue lines around our target neighborhoods and told us our "audience selection is great!" It approved the ad.

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This story you've just finished was funded by our readers and we hope it inspires you to make a gift to ProPublica so that we can publish more investigations like this one that holds people in power to account and produces real change.

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Julia Angwin
Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010.

Ariana Tobin
Ariana is an engagement editor and reporter at ProPublica, where she works to cultivate communities to inform our coverage.

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Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

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In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment or credit. But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company's monitoring of the rental market.

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15. The use of social media by the #BlackLivesMatter campaign

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15. The use of social media by the #BlackLivesMatter campaign

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In the 1960s, if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you needed to get some urgent news out to the rest of the world-word of a beating or an activist's arrest or some brewing state of danger-you would likely head straight for a telephone.

From an office or a phone booth in hostile territory, you would place a call to one of the major national civil rights organizations. But you wouldn't do it by dialing a standard long-distance number. That would involve speaking first to a switchboard operator-who was bound to be white and who might block your call. Instead you'd dial the number for something called a Wide Area Telephone Service, or WATS, line.

Like an 800 line, you could dial a WATS number from anywhere in the region and the call would patch directly through to the business or organization that paid for the line-in this case, say, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

On the other end of the line, another civil rights worker would be ready to take down your report and all the others pouring in from phones scattered across the South. The terse, action-packed write-ups would then be compiled into mimeographed "WATS reports" mailed out to organization leaders, the media, the Justice Department, lawyers, and other friends of the movement across the country.

In other words, it took a lot of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going on in the streets of the Jim Crow South.

Any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it and tailors its goals, tactics, and rhetoric to the media of its time. On the afternoon of Sunday, March 7, 1965, when voting-rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, were run down by policemen at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the WATS lines were in heavy use. ("Here come the white hoodlums," an activist said from a corner pay phone at 3:25 pm.) But the technology that was most important to the movement's larger aims was not in activists' hands at all: It was in a set of film canisters being ferried past police blockades on Highway 80 by an ABC News TV crew, racing for the Montgomery airport and heading to New York for an evening broadcast. That night, 48 million Americans would watch the scene in their living rooms, and a few days later Martin Luther King Jr. would lay bare the movement's core media strategy. "We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners," he said. "We're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television."

"The tools that we have to organize and to resist are fundamentally different than anything that's existed before in black struggle."

"It was a rare admission," writes media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy. "King and other civil rights organizers seldom acknowledged their own self-conscious use of the mass media." Today's African-American civil rights organizers, by contrast, talk about the tools of mass communication all the time-because their media strategy sessions are largely open to everyone on the Internet.

If you're a civil rights activist in 2015 and you need to get some news out, your first move is to choose a platform. If you want to post a video of a protest or a violent arrest, you put it up on Vine, Instagram, or Periscope. If you want to avoid trolls or snooping authorities and you need to coordinate some kind of action, you might chat privately with other activists on GroupMe. If you want to rapidly mobilize a bunch of people you know and you don't want the whole world clued in, you use SMS or WhatsApp. If you want to mobilize a ton of people you might not know and you do want the whole world to talk about it: Twitter.

And if, God forbid, you find yourself standing in front of the next Michael Brown or Walter Scott, and you know the nation's attention needs to swerve hard to your town, your best bet might be to send a direct message to someone like DeRay Mckesson, one of a handful of activists who sit at the apex of social networks that now run hundreds of thousands strong. "The thing about King or Ella Baker is that they could not just wake up and sit at the breakfast table and talk to a million people," says Mckesson, a former school district administrator who has become one of the most visible faces of the movement. "The tools that we have to organize and to resist are fundamentally different than anything that's existed before in black struggle."

#BlackLivesMatter became a hashtag in the summer of 2013, when an Oakland, California, labor organizer named Alicia Garza responded on her Facebook page to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who gunned down Trayvon Martin. Since then it has become the banner under which dozens of disparate organizations, new and old, and millions of individuals, loosely and tightly related, press for change.

Any phenomenon that seizes the nation's attention this much needs a name-headline writers make sure of that. But it is hard to talk about the national Black Lives Matter movement without imparting a false sense of institutional coherence to it. Of course, the civil rights movement of the '60s was itself far from monolithic, but there aren't really analogues to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in today's activist scene. "It's decentralized but coordinated," says Maurice Mitchell, an organizer with a group called Blackbird. "There are no top-down mandates."

You could look at it this way: The movement of the '60s needed a big institutional structure to make things work-in part because of the limitations of the tech at the time. Now that kind of structure has come to seem vestigial. After Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, and the city became a lightning rod for activism, Mckesson says he had a kind of epiphany about movement-building: "We didn't need institutions to do it," he says. Social media could serve as a source of live, raw information. It could summon people to the streets and coordinate their movements in real time. And it could swiftly push back against spurious media narratives with the force of a few thousand retweets.

Of course, some level of institution-building is still crucial, as the movement has realized. And there are downsides to the media environment that today's activists have adapted to. Despite its success in making videos of police violence go viral, social media itself has become another arena where black people are abused. Harassment, threats, and insults are basic hazards of online activism today, but they are especially pervasive for anyone speaking on the touchy subject of race in America. Mckesson, for one, says he has blocked more than 15,000 people from interacting with him on Twitter. He retweets some of the haters. It's occasionally hard to read. (There's a stale, conventional wisdom that says overt racism is largely a thing of the past in America. Whoever says this clearly has not spent much time on Twitter. God help them if they start reading comments on YouTube.)

This might seem like an opportunity: Drawing hate out into the light was, after all, a signature tactic of the civil rights movement. Televised footage of well-dressed white people heckling black children as they walked to school were powerful because they were so public, says Lisa Nakamura, a professor of media and race at the University of Michigan. "But when that happens on Twitter, it's really, really private." Any given tweet might be public, but online threats are disembodied and anonymous. Bystanders don't seem to take them as seriously. Plus, the full experience of receiving a thousand threats may only really be felt by the recipient. Even in the panopticon of social media, mobs aren't all that visible.

And of course, social media is also profoundly susceptible to surveillance. We know now that many leaders of Black Lives Matter have been monitored by federal law enforcement agencies. That has prompted many to start seeking out more secure channels; in nearly all my conversations with activists about how they use different platforms, there was a point when they told me they didn't want to say any more for security reasons.

Still, this movement, as diffuse and protean as it may seem, has mounted some of the most potent civil rights activism since the '60s. It helped secure the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol. It helped pressure the federal government to investigate police practices in Ferguson and Baltimore. It has successfully pushed Democratic presidential contenders to come forward with policy proposals on the issues that specifically concern black people in America. And an offshoot of the movement, a project called Campaign Zero that was organized in part by Mckesson, has put forward a bunch of specific policy proposals to uproot police violence. A huge reason for all this success is that, perhaps more than any other modern American protest movement, they've figured out how to marshal today's tools.

The movement has also had another profound but less concrete effect: I believe that Black Lives Matter has changed the visceral experience of being black in America. I see this in the way it has become a community reflex to record interactions with police-a habit that is empowering, even as it highlights black vulnerability. I see it in the rise of a new group of black public intellectuals and in the beginnings of a new political language. And I see it in my own experience.

I grew up in Tyler, Texas, a small city in the eastern part of the state, in the 2000s. I attended the local Catholic high school-not the local public school named after Robert E. Lee, where the majority of the student body was nonwhite. No one called me a nigger, though white friends would sometimes use the slur to refer to other black people; in the next breath, they'd assure me I was different. Despite constantly feeling like I was a token, or that I had to tiptoe around white sensitivities, I couldn't have told you what ailed me. I wasn't politically conscious. I didn't have the language to speak about microaggressions, aggression-aggressions, or structural prejudice. I just endured a thing I wasn't totally sure I was enduring.

But I can still remember the fluorescent lighting of my high school's hallways and the pervasive sense that something was deeply wrong. The air itself felt toxic. I had nightmares about nuclear reactors sending clouds of poison into the sky. On those nights I'd wake up and look through my window at the moon and wonder how long it would be before I could escape.

Does it seem strange that I now associate those dreams with racism? That I see the unease I felt then as a species of profound alienation that I wasn't at all able to comprehend, because nothing I'd experienced before had prepared me to understand unthinking hate? This kind of clarity about my own experience has come with time and distance. I can't help but think that if I'd been a few years younger-if my upbringing in Tyler had overlapped with the past two years of digital and intellectual ferment in America-I would have realized far earlier that what I felt wasn't particularly unusual. "All of a sudden," Mckesson says, "you see that there's a community of people who share the same symptoms."

Of course, shared symptoms are not enough. That's why Black Lives Matter appears to be shifting into a new phase. "The movement doesn't win if there's only a small set of people who understand the solutions," Mckesson says. The movement wins when there's a broad understanding that we need a system that doesn't kill people, when a critical mass of citizens can envision what that looks like, and when concrete steps are taken to make it happen.Historians of the 1960s talk about how the media of the time helped establish a "new common sense" about race in America. I think the new common sense being established now is that racism and the struggle against it do not exist somewhere in the distant past; racial activism didn't end after King and the Black Panther Party. Technology has helped make today's struggle feel both different from and continuous with the civil rights era. All the terror and greatness we associate with that moment is right in front of our faces, as near to us as our screens.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power

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Technology has revolutionized how the civil rights movement can respond to racism and police brutality.

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41. Students in Ukraine Learn how to spot fake stories, propaganda, and hate speech

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41. Students in Ukraine Learn how to spot fake stories, propaganda, and hate speech

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The fact alone that young people are being exposed and taught about Fake News shows how integral social media is to modern societies across the world.

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About five years since the war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists began, triggering a surge in propaganda and disinformation, some students in four cities across the country are learning how to better assess what they're reading, seeing and hearing.

A report released Friday by global education organization IREX says that students in 8th and 9th grades were better able to identify false information and hate speech after teachers integrated the organization's media literacy techniques into their lessons.

Students were twice as likely to detect hate speech and 18 percent better at identifying fake news than students who missed out on those lessons, according to the report.

The Learn to Discern program, funded by the U.S. and U.K. embassies in Ukraine, was tested in 50 schools, including in the eastern city of Mariupol which saw major fighting in the war's first years.

A group of fact checkers, journalists and teachers wove the training into some 15 existing lesson plans.

Teachers didn't all include the same techniques in their programs. Between September and December 2018, students might have analyzed the implications of word choices in a Ukrainian literature class, or study doctored videos in their art classes - and they might not have even realized they were receiving media literacy training.

"We go into how a given photo could be taken from a movie and then with captions be altered to represent a certain situation or conflict," Mehri Druckman, IREX's country representative in Ukraine, tells NPR. Students were taught how to check and double check images that could have been manipulated, she adds. "Sometimes it would be as simple as understanding how to do a reverse image search, or if we have time, to go into photo forensics."

IREX says that kids who received the modified lessons performed better in all media-analysis skills, such as distinguishing facts and opinions, identifying hate speech, and noticing where information had been omitted.

Girls gained more knowledge than boys. "The girls did better at separating fact from opinions, on news media knowledge and on analysis skills," says Druckman. "Why is that? We're trying to understand that more deeply ourselves."

IREX plans to do further research to try to understand the better performance by girls.

One open-ended survey question, posed to students as the semester concluded, inspired teachers, she said. It asked kids to describe the most memorable lesson of their semester and why. Students most often referred to lessons that had been injected with media literacy education.

Still, IREX's head of Media and Information Literacy Initiatives Katya Vogt says, "We are ten years too late."

The organization began Ukraine's Learn to Discern program in 2015, after Russia's annexation of Crimea. Staff initially started teaching adults across the country how to detect disinformation and propaganda before turning to younger generations.

Druckman says that by 2021, the program will be used in approximately 650 schools across Ukraine.

"Often places that are the most vulnerable [to disinformation] are where large social divisions are being actively exploited by bad actors," Mike Caulfield, who is leading a national digital literacy initiative for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, tells NPR. That makes the training "more politically delicate."

Caulfield is not connected with the IREX initiative.

He says there is a risk that "folk knowledge about truth and authority on the Internet" gets passed down to younger generations. In his own experience, students struggle the most with assessing media, not when they lack a strategy, but when they apply bad strategies they've been taught.

As soon as teachers introduce digital tools to students in the classroom, they should begin teaching some digital strategies, Caulfield says. But there is a dearth of organizations coordinating such efforts in the United States, he adds.

More money should be spent on training teachers to integrate media and web literacy in their lessons, Caulfield says.

"The takeaway is, let's have a real national discussion about how to do this right in the United States."

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Students In Ukraine Learn How To Spot Fake Stories, Propaganda And Hate Speech

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About five years since the war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists began, triggering a surge in propaganda and disinformation, some students in four cities across the country are learning how to better assess what they're reading, seeing and hearing.

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Similarly to the #ArtHoe movement, Black Twitter is an example of a space, which has developed online, where black people connect and share in their sense of culture and identity. It's interesting to compare this article to my friend Todun's thoughts (see above).

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There is power in numbers. No internet subsection displayed this fact better than Black Twitter, which touched nearly every sphere of American culture and politics this decade.

In the 2010s Black Twitter become a cultural force to be reckoned with.It promoted Black Lives Matter and raised awareness around the tragic deaths of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner through hashtags such as #SayHerName and #ICantBreathe. Its anger over Kevin Hart's homophobic tweets pressured him to drop out as a host for the 2018 Oscars ceremony. It pressured Pepsi to retract and apologize for a Kendall Jenner-fronted commercial accused of co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement. It created hundreds of delightfully viral moments such as "eyebrows on fleek".And it helped a wild 180-tweet thread - in which a stripper recounts an adventure-filled road trip to Florida - become an A24-produced, feature-length film.

"I would absolutely say this decade wouldn't be the same without Black Twitter," says the UVA professor Meredith D Clark, who is currently writing a book on the internet subsection. "But I also think it was a continuation of our larger relationship with black American communities. Black culture has been actively mined for hundreds of years for influences on mainstream American culture."

Bizzle Osikoya (@bizzleosikoya)
Caption This pic.twitter.com/HtPDWwqVWG

The thrill and intrigue of scrolling through Black Twitter often crossed cultural and racial lines. "At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by the Internet, I cannot keep quiet about my obsession with Late Night Black People Twitter, an obsession I know some of you other white people share, because it is awesome," Choire Sicha wrote for The Awl in 2010, before "Black Twitter" had become the accepted moniker.
He pretended to be a black woman online and became famous - then his life unraveled
Defining Black Twitter continues to be difficult. The meaning is slightly amorphous, but it refers to a particular collective of black identities and voices on Twitter taking part in collective, culturally specific jokes and dialogues that affect the community - from discussing colorism to dishing out jokes about common "black mom" phrases.

The Georgia Tech professor André Brock says Black Twitter allowed mainstream, white culture an unprecedented glimpse at how black people talk and joke among each other."It was one of the first spaces that white people could see how creative black people are with our discourse, and how we used a technology that wasn't originally designed for us."

Free Atlas (@Hampton)
When Popeyes made that Chicken Sandwich pic.twitter.com/9GaTWitcDg

One of the first viral Black Twitter moments of the decade came in response to the documentary Kony 2012, a 30-minute YouTube film that looked at the kidnappings of Ugandan children by a guerrilla group and efforts to find them. The video received over 120m views in only five days and redefined what "virality" meant, with donations towards the cause quickly surging.

However, members of Black Twitter were some of the first to criticize Invisible Children, the charity behind the film, for its sources of funding and misleading reporting. The critiques were surprisingly nuanced for a social media space, some citing the call for donations as another incident of "slacktivism", a term used for low-scale, "feel-good" displays of charity. Invisible Children's campaign quickly faded in popularity, and the charity later struggled to survive after its viral moment.

This would be the power of Black Twitter over the course of the decade - a diligent, occasionally merciless watchdog for problematic behavior.

Calling out cultural appropriation was a chief focus of the space in the early 2010s. Celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kendall Jenner and Miley Cyrus were critiqued (and roasted) for adopting traditionally black hairstyles and/or dances. Its ability to prevent major business deals would also be flexed. In 2013, Black Twitter's outrage was largely responsible for corporations ending their affiliations with chef Paula Deen after she admitted to using the N-word. Later, a juror from the 2013 George Zimmerman trial lost out on a major book deal when Black Twitter voiced disapproval. Users were able to directly put pressure on the juror's literary agent, Sharlene Martin. "You know that the stains from blood money don't wash off, right?" one user wrote at the time.

timanni (@positiviTeee)
How the world portrays Jesus vs how the Bible describes him. #MetGala pic.twitter.com/AOSrHDIaY8

Here are just some of the celebrities and companies Black Twitter "cancelled" this decade: Roseanne, Pepsi, Meghan McCain, Gucci, Don Lemon, Iggy Azalea, Karamo Brown, Jeffree Star, Jussie Smollett, Kevin Hart, Kanye West, TI, Jay-Z, the NFL, Gina Rodriguez, Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Brown, Matt Damon.

Brock says the litany of "cancellations" that occurred on Black Twitter this decade were not simply rooted in anger and outrage, as media outlets frequently depicted them. They were moments of catharsis. "People who have been affronted or hurt or wounded finally had a voice to make gatekeepers take notice," he says.

Clark says the subsection is not a monolith, but actually composed of numerous, small personal communities and networks, which then band together "when an incendiary event or something that triggers discussion occurs".

Clark argues the term Black Twitter often led to racial biases (ie, depictions of the group as an "angry mob") during media coverage. "Whenever you put 'black' in front of anything, people think it's deviant from what's mainstream. I think that led to a lot of confusion for folks who were outside of Black Twitter. The term doesn't necessarily signal the cultural richness we found within the space."

Black Twitter has its roots in the low-tech forums and blogs of the early aughts.

Brock says, before 2010, black-centric blogs would try to pressure mainstream media into covering underreported topics, like 2006's Jena Six case (which saw activists protesting against the excessive charges six black boys faced for beating a white classmate). Lipstick Alley, BlackPlanet, OkayPlayer, Crunk and Disorderly - these sites were digital watering holes for early black internet users. However, their presence was nowhere near the scale or visibility of Black Twitter.

"Blogs couldn't talk back to media in real time the same way Twitter can," Brock says. "That ability to talk back to corporations and media, and for the talk back to be visible is what distinguishes Black Twitter from previous incidents of black communities online."

During the 2010s, Black Twitter would prevent the tragic deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and too many others from being glossed over by news outlets. It proved the power of a hashtag through well-crafted digital campaigns. One study found that the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was used over 1.7m times in the three weeks following a grand jury's decision not to indict the cop who killed Michael Brown.

However, there were downsides to the immense attention.

April Reign, who started the popular #OscarsSoWhite campaign, says media companies often surveilled the space, looking for ways to report on the black community without actually engaging with it. " It's hard when you see someone who is having a profound discussion about a particular issue, and a media outlet will extract all these tweets and put a sentence at the end and call it an article," she says. "That person got paid for 'writing the story' and the media outlet got paid through advertising dollars for someone else's tweets. The person who wrote the tweets never sees a dime."

This would be a frequent problem throughout the decade, brands adopting popular phrases and jokes born in the space for advertisements. At 16, Kayla Newman had her "eyebrows on fleek" saying popularized through a recirculated Vine video and became slang for "flawless" and "perfection". Kayla's unique saying was used by brands like Domino's, Ihop and Denny's in advertising - without her ever seeing a dime.

"I gave the world a word," Kayla Newman told the writer Doreen St Felix in 2015. "I can't explain the feeling. At the moment I haven't gotten any endorsements or received any payment. I feel that I should be compensated. But I also feel that good things happen to those who wait."

There would be numerous occasions where Black Twitter's lexicon provided new terms for popular culture: "thot", "bae", "cuffing season", "throwing shade", "lit", "turnt up". The exchanges were fun (even if they were often misused by white people), until companies began using the slang to sell T-shirts and other miscellaneous products online.

Of course, there were also major winners from the space. For the lucky, success on Black Twitter could be monetized. Lil Nas X - who broke boundaries as an out gay, black man in rap and country - mastered the arts of memes, retweets and follows to make his song Old Town Road an unexpected viral hit. Lil Nas X was allegedly able to go from running a Nicki Minaj stan account, under the handle @NasMaraj, to Grammy-nominated artist. (Lil Nas X has not confirmed running @NasMaraj, despite reporting, urls and time stamps strongly suggesting he did.)

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Lil Nas X at the 47th annual American Music Awards, in Los Angeles, 24 November 2019. Photograph: Stewart Cook/REX/Shutterstock

Meanwhile, the social media accounts of fast-food chains like Popeyes and Wendy's connected with audiences - and sold product - through lifting phrases and slang from black and gay communities on Twitter.

Elsewhere, the comedian Shiggy became an internet star when he danced to Drake's In My Feelings record, creating the dance challenge of 2018 and later appearing in the rapper's video for the track.

As 2019 comes to an end, the power of Black Twitter is being demonstrated through the 2020 presidential campaigns. Joe Biden's story about CornPop, a racially charged pool confrontation in the 60s, provided the basis for numerous memes. Kamala Harris's virality on Black Twitter was so strong that Maya Rudolph, while impersonating Harris on SNL, joked "Mama needs a GIF!" to boost her poll numbers. And conversations about reparations - once thought of as a far-fetched, in-group topic - were held by major candidates.

Ira Madison III (@ira)
Kamala Harris seems like she'd suggest splitting up in a haunted house
July 29, 2019

Brock believes the outsized influence and visibility of Black Twitter will continue through the 2020s. "As much as people complain about Twitter, it has a mindshare wildly out of proportion with its user base," he explains. "I don't see a service that offers that same level of access, distribution and open conversation on the horizon."
Topics

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Ten years of Black Twitter: a merciless watchdog for problematic behavior

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There is power in numbers. No internet subsection displayed this fact better than Black Twitter, which touched nearly every sphere of American culture and politics this decade. In the 2010s Black Twitter become a cultural force to be reckoned with.It promoted Black Lives Matter and raised awareness around the tragic deaths of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner through hashtags such as #SayHerName and #ICantBreathe.

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How Social Media Shapes Identity | Ulrike Schultze | TEDxSMU

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Describes itself as 'a space to feature inspiring and badass South Asian women around the world'.

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A brown media empire (in progress) here to splash content fusing South Asian culture and pop-culture, relatable memes and intersectional feminism across your feed.

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2. My friends talking about their digital identities

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2. My friends talking about their digital identities

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Being products of the 'digital age', my generation have been shaped many ways by social media. Here, my friends talk about their own experiences with this and conceptualise their Instagram accounts as the 'highlight reel' of their life, and 'like a visual CV'. This gives interesting insight in terms of updating Goffman's presentation of self theory to the digital age.

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39. My friends talking about their understandings of fake news and how the Internet has changed democracy

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39. My friends talking about their understandings of fake news and how the Internet has changed democracy

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Having filmed this before the news of Caroline Flack's death, I was interested to return to it after this news. My friends suggest that a lot of people do use social media platforms for news, and therefore confirm the potential harm of fake news and sensationalist news stories. They also touch on the prominence of filter bubbles with the suggestion that 'I craft my feed to mimic my own views and show exactly what I want to see'.

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48. Does 5G Have the Potential to Make the Digital Divide Worse?

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48. Does 5G Have the Potential to Make the Digital Divide Worse?

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Following Boris Johnson's approval of 5G in the UK, it is interesting to look at the problems associated with such fast technological development, and the way it can leave people behind. This issue also unveils deeper ones about national security and the possibility of hacking, thereby showing intersectionality between two key dangers associated with the internet.

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In the coming years, 5G wireless Internet stands poised to remake the online world, its unprecedented speed enabling advances in everything from public safety to virtual reality. Within this progress, however, there exists another near-certainty - segments of the population will be left out of the advantages.

Indeed, as small-cell networks enable blazing-fast Internet across the country, stakeholders in the government technology and innovation space say 5G will also exacerbate digital inequities. Angela Siefer, the executive director of National Digital Inclusion Alliance, said it's important to understand here that the digital divide - meaning the split between individuals benefiting from new tech and those struggling in its wake - is made up of many smaller divides.

"I do think it's going to worsen the digital divide," Siefer said. "5G is yet another divide, and it adds to existing problems."

There are three central problems at the heart of the digital divide: lacking Internet connection, lacking technological devices and lacking the skills to use new technology in a meaningful way. A lack of connection is an ongoing problem in many communities, especially those that are underserved - both in cities and rural areas - where it is not economically advantageous for telecom companies to build infrastructure or offer broadband at affordable rates.

Siefer said there is nothing about 5G that will make it a better option for communities already lacking affordable access to fast Internet. In addition, there is a distinct possibility that in order to access mobile 5G Internet, users will need a newer and more expensive device built for the increased speeds.

This all speaks to a larger ongoing issue in the country, which is that government and society at times still views broadband as a commodity, rather than a utility needed to foster equitable outcomes in education, healthcare, employment and other vital segments of daily life.

"It's a service that is sold," Siefer said. "It's not a utility, it's not regulated like a utility and those companies that provide it are beholden to their short shareholders."

Dana Floberg, a policy manager with the media and technology equity advocacy group Free Press, agreed, noting there is a narrative being sold to the public that the country is locked in a must-win, high-stakes race to deploy 5G faster than other countries such as China.

Validity aside, that very notion only frames the issue as a technological challenge - asking how fast can we build small-cell networks - rather than an economic challenge. Ignoring the affordability component is likely to create all the same problems that have existed for years with other Internet services.

"5G is potentially an enormous technological innovation," Floberg said, "but it's not that innovative when it comes to the economics of the service. It's a step forward for technology, but it's not necessarily a step forward for affordability of competition."

With that in mind, there are actions local government can take to help turn the advent of 5G into an opportunity city hall can use to foster digital equity. In fact, there's already one major tangible success story.

San Jose, Calif., recently announced the largest digital equity fund of any local government in the nation, one that will see $24 million in grants given to digital inclusion work in that city over the next 10 years. And that fund would indirectly not have been possible without the coming of 5G.

Last decade, San Jose did a benchmarking study to compare some of its digital equity issues with those of peer cities, and city officials did not like the results, said Dolan Beckel, who previously served as San Jose's civic innovation and smart cities lead before being named chief innovation officer this month.

Officials there found that despite being the at the veritable heart of Silicon Valley, some 200,000 residents there did not have access to the Internet. Basically, the San Jose metropolitan area is home to some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world, and yet, there was a serious digital divide and poor connection quality plaguing much of the city.

In the parlance of 2020, this was a bad look, one that did not meet the desired brand image.

So, San Jose began to build inclusivity into the core of its tech and innovation work, with everyone from Mayor Sam Liccardo to the city council buying in and making equity a priority. Around the same time, 5G networks began to become a reality.

With that next-gen connection now realistic, telecom companies needed access to the city's infrastructure - to rooftops, alleyways, utility polls - to set up the physical small-cell boxes that make the service work. The largest communications companies in the world needed the city's infrastructure, and they wanted access to be fast and predictable, which were priorities the city shared.

Through discussion, what ultimately emerged was a partnership between the local government and private sector Internet providers, one that would rent the latter the real estate needed in exchange for money the city could channel back into digital equity efforts.

As a result, telecom companies are responsible for $14 million of the grant money San Jose is now offering to advance digital inclusion. The first round of grants, spanning 30 agencies and $1 million, will go before the city council in February.

Granted, San Jose was in a somewhat unique situation, because before coming to the city Beckel had worked for the same telecoms he found himself helping the city communicate with, giving him special knowledge of their technology life cycles, spending practices and other information that got the two parties on a mutually-beneficial page. But Beckel said in a recent conversation with Government Technology there are lessons from what San Jose accomplished that can benefit other cities, too.

The chief lesson is that the involved parties need to work together here, because they all want the same thing. While shareholder priorities and the needs of government can often be in opposition, in the case of 5G everyone wants faster Internet throughout the city, and they want to make that happen through a speedy and predictable installation process.

It really does benefit the city to find a way to approve installation permissions faster, especially if officials can leverage that for financial benefit. This can be achieved by finding an agreeable way to have the technology rolled out at scale, rather than on a project basis.

"It could be a pole-by-pole or rooftop-by-rooftop knife fight," Beckel said, "where 5,000 times we negotiate this, or we could negotiate the entire city."

Doing this at scale may involve building new process tools to make the whole process easier, which is something San Jose used to go from issuing five permits a year to 60 permits in a week, and they built those tools, again, through public-private partnership.

Beckel also stressed that it is important for cities to view providing affordable broadband options as vital to the service they provide residents. They need to embrace this as one of their duties, which, getting back to the points made by activists like Siefer and Floberg, is not something that all cities make a practice.

"Who knows what 5G is going to usher in, but we felt very passionate that we can't have 5G widen the digital equity gap," Beckel said.

And that passion is, of course, not limited to San Jose. New York and San Diego have deployment success stories. And Boston has long worked hard to foster competition among Internet providers in its city as a means of lowering the cost of broadband access. Boston also has a full-time staffer within city hall that works on digital equity issues, and it has a robust and growing digital equity fund to support work done in the area by community groups.

Still, Boston CIO David Elges agreed with the others that 5G exacerbating the digital divide is a concern. Elges noted that the federal action to take some of the decision-making powers from local government is a challenge, but he said the city is working hard to approach the advent of 5G with the same commitment to digital equity it brings to its other work.

Elges said key to Boston's approach is making sure that the two conversations surrounding 5G - the one about how best to spread the physical technology and the other about digital equity - are happening in tandem, that public-private partnerships are vital and that they "always make sure residents are at the center of the conversations."

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Does 5G Have the Potential to Make the Digital Divide Worse?

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In the coming years, 5G wireless Internet stands poised to remake the online world, its unprecedented speed enabling advances in everything from public safety to virtual reality. Within this progress, however, there exists another near-certainty - segments of the population will be left out of the advantages.

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I found this podcast really interesting in capturing an issue which often isn't covered by the mainstream media. It discusses a report which finds a widening gender gap, whereby women have lower access than men to the Internet, particularly in developing countries. This has significant wider implications for societal power structures across the world.

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Digital Planet - The digital gender divide - BBC Sounds

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The UN’s ITU reports a widening gap in the number of women and men who are online.

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50. The Digital Divide: Differences in Home Internet Access

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50. The Digital Divide: Differences in Home Internet Access

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NCES Blog | The Digital Divide: Differences in Home Internet Access

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The expanding use of technology affects the lives of students both inside and outside the classroom.

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20. The ease of creating online content which can spread so quickly

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20. The ease of creating online content which can spread so quickly

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It's interesting how easy it is to produce content and put it online these days - mass audiences have become so accessible. Is this worrying or positive?

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19. How has the rise of unofficial online political media content affected the way that university undergraduates view and engage with the UK’s major political parties?

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19. How has the rise of unofficial online political media content affected the way that university undergraduates view and engage with the UK’s major political parties?

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This is a group project which I took part in as part of a previous course. It uses surveys to look at how content such as memes are influencing political engagement among university students. I found it really interesting going back to this research in light of class discussions on 'prosumerism'. The central findings of my research, corroborated by a wealth of literature, suggested a correlation between the rise in unofficial media (e.g. memes) online, and the level of engagement with politics among young people.

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21. Meme warfare: how the power of mass replication has poisoned the US election.

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21. Meme warfare: how the power of mass replication has poisoned the US election.

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If you use Facebook, or Twitter, have a Wi-Fi connection, watch television or have been to an office Halloween party, you've probably encountered them: internet memes.

These shareable, sometimes pithy and often puerile units of culture have emerged as the lingua franca of the 2016 election, and have given the American people an entirely new way of articulating their beliefs. Clinton's top tweet is a meme. Trump's taco bowl became one. Through memes, Ted Cruz was "unmasked" as the Zodiac killer. Jeb Bush's limp plea for applause got him Vined into oblivion. Bernie Sanders shared a moment with a bird that blossomed into something out of Walt Disney's long-lost Marxist phase.

Memes can be fun, or they can be dumb - but as an emerging medium, they haven't provoked a lot of debate or analysis. In fact, they seem to defy scrutiny.

And slowly, before anyone can even take note, memes are ruining democracy.

Memes - from the Greek for "that which is imitated" - were once defined as being self-replicating units of culture. This included anything that could be learned, remembered and spread from one brain to another, such as the concept of god all the way to the popular Budweiser " Wazzup " catchphrase.

Through the internet, the idea moved from the conceptual sphere into the viscous reality of data and pixels, transforming it into something more traceable: a segment of media that is copied rapidly. This includes images, text, video, a combination of all three and sometimes real-world actions.

Political memes have always existed. Recall Ronald Reagan's Welfare Queen or Howard Dean's euphoric howl. And of course, more recently, we had Yes We Can.

What's novel here is an inversion of control - political memes are no longer rare flashes of uncensored personality or intensely manicured visual messages. They are now born from the swamps of the internet in real time, distributed from the bottom up. They have grown into a form of anarchic folk propaganda, ranging from tolerable epigrams to glittering hate-soaked image macros akin to a million little rogue Pravdas.

Like me, you probably have more than a few Facebook friends who make it their life's work to circulate political memes in hopes of influencing how you see the world. They are our deadbeat uncles, former co-workers and long-forgotten high school acquaintances. They are agents of nowhere, apparatchiks of nothing in particular. And through the raw power of mass replication, even their most insipid ideas are able to surface from below. By typing some text on an image and sharing it with friends, they too have a voice capable of reaching a critical mass.

The reason why it is now possible for Darryl from Accounting who hates "social justice warriors" to have the same communicative power as a television network is down to the DNA of the medium: speed and lack of gatekeepers. Memes thrive on a lack of information - the faster you can grasp the point, the higher the chance it will spread.

They also favor extreme perspectives: a recent study from Texas University found that individuals who are socially isolated and more likely to be characterized as "on the fringe" have a greater chance at creating a successful meme.

In order to grasp why this is so significant, we need to go back to the last time we were making similarly grandiose proclamations about how the internet changed everything.

ILProgressiveNetwork (@ILProgNet)
#FeelTheBird #BirdieSanders pic.twitter.com/BheazM1KSv

Picture yourself in the year 2010.

The possibility of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series is as depressingly remote as ever. Barack Obama still has that new car smell and is being hailed as the first "internet president". The world is awash in a fresh wave of tech-centric optimism and the Middle East's Twitter revolts have yet to burn to a cinder.

It was a more innocent time, when Uber and AirBnB were still known as Ubercab and Airbed and Breakfast and neither had been blamed for homelessness, unemployment and the wholesale destruction of the working class yet.

I was a staff writer at Adbusters Magazine at the time - a radical, anti-consumerist magazine based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, that bills itself as the journal of the mental environment and got famous off their 1990s "subvertisements".

The art director, a few graphic designers and myself would often spend long nights in the office drinking beer and churning out content to fill the spaces that would be traditionally used for advertisements. We created memes, but not just any memes - political ones meant to trigger paradigm shifts that would upend the prevailing logic of late capitalism, such as this one:

We called it "meme warfare", a term that was originally coined by social change activist Andrew Boyd.

"Social movements cannot live by meme alone. Yet memes are clearly powerful -both analytically and operationally," Boyd wrote in his essay Truth is a Virus: Meme warfare and the billionaires for Bush (or Gore). "A vital movement requires a hot and happening meme. Truth is a virus whose aim is to subvert the corporate mememachine with a sly guerrilla war of signs."

Much of what we produced was mischievous, maybe even poignant, much of it verged on self-satire but most of it was strictly for the LOLs; in-jokes to keep the blood pumping through those long and sedentary pizza-filled production nights. But every once in a while, the Adbusters office turned out something that proved to be profoundly effective.

For instance, the black and white image of a ballerina gracefully perched atop the charging bull of Wall Street, while masked figures charged forward from the background. "Bring tent", it read underneath, alongside the now famous hashtag that sparked the Occupy movement.

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Photograph: Adbusters

Back in 2010, the idea of using memes to political ends was still housed within a fairly slim leftist-activist corridor - it was a tool that seemed entirely of our own creation, and entirely under our control. We viewed memes as a vehicle through which activists could speak truth to power - they were molotov Jpegs to be thrown at corporate hegemony's bulletproof limousine.

Never in our most ironic dreams did we the think that the spirit of our tired, lager-fueled pisstakes would end up leading to a resurgence of white nationalism and make the prospect of a fascist America faintly realistic.

But the internet is weird like that. It takes things and twists them.

At their most basic, meme warfare presented an opportunity for individuals to seize control of the means of media production from corporate interests. It was a viral and open-source medium that would allow individuals to compete for attention against the all-consuming hydra of advertising, marketing and public relations.

This line of thinking was, in retrospect, breathtakingly naive. It assumed that the act of meme generation by a non-corporate entity would be innately good. Like many instances of the tech-centric idealism, it would unravel in spectacular fashion. It's not that anti-corporate activists were wrong about how the internet could be leveraged to change politics - it's that they were terribly right.

There isn't a straight, causal line connecting the Occupy movement and its many slogans with the neo-Nazi image macros that have been frogmarched out of 4chan to spread hate across the internet in support of Donald Trump. But they share some conceptual DNA. They are both indebted to Guy Debord and the Situationists, specifically the practice of détournement: hijacking expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself. They both also share a deep cynicism about the mainstream media. But this is where the similarities end.

When appropriated by the emerging alt-right, memes become a different weapon. They call it "meme magic" - a phenomenon which has helped vocalize and activate the more extreme wings of the Trump base and introduce white nationalism to a new generation of disaffected nerds. Meme magic is almost identical to meme warfare in that it attempts to use shareable images and ideas in an effort to engender real political change.

To date, their most effective memes have been those questioning Hillary Clinton's health status. Google image search " Zombie Hillary" or " Hillary Short Circuit " and you'll be treated to a series of imagery made up of equal parts blood and robotics.

As explained by Andrew Anglin, publisher of The Daily Stormer, a faux-contrarian neo-Nazi blog, meme magic "comprises not only an attempt, but a successful attempt, to formulate a new culture for ourselves, separate from the mainstream culture, which is largely the result of Jewish social imperialism".

In a post-truth landscape where distrust of the media has gone mainstream, nickel-and-dime propagandists like Anglin are able to resonate with an audience because they trade in the allure of dark fantasies that appeal to alienated young white men.

When the activist left decried corporate control over media, its strongest arguments leaned heavy on well-plodded reasoning. Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent instantly comes to mind, in which he painstakingly examines the New York Times' coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.

The alt-right, on the other hand, is far less interested in thoughtful critiques and far more concerned with control. This mirrors the classic left/right divide of analysis versus action. While the left is typically comfortable with endlessly analyzing what's wrong with the reality, the right seeks to impose their own reality, currently existing reality be damned.

Traditionally, mass media have provided a protective membrane between the public and overly toxic ideas. The mass effect of this delivered a relatively standardized view of politics and world events. For a number of reasons - a decades-long lowering of journalistic standards, the deterministic effect of ratings and clicks, and the generalized paranoia created by the internet, to name a few - this membrane has broken down.

The recent #draftourdaughters meme provides an instructional example.

On 16 May of this year, Hillary Clinton voiced support for legislation that would require women to register for the draft. This was largely received as a rare instance a bipartisan support for a purely symbolic gesture, aimed at promoting gender equality in the military.

For a maverick like Ted Cruz, it was a chance for him to put on his daddy hat, lambasting the bill because it would "forcibly conscript young girls into combat". To the paranoiac mind it fed into a conspiracy theory that the next world war is imminent. For the alt-right, it was a perfect opportunity to launch a " weapons-grade persuasion " campaign.

The result has been a series of widely shared fake campaign ads meant to promote the idea that Hillary wanted to send young women to their deaths in a war against Russia. The imagery had a distinctly feminist flavour, with slogans like "He died for his country. Now, it's her turn" and "Men make up 97% of combat deaths. It's time to end the combat gap."

Those orchestrating the campaign instructed their followers to "Remind folks when they say it's fake ... It's real".

Deplorable Tso Tofu (@GeneralTsoTofu)
Are you #WithHer? #DraftourDaughters pic.twitter.com/vk1EXMx560
October 28, 2016

Perhaps this is all a just a garbage mirage brought about by this election cycle's hate-bubble. But regardless of their long-term viability as a fringe pantomime, those meme creators are at the vanguard of a broad directional trend, and seem to be exploiting it with some measure of success.

Irrespective of your personal political leanings, for anyone who thinks sensible dialogue is a critical component to a functioning democracy, there is a large problem to solve here.

In his 1946 essay Politics and the English language, which scrutinized the connection between ideology and the proliferation of empty language, George Orwell said:

Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

We face a similar challenge, albeit one that is punctuated with reaction gifs. If you look at the latest iOS keyboard update, complete with a massive repository of looping imagery, we can see how intimately memes have meshed with language, and how we face a far more daunting challenge than Orwell ever did.

The tools we use to communicate are becoming counterproductive to actual communication. It's only getting easier to spread lies and respond with shrugs. The internet has become an endless theatre of virtual conflict, one in which we are all either willing or oblivious participants, and like it or not, it is on this battlefield that the nature of our reality will probably be decided.

There's no clear answer to this dilemma save for one basic fact: those who value truth desperately need to find a way to make the truth more plausible.
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Meme warfare: how the power of mass replication has poisoned the US election

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If you use Facebook, or Twitter, have a Wi-Fi connection, watch television or have been to an office Halloween party, you've probably encountered them: internet memes. These shareable, sometimes pithy and often puerile units of culture have emerged as the lingua franca of the 2016 election, and have given the American people an entirely new way of articulating their beliefs.

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1. My friend talking about 'black Twitter'

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1. My friend talking about 'black Twitter'

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As a committed user of Twitter, my friend Todun has some interesting thoughts about 'black Twitter' and how it impacts her identity. She says that the particular importance of the platform lies in its ability to give black British people a sense of community and solidarity regardless of where they are in the UK, and the way in which it enables them to start movements and discussions based on common experiences.

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46. Caroline Flack's tragic death shows that the way the media treats women must change

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46. Caroline Flack's tragic death shows that the way the media treats women must change

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The tragic death of Love Island presenter Caroline Flack at age 40 forces us to confront, and not for the first time, the cruelty and relentlessness of the tabloid media - especially when it has a woman in its crosshairs. Flack was considered easy pickings for the red tops after she was arrested for allegedly assaulting her boyfriend in December. A public downfall has been played for end-of-pier giggles, as was evident from a notorious spoof Valentine's Day card with the headline "I'll f***ing lamp you", as brought to widespread attention by The Sun newspaper. Flack's family have confirmed that she died by suicide. She had insisted her innocence to the assault accusations ahead of a trial next month. But while the court had yet to sit in judgement, elements of the media had already sentenced to her a long, slow humiliation.​

"Bedroom Bloodbath" was one of the headlines that followed her arrest, with a nameless source quoted in the story describing the scene of her alleged attack on her boyfriend as resembling a "horror movie". These and other details were reported in a tone of barely suppressed glee. Over and over, Flack was portrayed as a cartoon monster.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Where the media goes, social media inevitably follows, of course. People love a pile-on and nobody will have felt that more than Flack, who in January went on Instagram to assert that her family was " no longer up for entertainment or gossip". As the shock fades, will this come to be seen as a tragedy too far for an industry which has made a business model out of chewing up the vaguely famous and spitting them out? And also for those of us who get a vicarious kick out of weighing in on Twitter?

Would a male celebrity have been publicly excoriated in such a fashion? It seems unlikely. As a high-profile woman, Flack had a target painted on her back as far as the gossip industrial complex is concerned. It delights in portraying women as "difficult" where their male equivalent would be described as "determined" and is always sniffing for the hint of diverging views between two female celebrities, in order to frame their relationship as a catty feud.

These attitudes, of course, don't fall from the clear blue sky. They are a reflection of society's views on women who dare overachieve and then show a chink of vulnerability. A woman can be successful or she can be flawed and human. She is never permitted to be both.

Flack had by then stepped away from Love Island and her long-term career must have been in question. She had been synonymous with the ITV2 reality hit and her ability to be both bubbly and strait-laced had served her well interacting with the show's tanned and toned contestants. She was an avatar for the audience - appreciative of the weather and the svelte torsos but also slightly in on the joke. It was a careful balancing act and she made the part her own.

With the shock of her death still fresh, it is perhaps too soon to be definitive about how this will impact on the media's treatment of celebrities. But it surely is a line in the sand for Love Island. Two former participants in the show - Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis - have previously died by suicide. The producers have insisted that the mental wellbeing of contestants is a priority, pledging extensive aftercare for contestants on the ongoing winter series of Love Island, filming in Cape Town.

This is no doubt the case. Even so, for the present series to continue after Flack had stepped down as host (replaced by Laura Whitmore) is surely unthinkable. Love Island ends on 23 February and at the time of writing is due to broadcast this Sunday night at 9pm. One wonders if the islanders will not shortly be told they are heading home early. The longer-term future of the franchise is surely up in the air also. Feelings will be raw as news of Flack's passing sinks in. But Love Island has surely lost what remains of its innocence and cannot continue.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, you can reach out for confidential support at Samaritans by calling 116 123 or visiting their website​

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Caroline Flack's tragic death shows that the way the media treats women must change

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The tragic death of Love Island presenter Caroline Flack at age 40 forces us to confront, and not for the first time, the cruelty and relentlessness of the tabloid media - especially when it has a woman in its crosshairs.

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45. Laura Whitmore's emotional tribute to Caroline Flack 

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45. Laura Whitmore's emotional tribute to Caroline Flack 

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I think it's really important, in the wake of events such as Caroline Flack's tragic death, to think about how these events are shaped by social media and the Internet. I don't think this is an issue which necessarily fits under one theme, but I decided to put it under this one because I think what has been going on online in relation to Caroline Flack is something which highlights some of the worst aspects of modern societies.

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Caroline Flack: Laura Whitmore’s emotional tribute

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27. My friend talking about the internet and celebrity culture

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27. My friend talking about the internet and celebrity culture

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Following the tragic news of Caroline Flack's suicide, I decided to look further into how social media impacts celebrities, and the power of features such as click bait in shaping their experiences. My friend, who is a freelance journalist, gave his thoughts on this culture and it's place in the world today. Again, the idea that social media's impacts are paradoxical are evident: it is a huge enabler to celebrities, but simultaneously can be detrimental to their public and personal lives. In this video, Sam suggests that proper social media use - and the potential harms of 'trolling' - should be better taught in schools, enabling young people to understand these dangers better.

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29. If You Don't Care About Online Privacy, You Should Read This 

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29. If You Don't Care About Online Privacy, You Should Read This 

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Note: This is part one of a two-part series on why online privacy matters and the lengths people have to go to in order to retain their privacy in 2019. This piece is about the why of online privacy. You can read about the extreme lengths Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp goes to protect his privacy in part two.
Privacy is a strange issue in today's world. People share their outrage on social media when news of a serious user privacy issue at a major tech company gets reported in the media, but there's usually no acknowledgement of the irony associated with sharing this outrage on a platform that has likely had privacy issues of its own in recent months.

At the end of the day, most people simply do not want to take the time to look beyond Google and Facebook to learn how they can better protect their personal data.

After getting swatted in October 2017 , Lopp created a system of extreme operational security (OPSEC) for cypherpunks and wrote a blog post to help others who wish to improve their own OPSEC.

While many people repeat the "I have nothing to hide" mantra when it comes to their reasons for freely handing all of their data over to giant tech companies, governments, or the random developer behind a flashlight app for their phone , Lopp's case shows the online privacy debate is much more complex than it may seem at first glance.

There are plenty of arguments to make against those who say they have nothing to hide , but even after everything from Edward Snowden's NSA leaks to 143 million Americans' social security numbers being compromised in the 2017 Equifax hack , the vast majority of people simply do not care enough to make changes to the way they use the internet. It's convenience over security.

If you're one of those people who doesn't think much about online privacy or computer security, then perhaps you should take a listen to what Jameson Lopp has to say because online privacy is directly related to one's own physical security in today's digital world. In a recent interview with Epicenter , Lopp discussed the risks associated with poor online privacy practices.
You Don't Know Who You Will Trigger Online
"The biggest issue, which I think I talk about near the beginning of my very long post of what I did, is that you don't know what might become an issue," said Lopp when asked about his extreme privacy practices.

The internet connects different people from every corner of the world, and individauls have the potential to reach thousands, millions, or even billions of people with a single social media post. While this interconnectivity has obvious benefits, Lopp made the point that there is also a negative side to the internet in terms of inadvertently connecting with unstable individuals who may get triggered by a thoughtless tweet.

"Within that hoard of people [who see your tweet], there might be one or two imbalanced people or people who have, you know, mental issues. They don't know where the line is, and they're willing to go to an extreme length to try to harm you in some way, or at least to make you afraid," said Lopp.

According to Lopp, his perspective on the impact of his tweets changed when he went from 1,000 followers a few years ago to nearly 200,000 followers today.

"Now, if I say something that offends someone or that might be against someone's financial interests because they hold a certain crypto asset, then they might feel compelled to try to do something to hurt me or to make me afraid," explained Lopp.

Lopp added that in the case of his swatting, the attacker was unsuccessfully attempting to simply extort him. It was at that point that Lopp realized he had a problem on his hands that could get worse as the popularity of Bitcoin and his own following on social media continued to grow.

"I should probably be conservative and assume that it might get like an order of magnitude worse," said Lopp.

"You don't know who you might piss off, especially if you're active on social media. It's just not possible to fully comprehend the thought processes of everybody else out there who's on the internet who might read or hear something you might say and then what they might do as a result," Lopp added later in the conversation.

The Casa CTO effectively burned down everything associated with his old life and started from scratch ( read more about the extreme measures he took to do that here).
Not Just a Social Media Issue
Of course, it's not just comments on social media that could trigger someone and lead to them target you with some kind of physical attack. After all, you can inadvertently offend someone while driving to work in the morning or standing in line at McDonald's. There are also plenty of out there who will stalk or attack specific people, especially women, even if they've done nothing wrong.

According to Lopp, the average person should at least be worried about the potential for identity theft.

Near the end of his interview with Epicenter, Lopp clarified that he believes that vast majority of people in the world probably have good intentions, but it is the small number of individuals with psychopathic tendencies or those who are simply willing to do things that most others would find immoral that create the need for proper security around one's personal data.

"That's what I'm worried about," said Lopp. "While the likelihood of something like that happening for the average person is probably lower, you never know. And so, it's like a form of insurance against a somewhat unlikely but still possible event."

... Read More

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If You Don't Care About Online Privacy, You Should Read This

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Note: This is part one of a two-part series on why online privacy matters and the lengths people have to go to in order to retain their privacy in 2019. This piece is about the why of online privacy. You can read about the extreme lengths Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp goes to protect his privacy in part two.

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7. Social media and celebrity culture 'harming young people'

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7. Social media and celebrity culture 'harming young people'

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Mental health is something I'm really passionate about, and I think something which continues to be really important in modern societies is understanding the ways in which social media can facilitate the good and the bad - it's all about how we use it. Perhaps there's something in this about whether social media replicates or creates inequalities. Reading this article has sparked an interest in this topic as something I may focus on in my final essay.

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Social media and celebrity culture ‘harming young people’

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Young people’s mental health damaged by ‘unobtainable’ body image in online world

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8. Too few councillors on campus: why students are turning to mental health apps 

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8. Too few councillors on campus: why students are turning to mental health apps 

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Again, this taps in (pardon the pun) to a debate about how social media is impacting mental health. It seems almost paradoxical - social media has the capacity to harm as well as improve mental health, particularly in young people. This article focuses on universities' promotion of mental health apps in seeking to enhance services for young people, but I found it interesting to consider this in light of my own experiences of social media - captured in my Digital Detox assignment - as sometimes being harmful to my mental health.

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Leaving friends and family at home and building a new life in a different city can be tough - especially for the first time. Throw in the stresses of university work, and it's little wonder that many students feel the strain. One in five students have a mental health diagnosis, according to a recent survey of nearly 40,000 students. Nearly half say they're often anxious, and a third are frequently lonely. There's no question that there's a student mental health crisis on campus - the challenge is how to deal with it.

The obvious answer is upping the number of counsellors on campus, but with budgets tightening at lots of universities, this isn't always easy. Sara Elkhawad, welfare officer at Newcastle University students' union, says counselling will inevitably be underfunded. "We have 28,000 students, and only so many counsellors. Even if you increase the number of counsellors by 10, it's only going to help a certain number of students."
Snake oil or panacea: can technology improve student mental health?
To plug the gap, a number of universities, including Newcastle, are starting to promote apps to help manage students' mental health or offer support and guidance. But do they work?

Amelia Trew, student wellbeing officer at the University of East Anglia, believes the apps are "empowering" because they allow students to take control of their wellbeing in their own time. She encourages students to use different apps for different purposes: for instance, its in-house app OpenUpUEA is focused on wellbeing, while another, Enlitened, acts as more of an academic support service.

Lots of students have welcomed the additional support that apps offer. "It's just a platform to express what you're feeling in an anonymous way. I think of the app as a first step in getting help," says Victoria Williams, an English student at Exeter University. "For some people, going to a wellbeing centre or speaking to a mental health expert can be quite daunting."

Many students find this intuitive as they are accustomed to interacting with friends on their phones, says Elkhawad. Apps can also benefit autistic students, who can be more comfortable communicating through phones than face-to-face. "There is this narrative of counselling being the only way to [make] mental health improvements or better yourself, and it's fundamentally wrong," she says. "It's really difficult speaking to someone you've never met before in your life about your personal issues."

But some students are less convinced. "It's quite patronising for people to assume [that apps are] how you tackle such a complicated and nuanced problem," says Martha Griffiths, a University of East Anglia student who has experienced mental health problems. "When you come down to severe mental health crises, apps can't help with that. They can't give you what students need, which is actual contacts and serious support. It's a great way of universities saying they're doing something without addressing the serious problem."

Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King's College London, shares some of Griffiths's concerns. "Many [apps] haven't been tested in a randomised controlled trial," she says. Indeed, a recent study by American and Australian academics found that only around one in 33 mental health apps had research to justify their claims of effectiveness. Just three in 10 claimed to have expert input in development, and only 20% were tied to a government body, academic institution or hospital.

Wykes believes that apps can have a place in monitoring and treating mental health, but that they should be in addition to, rather than in place of, more traditional counselling and advice services. "If you talk to people, they actually say they're happy to interact with an app but not if that means they won't have access to a person if they need it," she says.

Part of the problem is that mental health apps are often developed by non-experts. Wykes worries that designers are driven by the wrong incentives: they want to find ways to keep people using the app, despite the fact that excessive phone use has been linked to mental health problems. She also worries that apps are often designed without consulting people who have experienced mental illness.

"It's quite well documented in literature that many mental health apps don't have that good evidence or peer-reviewed research to back up what they do," admits Tim Rogers, clinical director at Big White Wall, which connects 25,000 students across 80 UK universities with peer support overseen by trained monitors. He adds: "However, that's not universal, and things are changing."
'It removes stigma': how tech breaks down barriers for students with disabilities
Apps are necessary, he argues, because of the strain on existing mental health services. For example, the NHS runs an Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme to help people access to talking therapies. "One of the goals of IAPT is to reach about 25% of people who have a mental health problem," says Rogers. "But what that means is 75% of people who have mental health issues don't benefit from face-to-face talking treatment. Even if you threw all the money in the world at the problem, you'd need to find the right numbers of suitably qualified psychological therapists of different kinds, and that's an issue too."

Technology, then, can ease the problem - but it shouldn't be the only solution. Elkhawad sees students coming in daily to access welfare and wellbeing services, and is generally sceptical of technological quick fixes. "It's not a binary, one-or-the-other system of mental health support," she says. "There are lots of options we should be promoting and investing in equally, rather than giving loads of support to one and nothing for the other."
Topics

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Too few counsellors on campus: why students are turning to mental health apps

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Leaving friends and family at home and building a new life in a different city can be tough - especially for the first time. Throw in the stresses of university work, and it's little wonder that many students feel the strain. One in five students have a mental health diagnosis, according to a recent survey of nearly 40,000 students.

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22. Instagram Influencer Marketing Is Already A Nightmare. Political Ads Will Make It A Shitshow.

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22. Instagram Influencer Marketing Is Already A Nightmare. Political Ads Will Make It A Shitshow.

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Kim Kardashian (deleted) / Joe Raedle / Getty

Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign is wading into the same murky waters as Kim Kardashian West and diet shakes.

This week, Instagram meme accounts like @fuckjerry and @tank.sinatra posted sponsored ads for former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign - the first campaign to use this sort of paid influencer marketing strategy. On Friday, Facebook told the Verge and BuzzFeed News that it would not be regulating these ads the same way it does political ads on Facebook and Instagram. For example, the ads won't be added to the Facebook Ad Library - the transparency tool that allows anyone to see how much money a politician, business, or group is spending on Facebook ads - unless the candidate or influencer were to pay Facebook to boost the post.

Facebook's political advertising policies, which fall into a gray area of federal regulations, have already come under intense scrutiny (they have decided not to fact-check political ads), and after foreign manipulation and inauthentic behavior in the 2016 US presidential election, it is still trying to convince the public that it's not going to fuck this up this time. But allowing political candidates to use influencer marketing on Instagram requires a lot of trust in the way that influencer marketing works - and that system has always been completely broken.

Influencer marketing relies on confusing the average user - that's what makes it effective. The clearest version is when an influencer puts #ad or #sponsored in the caption, which is very easy to miss, but there are a billion less obvious variations.

Sometimes an influencer will simply tag a brand in the photo (does this mean they were paid to post? Or given a free gift? Or just like the brand?). Sometimes they'll write flowery language about "partnering" with a brand or give out a discount code with their name on it. Or maybe they'll just say "thanks @BRAND." Or maybe nothing at all!!!

In theory, there ARE rules. The Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that regulates advertising, has guidelines for disclosing social media ads. The rules say that any material relationship to a brand must be disclosed. This means an influencer needs to say if they have been given a big wad of cash to do a post, but also if a makeup company sent them a free lipstick and they posted about it - even if the gift was unsolicited. It also needs to be disclosed if an influencer has a financial stake in a brand ( DJ Khaled and Cîroc, for example), or even if they have a spouse or family member who does.

And there are very specific rules for how to disclose that relationship in an ad. It must say #ad or #sponsored (#sp doesn't cut it), and that disclosure must appear in the first three lines of an Instagram caption, before the caption text gets cut off in the feed.

But enforcement has been pretty hands-off. Over the years, the FTC has taken action against brands and advertising agencies, but never individuals putting up posts. The closest any influencer has gotten to being punished came in 2017 when, prompted by the advocacy group Truth in Advertising, the FTC sent polite "educational letters" to remind a handful of celebrities and influencers how to properly disclose an ad. When several of those celebrities like Amber Rose and Lindsay Lohan continued to do undisclosed Instagram ads, they got second, slightly more chastising letters asking them to tell the FTC whether or not the posts were ads. No influencer, not even a Kardashian, has ever faced official action or penalty by the FTC.

At the moment, there are no FEC rules in place specifically about Instagram influencers.

Making things more confusing, a spokesperson for the FTC told BuzzFeed News that the FTC isn't even in charge of regulating political ads done by Instagram influencers, even if they aren't properly disclosed. The FTC deals with commercial advertising, not political ads, which are regulated by the Federal Election Commission. The FEC, however, has never had to regulate Instagram influencer ads before. It has rules about how internet ads must be disclosed, but these were designed for more traditional online advertising models.

In December 2019, FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub issued an official statement lamenting the lack of updated and more specific rules around internet ads. "The Federal Election Commission last wrote internet communication disclaimer regulations several eons ago, in 2006, when political internet advertising was in its infancy," Weintraub wrote. "The Commission has since been unable to revamp its regulations to better tailor the disclaimer rules to today's far more significant and varied political internet advertising market." At the moment, there are no FEC rules in place specifically about Instagram influencers.

The real loser here is the average user, who is left with no idea how to tell what's an ad and what isn't.

Facebook has been incredibly slow to adapt. It took until 2017 (shortly after those FTC letters) for Instagram to test a built-in feature for influencers to disclose brand partnerships. This feature has rolled out more widely over the last two and a half years, but it's still only available to verified users. As microinfluencers - people with 10,000 to 100,000 followers - become more popular with marketers, the fact that the feature is only for blue checkmarks means it can't be a total solution.

And the FTC doesn't even think it's a good solution, either. In 2017, an FTC official said that the disclosure tools built in on Instagram and Facebook do not meet the regulator's guidelines for proper disclosure.

It's possible that Instagram could solve this at a product level. Instead of the tiny "paid partnership with" text that lives in the location area of a photo, it could make a big huge red "ADVERTISEMENT!" text, or a colored border, or to look similar to actual ads instead of regular feed posts.

Or they could boot off influencers who continually violate the rules, or even publicly post its own guidance about how to comply and be a good influencer-citizen (Instagram does have liaisons on staff who work with and give advice to big accounts and celebrities, but that's all done behind the scenes and that info is not available to everyone).

As confusing as the rules are, the real loser here is the average user, who is left with no idea how to tell what's an ad and what isn't.

I've been reporting on influencer ads on Instagram for years, and I'm a pretty savvy internet user who has a professional understanding of the basics of advertising and marketing - but I often can't tell whether a post is an ad. I do not believe for a second that the average person is able to know what's an ad 100% of the time on Instagram. Or even 50% of the time.

Influencer marketing thrives exactly because of this confusion: It's hoping you think Kim Kardashian actually loves Fit Tea drinks and genuinely recommends them. It's hoping you think a travel influencer actually loves that hotel room, or that a makeup artist really recommends this eyeliner.

It's hoping you think Mike Bloomberg is actually a funny, relatable guy who is able to make a joke about himself, and not that someone else was paid to write the jokes and someone was paid to post them (one of the meme accounts that was paid to post Bloomberg #spon is run by a non-news BuzzFeed employee).

Influencer marketing is still a total shitshow for the average Instagram user, who is constantly being deceived by influencers and brands, either on purpose or because the rules are too confusing. It's been going on for years this way, Facebook has done very little to solve the problem. Allowing political ads to flourish in this third-party bootleg ecosystem that has minimal regulation from the platform can only end in more confusion and a bigger disaster.

Topics In This Article

1. Facebook

2. Instagram

Katie Notopoulos is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Notopoulos writes about tech and internet culture and is cohost of the Internet Explorer podcast.

Contact Katie Notopoulos at katie@buzzfeed.com.

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.

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Instagram Influencer Marketing Is Already A Nightmare. Political Ads Will Make It A Shitshow.

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This week, Instagram meme accounts like @fuckjerry and @tank.sinatra posted sponsored ads for former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign - the first campaign to use this sort of paid influencer marketing strategy. On Friday, Facebook told the Verge and BuzzFeed News that it would not be regulating these ads the same way it does political ads on Facebook and Instagram.

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51. Caroline Flack's death shows how social media has democratised cruelty

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51. Caroline Flack's death shows how social media has democratised cruelty

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"Tabloids always hounded celebrities but online, anyone can be a public figure – and everyone can join a mob"

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he days after the death of Caroline Flack have seen an admirably sober, reflective mood on the part of politicians and the public. Labour leadership candidates are denouncing press intrusion and calling for regulation of social media, while Downing Street wants social media firms to be more proactive in removing " unacceptable content ". Journalists are contrite over allegations that the tabloids hounded Flack. After the feast, the penitence.

Amid the contrition, of course, everyone is searching for someone else to blame. Social media users blame trolls. Politicians blame social media. The press blames reality television - a format that specialises in " interpersonal torture ", as Douglas Rushkoff puts it.

But this problem can't be reduced to a single source, and Flack's trials in particular seem to have been orchestrated by an informal alliance between the press, social media, and police and prosecutors - who furnish the titillating details for lurid headlines and furious tweets. But there is no single villain in this coalition of moral persecution: in fact, it involves us all.

The thrill of the chase is accompanied by the thrill of realising that we are all at risk, all potential targets

Flack was about to be prosecuted over allegations of assaulting her partner, despite him withdrawing his complaint. Most of us know next to nothing about what really happened. However, the press that had happily built her up as a star also delighted in taking her down, cackling about Caroline "Whack". On the back of these headlines, armies of online vigilantes were equally happy to harass someone about whom they knew little, often acting as judge, jury and executioner while dispensing with the presumption of innocence. What is really happening here is that a form of punitive moralism towards celebrities, long associated with the tabloid press and the police - whose alliance was exposed by the phone-hacking scandal - has now been democratised. The issue is not unkindness or random bad behaviour, but a cultural system of public sadism.

This is obscured by the fact that such sadism usually has some virtuous justification. The former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald has offered the state's rationale for prosecuting Flack after the allegations were withdrawn, rightly noting that victims often withdraw their complaints under pressure from their abusers.The tabloids, meanwhile, have their own justifications for exposing private lives. "Privacy is for paedos," the News of the World hack Paul McMullan told the Leveson inquiry.In all his years of spying on celebrities for public titillation, he had "never found anybody doing any good".

Online culture has its own forms of justification for vigilantism. The hashtag #believesurvivors, for example, has often been interpreted on social media to mean that every horrendous allegation is automatically true. There are good reasons for all of this: abusers exert pressure on their victims; the criminal justice system is under increasing public pressure to rectify its mishandling of such crimes; privacy canbe used to shield bad behaviour; and survivors are all too often not taken seriously. Yet we have already seen examples - including the collapse of Operation Midland and related inquiries into elite child abuse - of how public shaming, online and off, can be used to destroy people's lives, even if the charges turn out to be baseless. But the dirty secret in all these episodes is the pleasure we all take in participating.

What is at stake in the monstering of celebrities is a prurient relish in the excesses and meltdowns of cultural elites - a form of what Theodor Adorno called "malicious egalitarianism". If you're in the public eye, it is said, nastiness goes with the terrain. It is the quid pro quo for privilege.Many people online now argue that the consequences of such attacks usually aren't even serious. "Just about everybody ends up fine," the columnist Lyta Gold writes, regarding "cancel culture" with "their careers intact". Yet this is a standard of "harm" that says it doesn't matter what torment a person endures - if they're not dead, or in career oblivion, then they're basically fine.

But now it is not just the ostensibly powerful who are in our sights. The upshot of social media is that we're all in the public eye, all celebrities. An entire industry has developed - call it the social industry - which converts social life into celebrity competition. The social media platforms, along with a network of advertisers, PR firms, multinationals, celebrities, news media and gaming corporations connected to them, have helped create a highly profitable new ecology of public visibility.

Anyone with an account has a public image - and, by deciding what to post, a public relations strategy. Anyone can become a magnet for the volatile feelings associated with what psychiatrists call "celebrity worship syndrome", which burden the sufferer with anxiety and depression. Over time, especially as the follower is disappointed by the object of their worship, these feelings segue into a no less passionate loathing, or even a desire to destroy the celebrity.

The social industry did not invent these tendencies. Even McMullan admitted that his paper's articles about Jennifer Elliott, daughter of the actor Denholm Elliott, may have contributed to her suicide. Richard Littlejohn's hounding of the trans woman Lucy Meadows in the Daily Mail contributed, according to the coroner, to her suicide. However, the social industry has democratised cruelty, ramped up popular sadism and enrolled all of us into these rituals of punishment.

Most ingeniously, the industry sells us a myth of celebrity while leveraging the reality that celebrity makes people miserable. The benders and breakdowns of celebrities, their horrified distress signals as their lives are taken over by their public persona, are well known. Less well known is that the rate of suicide for celebrities is anything between seven and several thousand times higher than that for the wider population. And now their breakdowns have become riveting social media spectacles, with celebrities often driven over the edge by supposedly outraged followers.

Yet if all of us are now celebrities - or at least all of us on social media - then that cruelty is also masochism. The thrill of the chase is accompanied by the thrill of realising that we are all at risk, all potential targets. Today's bloodhound is tomorrow's fox. So the more we extol the virtues we find wanting in others as we take them down on spurious grounds, from Natalie Wynn to Jameela Jamil, the more we are gleefully setting ourselves up for the same fall.

This is why the ritual calls for kindness that follow tragedies like Flack's suicide are ineffectual, and as hollow as new year pledges of sobriety and clean living. To take kindness seriously, we need to confront not only the machinery that loops us into sadomasochistic frenzies for the purposes of generating profitable flows of attention and engagement. We also need to take seriously our own pleasure in, and fascination with, personal destruction.

Richard Seymour is a political activist and author. His latest book is The Twittering Machine

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Caroline Flack's death shows how social media has democratised cruelty | Richard Seymour

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he days after the death of Caroline Flack have seen an admirably sober, reflective mood on the part of politicians and the public. Labour leadership candidates are denouncing press intrusion and calling for regulation of social media, while Downing Street wants social media firms to be more proactive in removing " unacceptable content ".

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40. Nigeria's biggest battle with coronavirus will be beating misinformation

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40. Nigeria's biggest battle with coronavirus will be beating misinformation

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Something which is so interesting to me when studying digital culture is the way that things change so frequently with events. This article looks at the spread of false information about Coronavirus through WhatsApp, demonstrating that the issue of 'fake news' is not confined to politics, or indeed to developed countries.

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In the wake of Nigeria's first coronavirus case, local authorities are preparing to face a test of public health systems and infrastructure.

For now, authorities say the index patient, an Italian business traveler who arrived in Lagos from Milan on Feb. 25, is "clinically stable" and is being treated at a dedicated facility for infectious diseases. But in the coming days, as work intensifies to identify possible infections and contain the disease, the government will have another fight on its hands too: tackling misinformation.

Indeed, as Quartz Africa was going to press, Whatsapp messages had started to spread with misleading information about the coronavirus.

Screengrab by Yomi Kazeem

Coronavirus messages received on WhatsApp

With fears among locals likely to rapidly grow after the first confirmed case, it could result in the spread of inaccurate hearsay and panic-induced misinformation. There is already worrying precedent in very similar circumstances.

In 2014, while the devastating Ebola epidemic raged in parts of West Africa, a viral WhatsApp broadcast prescribed bathing with or drinking salt and hot water mixtures as a "cure" for the dreaded disease. Even though there was no medical basis for it, the "prescription" went viral enough for the government to have to officially debunk it. But that ultimately proved futile, as at least two people died and several others were hospitalized over excessive salt consumption.

False claims can even come from government sources too: in 2014, Nigeria's former information minister claimed the government had acquired Ebola vaccines in preparation for an outbreak even though no vaccines existed at the time.

Given the increasingly global scale of infections with over 80,000 cases in nearly 50 countries, the possibility of similar bogus claims making the rounds and being adopted out of desperation is very real. To be clear, such misinformation episodes are not exclusive to Nigeria or even Africa, as anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists in the United States and Europe show. But the threat of more damaging after-effects are more pronounced here given traditionally weaker and under-equipped health systems

For its part, the Nigerian government has attempted to stay ahead of the narrative, publicizing its preparation plans even before its first confirmed case and sensitizing the public through official press releases and social media.

But social media platforms particularly represent a potent danger with regard to misinformation. "Misinformation spreads fastest on WhatsApp at times like this," says Mayowa Tijani, a fact-checker with AFP. "The more trusted the source is, the more damage it is likely to cause," he adds.

WhatsApp's potential as a tool for misinformation is further amplified by its sheer popularity: it's the most popular messaging app across several African countries, including Nigeria. Local telecoms operators have also created WhatsApp-only data bundles for users. While admitting to the magnitude of its "fake news" problem, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has seemed uncertain of how best to tackle it.

For its part, Facebook, also a widely popular social media app in Nigeria, has deployed a number of features to curb misinformation. Last August, its third party fact-checking program was expanded to include 11 African languages, including Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, Nigeria's three major languages.

Despite the best efforts of social media platforms, a bulk of responsibility of plugging information gaps currently lies with the government. "The government has to take out all opportunities for speculation by providing all possible information," Tijani says. "The more people know, the less they speculate."
Sign up to the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief here for news and analysis on African business, tech and innovation in your inbox

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Nigeria's biggest battle with coronavirus will be beating misinformation

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In the wake of Nigeria's first coronavirus case, local authorities are preparing to face a test of public health systems and infrastructure. For now, authorities say the index patient, an Italian business traveler who arrived in Lagos from Milan on Feb. 25, is "clinically stable" and is being treated at a dedicated facility for infectious diseases.

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28. Met police chief: facial recognition technology critics are ill-informed

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28. Met police chief: facial recognition technology critics are ill-informed

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The Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, has attacked critics of facial recognition technology for using arguments she has claimed are highly inaccurate and ill-informed.

The Met began operational use of the technology earlier this month despite concerns raised about its accuracy and privacy implications by civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International UK, Liberty and Big Brother Watch (BBW).

On Monday, speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) in central London, which has just launched its own report expressing reservations about the rollout of new technology in policing, Dick launched an impassioned defence of its use.

"I and others have been making the case for the proportionate use of tech in policing, but right now the loudest voices in the debate seem to be the critics, sometimes highly incorrect and/or highly ill-informed," she said. "And I would say it is for the critics to justify to victims of crimes why police shouldn't use tech lawfully and proportionately to catch criminals."

The commissioner sought to bust "myths" surrounding use of the technology by the Met. Addressing some of the specific concerns raised, she said:

It does not store biometric data.

Human officers will always make the decision about whether to intervene.

The Met's technology has been proved not to have an ethnic bias.

The force has been open and transparent in its deployment.

She said the only people on the facial recognition watchlist were those wanted for serious crimes and the only bias in the technology used by the Met was that it was slightly harder to identify a wanted woman than a wanted man.

Dick said trials of the technology had led to the arrests of eight criminals who would probably not have been caught otherwise and that it was not for the Met to decide the boundary between privacy and security. But she added: "Speaking as a member of public, I will be frank. In an age of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, concern about my image and that of my fellow law-abiding citizens passing through LFR [live facial recognition] and not being stored, feels much, much, much smaller than my and the public's vital expectation to be kept safe from a knife through the chest."

The commissioner said it was incumbent on the Met to embrace modern technology, also including algorithms, at a time when it was being used by criminals, the general public and other sectors.

LFR critics responded angrily to her speech. BBW accused Dick of ignoring the report by Prof Pete Fussey, who conducted the only independent review on behalf of the Met of its trials, finding it to be verifiably accurate in just 19% of cases.

The civil liberties group said: "It's unhelpful for the Met to reduce a serious debate on facial recognition to unfounded accusations of 'fake news'. Dick would do better to acknowledge and engage with the real, serious concerns."

Hannah Couchman, a policy and campaigns officer at Liberty, said the commissioner's language was "misleading and dangerous", maintaining that LFR undermined safety "by handing extraordinary power to the state to control our movements and behaviour".
Topics

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Met police chief: facial recognition technology critics are ill-informed

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The Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, has attacked critics of facial recognition technology for using arguments she has claimed are highly inaccurate and ill-informed. The Met began operational use of the technology earlier this month despite concerns raised about its accuracy and privacy implications by civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International UK, Liberty and Big Brother Watch (BBW).

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31. Kerry Katona's Instagram Post about the media and being in the public eye

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31. Kerry Katona's Instagram Post about the media and being in the public eye

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Kerry Katona has been posting a lot about the media and the way it treats celebrities - with a complete lack of respect for their privacy. In this post, she angrily confronts the fact that online media outlets often post false stories in an attempt to gain as much attention as possible. Again, this demonstrates the lack of privacy in today's digital society, and illustrates the impact which this has on those who are in the public eye and their identity formation processes.

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30. Philip Schofield's Instagram story announcing that he is gay

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30. Philip Schofield's Instagram story announcing that he is gay

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The fact in itself that Philip Schofield felt obliged to post an instagram story to announce that he is gay is telling in itself - and demonstrates the way that celebrities' experience new, digitally mediated intersections between privacy and publicity.

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13. Screenshot from Twitter - Comedian Joe Lycett changes name to 'Hugo Boss' in protest

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13. Screenshot from Twitter - Comedian Joe Lycett changes name to 'Hugo Boss' in protest

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A wealth of literature proposes that online activism is nothing more than meaningless 'clicktivism', but I disagree. This is an example of social media platforms - predominantly Twitter - being mobilised in order to draw attention to particular issues which would likely not have received such attention before the digital age.

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32. 9 celebrities who have struggled with the pressures of social media

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32. 9 celebrities who have struggled with the pressures of social media

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Selena Gomez has more followers on Instagram than any other human being, dog or food blog. But she says looking at other people's perfectly filtered lives made her feel bad about her own.

"As soon as I became the most followed person on Instagram, I sort of freaked out," she told Vogue magazine in March of this year.

"It had become so consuming to me. It's what I woke up to and went to sleep to. I was an addict, and it felt like I was seeing things I didn't want to see, like it was putting things in my head that I didn't want to care about. I always end up feeling like s*** when I look at Instagram. Which is why I'm kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit."

Most recently, SelGo revealed to Business of Fashion that she worries about how disconnected we're all becoming...

"I see a disconnect from real life connections to people, and that makes me a little worried. I do think social media is an amazing way to stay connected, to learn more things about what's going on outside your little bubble, but sometimes I think it's too much information."

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BBC Radio 1 - Nick Grimshaw - 9 celebrities who have struggled with the pressures of social media

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Selena Gomez has more followers on Instagram than any other human being, dog or food blog. But she says looking at other people's perfectly filtered lives made her feel bad about her own. "As soon as I became the most followed person on Instagram, I sort of freaked out," she told Vogue magazine in March of this year.

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Your Social Media is [Probably] Being Watched Right Now

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Your Social Media is [Probably] Being Watched Right Now

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Getty

The use of automated tools to enable mass surveillance of social media accounts is spiralling out of control. So says a new report from Freedom on the Net, which warns that nine in every ten internet users are being actively monitored online. And where this might have been done by armies of analysts in the past, it is now automated. Advances in AI and pattern analytics have enabled billions of accounts to be watched in real time. The report highlights the darker parts of the internet world-China, Russia, parts of the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia, but it also cites examples of monitoring in the U.S. and Europe, and the development of commercial tools with western government money that then end up in the hands of questionable regimes.

There is a balancing act when it comes the monitoring of social media and online messaging and data sharing. That debate has been headline news in recent months as we look to Facebook, Twitter and others to remove hatred and violence, to police a staggering volume of data. Passive monitoring-censorship, is linked to more active monitoring where individuals are highlighted, their relationships and networks probed, threads pulled. One balancing act deals with the imperatives of law enforcement agencies charged with tackling terrorism, people and drug trafficking, child abuse, money laundering and the the billions of citizens whose privacy should be respected and protected. Another balancing act deals with the capabilities given to agencies subject to sensible levels of legal restrictions and those same tools being scaled for population control and political suppression.

Cambridge Analytica may have exposed the raw truth about data security and manipulation on social media, but the issue is rooted in the platforms-the potential for deriving intelligence from otherwise innocuous data. Many of the tools are new, leveraging AI and pattern analytics to map relationships between people "through link analysis," to use natural language processing to "assign meaning or attitude to social media posts," and to mine data for information about "past, present, or future locations." And so are you really being watched? Probably.

The report claims that 89% of the world's internet users are being actively monitored-around 3 billion people. As you'd expect when it comes to mass population monitoring and the use of technology to advance population control, China leads the way. But of the 65 countries covered in the report, there are another 39 in addition to China which "have instituted advanced social media surveillance programs."

The reality check for millions of us is that we're not as different and individual as we might think we are. And knowing that, with enough data to back it up, our behavior can be monitored and then manipulated. Essentially we all now subscribe by choice to the platforms that are being used keep tabs on us and put into effect mass scale population control. "Once the preserve of the world's foremost intelligence agencies," Freedom on the Net warns, "this form of mass surveillance has made its way to a range of countries, from major authoritarian powers to smaller or poorer states that nevertheless hope to track dissidents and persecuted minorities."

This intersection between social media and government action has been highlighted in Hong Kong, Russia and Xinjiang. But we have also seen nationwide programs in China to assess the population and ascribe citizen scoring. We have seen Russia's new sovereign internet scheme to provide monitoring probes sitting between its population and the platforms they use. And we have even seen the U.S. turn to social media as a means of screening for immigration threats.

Almost all of us have now inadvertently opted into a data goldmine that can now be widely accessed. And while the platforms claim they protect our data from monitoring and interference, much of the data is available commercially and mass scraping tools can readily mine all those sources, even if some gentle social engineering needs to be applied to gain access. "Even when it concerns individuals who seldom interact with such services," Freedom on the Net says, "the information that is collected, generated, and inferred about them holds tremendous value not only for advertisers, but increasingly for law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well."

In China, the report says, quasi-commercial organisations have built platforms that now monitor hundreds of millions of citizens. Some of that we know because the security controls are often so loose around those data repositories that we have seen a number of breaches. But it isn't just China. In the U.S., data mining tools have been developed, often seeded with government venture funding, and then acquired to fuel investigations into serious crime. But, the report warns, "law enforcement and other agencies at the local, state, and federal levels are increasingly repurposing them for more questionable practices, such as screening travelers for their political views, tracking students' behavior, or monitoring activists and protesters."

While from an internet freedoms perspective, Western Europe and North America are coloured green on the report's interactive map, mass data surveillance is also on the rise there, in the U.S. to monitor visitors to the country and in the U.K. to "monitor nearly 9,000 activists from across the political spectrum-many of whom had no criminal background- using geolocation tracking and sentiment analysis on data scraped from Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms."

Freedom on the Net

There is always a need for balance when it comes to reports on data surveillance. As consumers of such online services, we value our privacy but we also demand safety and security. Determining where to draw that line is a matter of assessing where public consent starts and ends-the trade offs we are willing to make. We have seen this same debate over end-to-end messaging encryption and government aspirations to introduce back doors on an "as needed" basis. The same two arguments pertain with messaging as with social media monitoring. How much is too much, and who determines which "good guys" get access to the tech.

There is another theme in this report which should worry us all. There is a pincer movement taking place. Countries around the world can tap into government surveillance tech from China and commercial variants from the U.S., Europe and Israel. And it is becoming significantly harder to exercise control over that. In parallel, as we all use the same social media platforms in much the same way, there is a worryingly level playing field being put into effect. Social media is "tilting dangerously toward illiberalism, exposing citizens to an unprecedented crackdown on their fundamental freedoms-as a result of these trends, global internet freedom declined for the ninth consecutive year in 2019."

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Your Social Media Is (Probably) Being Watched Right Now, Says New Surveillance Report

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The use of automated tools to enable mass surveillance of social media accounts is spiralling out of control. So says a new report from Freedom on the Net, which warns that nine in every ten internet users are being actively monitored online.

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33. danah boyd on Embracing a Culture of Connectivity 

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33. danah boyd on Embracing a Culture of Connectivity 

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One theme which boyd discusses is the boundaries, complicated by social media, between privacy and publicity. She cites a quote from a 17 year old girl which I think captures a key issue within this, it says "My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being 'public'. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy". boyd comments that "it's about having agency to assert that social control'. This led me to think about celebrities and their experience of privacy, how they differ from the 'ordinary' individual, and how they perhaps lack this social control.

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The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

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danah boyd on Embracing a Culture of Connectivity

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16. Online activism: it's easy to click, but just as easy to disengage 

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16. Online activism: it's easy to click, but just as easy to disengage 

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Online activism: it's easy to click, but just as easy to disengage

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Rosalie Tostevin: While social media may empower those already active, in some cases it is merely creating the impression of activism

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9. The Dagenham Pupil That Told Meghan Markle She's Beautiful

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9. The Dagenham Pupil That Told Meghan Markle She's Beautiful

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The literature on the concept of 'micro celebrity' explores the power of the internet to grant fame to 'ordinary' people. This is a good recent example of this, whereby almost overnight social media has turned this 'ordinary' boy into a national hero.

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The Dagenham Pupil That Told Meghan Markle She's Beautiful | Good Morning Britain

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42. Twitter to remove harmful fake news about coronavirus

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42. Twitter to remove harmful fake news about coronavirus

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The current pandemic has once again illustrated the importance of social media in the spread of information and support. But it can also enable the spread of false information, as it has done in the case of the coronavirus.

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Twitter to remove harmful fake news about coronavirus

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Twitter will remove tweets that run the risk of causing harm by spreading dangerous misinformation about Covid-19, the company has said, after weeks of criticism that its policies on misinformation were too lax. Now, the social network says, it will be applying a new broader definition of harm to address content that "goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information".

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43. Screenshots of false coronavirus messages which I have received from friends 

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43. Screenshots of false coronavirus messages which I have received from friends 

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10. 'Black Twitter' Tweets which demonstrate what it's all about

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10. 'Black Twitter' Tweets which demonstrate what it's all about

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I had a look through my friend Todun's (see top for video) Twitter likes and screenshotted some of the tweets which caught my eye.

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The main themes which I found prominent were:
- Celebrating black beauty in a world which sometimes forgets to.
- Tweets about Nigerian / African parents, which others related to.
- African culture in terms of recent events e.g. coronavirus.
Ultimately, a number of the points I'd previously discussed with friends were evident: 'Black Twitter' appeared to provide a safe space for black communities to laugh, cry, share and discuss.

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17. Social Media as a platform to fight for veganism

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17. Social Media as a platform to fight for veganism

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A number of my friends, alongside several celebrities, have used Instagram in particular to promote veganism. Their approaches differ - from the more militant approach whereby they direct anger at meat-eaters, to less confrontation approaches such as posting vegan recipes. Instagram has provided a platform for the spread of this content, showing the power of social media to enable activism. Indeed, the strength of these approaches has been demonstrated in my own life: I decided to become vegetarian after watching a video of cows getting slaughtered on a friends' instagram account...

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One of my favourite artists raps about his experience going from 'unknown' to 'viral on the Internet', and how this sudden transition impacted his mental health.

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34. Media and Its Impact on Celebrity Culture and Society

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34. Media and Its Impact on Celebrity Culture and Society

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52. Caroline Flack death: Will people now 'be kind' in the media and online?

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52. Caroline Flack death: Will people now 'be kind' in the media and online?

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Social media demonstrates such deep rooted problems within our society, and one of the ways that this manifests is through negative comments towards celebrities - gossip, drama and rumours can be spread so quickly and people are often slow to realise the genuine impact that these comments are having on people, because social media allows a level of distance. In the video in this article, Billy Eilish says 'I stopped reading comments fully because it was ruining my life.'

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Former Love Island presenter Caroline Flack's death prompted not just an outpouring of grief, but an overwhelming demand for it to become a turning point for the treatment of celebrities on social media and the press.

The night after hosting her first live edition of The X Factor in 2015, Caroline Flack was not on a high after reaching another peak in her career. She was in tears after looking at social media.

"The reaction was quite overwhelming because I didn't think people would be talking about how I look, how I stand, how I walk or how I laugh," she said at the time.

"Not everyone is going to like you all the time, not everyone is going to think you're beautiful, but there is a difference between opinion and abuse."

Those are words that many celebrities - especially women - will relate to.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, Billie Eilish - fresh from winning five Grammys, recording the new James Bond theme and having the best-selling album of 2019 - revealed she had recently stopped looking at comments.

"It was ruining my life," she said. "It's weird, the cooler the things you get to do are, the more people hate you. It's crazy. It's way worse than it's ever been right now."

Her brother and producing and songwriting partner Finneas O'Connell added: "You might see someone who's a 'famous celebrity' and you might think sticks and stones, nothing I can say is going to actually be potent to them. But it all is. It's all very equal online."

Little Mix singer Jesy Nelson, Brit Award winner Dua Lipa and former Girls Aloud star and The Masked Singer champion Nicola Roberts are a few others who have spoken about the impact of trolling.

'Social media is a witch hunt'

"There has to be a line," Roberts told BBC News on Monday. "There is a culture of a slight witch hunt that happens and social media certainly can prove to be toxic at times.

"I think it would be great if we could eliminate those elements within society."

Social media has come under scrutiny in the search for explanations and blame since Flack's suicide on Saturday at the age of 40 - as have the mainstream media, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for pressing ahead with a trial after she was charged with assaulting her boyfriend.

At her last hearing, on 23 December, where she pleaded not guilty, the TV presenter seemed to be struggling with the media attention and courtroom pressure.

The following day - Christmas Eve - she wrote on Instagram that "this kind of scrutiny and speculation is a lot to take on for one person to take on their own".

No-one will really know what Flack was thinking, and the reasons for any suicide are usually numerous and complex.

As well as the attention, Flack had lost her job on Love Island, having stood down after being charged; been banned from contacting her boyfriend by the court; and was facing trial for domestic abuse.

The loudest refrain after her death was for people to "be kind", especially on social media.

Laura Whitmore, who replaced Flack on Love Island, appealed to listeners on her BBC Radio 5 Live show "be kind" to others, and added: "To paparazzi and tabloids looking for a cheap sell, to trolls hiding behind a keyboard - enough."

Whitmore added: "I'm not going to pretend she was perfect, but is anyone? She lived every mistake publicly, under the scrutiny of the media."

Comedian Russell Brand echoed her cry on his blog: "I am angry because I have watched this play out before with vulnerable people in the public eye and I would like to slay with some righteous sword the salacious, foaming, incessant poking, trolling judgment that chased her to the grave," he wrote.

A petition calling for "Caroline's Law", which would make it an offence for the media to "knowingly and relentlessly bully a person", has reached 700,000 signatures at the time of writing.

Brand said he admired "the optimism" of the petition. "But the media is made up of people, the world of celebrity is made up of people, social media is made up of people. All culture, all values pass through the consciousness of individuals and collectives," he wrote.

"If we want the world to change, for less people to die in pain and shame then we should pause before we next vent a pleasurable stab of vindictive judgment or jeering condemnation."

'Really frightening'

Asked how long the spirit of kindness might last, columnist and author Joan Smith, who chairs the Mayor of London's Violence Against Women and Girls Board, replied: "It lasts for about 10 minutes usually, doesn't it?"

Women like Flack attract a different kind of media attention than men, Smith told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, noting that the presenter's legal case had put her under an intense spotlight.

"That kind of attention for somebody who is fragile is really frightening," she said. "I think part of the problem is most people see this on a case-by-case basis. 'That's really awful. Something ought to happen.' And then it all dies down again."

She added: "But we did actually have an inquiry, The Leveson Inquiry, which I myself gave evidence to, and whatever happened to that?"

The 2011 and 2012 inquiry investigated the conduct of the press after the phone-hacking scandal, but the second part of the inquiry was scrapped by the government, and a new system of self-regulation was set up.

"I remember saying at the time, it's not independent, it's too much influenced by newspaper editors. And I still think that's the case," Smith said.

'We are feeding the monster'

Labour MP Jo Stevens, who sits on the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee, said the second part of the Leveson Inquiry "would have looked at precisely the role of newspapers in reporting on this sort of activity".

Her committee will "want to look at" what was said about Flack on social media and in the press, she told BBC Radio 5 Live. "And we also need to look at ourselves and how we behave.

"Because these stories that are written online, every time someone clicks on a story to read about it, salacious gossip stories about celebrities and personalities, we are feeding that monster because it is creating revenue for the websites."

But former Sunday Mirror editor Paul Connew said most of the coverage of Flack's case had been based on facts in the public domain, or information she had put on social media.

"She's lived her life on the social media platform and in a way, once that's in the public domain, you can't blame the mainstream media for focusing on it," he said.

"But the mainstream media haven't adopted the sort of approach that's taken place on social media, on the Wild West of cyberspace, where people can be as abusive and cruel and wildly inaccurate as they like because they are hiding in nearly all cases behind anonymity."

The Society of Editors, which represents newspaper editors, said it was "wrong to blame the media" for Flack's death "without knowing the facts".

It cites Samaritans guidance, which states that speculation over the "triggers" can often "oversimplify" the "complex realities of suicide."

In a statement, the society said: "It is also wrong for politicians to use her tragic death as a means to attack the media and call for changes in the ways politicians themselves are reported."

It added the police investigation and the CPS's decision to pursue the assault case against Flack "were in the public domain and should be covered".

"To believe that by silencing mainstream media on such matters would prevent speculation on social media where rumour and accusations run unchecked by the regulations the media adheres to, is both naive and dangerous," it said.

PM: Social media firms 'must go further'

There have been calls for tighter regulation of social media in the wake of the star's death, with suggestions for measures like removing that anonymity by forcing anyone who signs up to provide ID and a photo.

That would go further than proposals contained in a proposed new law to counter "online harms", under which regulator Ofcom will "set out steps that should be taken to tackle cyberbullying".

Responding to Flack's death on Monday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: "The industry must continue their efforts to go further. We expect them to have robust processes in place for removing content breaching their acceptable use policies."

Last year a think tank, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, published a report suggesting celebrities should respond to trolls by ignoring and blocking them.

On Monday, broadcaster and former Big Brother contestant Andy West said: "When we're talking about practical solutions, if you're finding social media difficult and it's getting you down - and Lord knows it gets me down almost every day - try and control yourself and make sure you're not adding to that by getting involved in the nastiness, and take your own personal responsibility.

"But I absolutely agree that we've reached a point now where, to earn your voice on social media, you have to prove you are who you say you are, and you have to be willing to stand by your words.

"I would go further and say you have to have a photograph that you can have verified."

Monica Shafaq, chief executive of health and wellbeing charity The Kaleidoscope Plus Group, added: "Delete their accounts. Make people verified, for example, before they can actually start using Twitter.

"There has to be some control in place because people are losing their lives as a result. It's not a joke.

"Caroline's not the first person to be a victim of this, and sadly she won't be the last until we make some significant changes."
Follow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

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Will Caroline Flack's death be a turning point?

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Former Love Island presenter Caroline Flack's death prompted not just an outpouring of grief, but an overwhelming demand for it to become a turning point for the treatment of celebrities on social media and the press. The night after hosting her first live edition of The X Factor in 2015, Caroline Flack was not on a high after reaching another peak in her career.

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23. Grace Beverley: the 22-year old taking on the gym wear world

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23. Grace Beverley: the 22-year old taking on the gym wear world

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Sometimes known as 'Grace Fit UK', Beverley is an example of a social media influencer who has used social media to create a platform on which she communicates with a vast audience. On this platform, she can influence consumers to buy items at her recommendation. Fundamentally, I think the influencer industry is driven by capitalism.

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One of the biggest fashion trends in the UK is gym wear - with the market set to be worth £6.7bn over the next five years.

Unsurprisingly, massive multinational brands compete hard for a piece of the action.

But at the other end of the power spectrum is 22-year-old Grace Beverley.

The Oxford Uni graduate has found a way of creating a niche in what is already an extremely crowded market.

Back in 2017, when she was still a student, she started B_ND - a company making vegan-friendly resistance bands. She set it up with money she'd made from selling her own workout plans and partnering with brands as an Instagram influencer.

"I've always been interested in finding gaps in the market and opportunities in items that don't exist," she tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.

"I had been using resistance bands and there were either really expensive good ones or really cheap, rubbery and plastic ones [on the market].

"So I looked into manufacturing to see how we could produce an affordable product, while still being ethical and we ended up making resistance bands and vegan barbell pads."

Last month she won Natwest's young entrepreneur of the year award, in part due to the mark she's made on the world of sustainable fashion.

But she has had criticism levelled at her in the past - over her private school background and whether she had help setting up her businesses.

"I don't believe it's for me to sit here and be like, 'No, I'm not privileged'," she says.

"But I've done this myself - the businesses have been started from scratch by myself.

"That doesn't mean I am not incredibly privileged and fortunate in many other ways, like in terms of my education."

In May she set up activewear brand TALA - where items including sports bras and gym leggings are made from 92% reused materials, including plastic bottles and factory offcuts.

Her focus in business has always been on sustainability and creating affordable gym products that don't fall under the 'fast fashion' label - because they are eco-friendly. The hard bit is competing with rivals like Gymshark and Nike in terms of style and price.

"It's taken a lot of work and a lot of sacrifices on our part - we don't have anywhere near the profit margins of those brands," says Grace.

"We had to make it at a price point to be able to offer people a sustainable alternative.

"It's all well and good shouting at people saying you need to be sustainable, but very few people can afford a £100 pair of leggings."

Grace says they had to settle at making the clothes 92% recycled as making clothes totally recycled would have out-priced their young customer base.

"For sustainable brands to be able to make their mark - we need to show there is that demand and people are choosing them over fast fashion equivalents."

When TALA launched in May this year, her first set of clothes sold out in 20 minutes, with a new collection of over 20,000 units selling out online last week.

She's aware of her young fan base and says one of her biggest achievements so far is "matching those bigger fast fashion brands by making prices under £35-40."

One of the stand out commitments of her brand has been showing that women of all sizes can feel comfortable in gym clothes - her clothes cater for a size 4-20 and also have options for taller women too.

Body diversity in gym wear has also been a hot topic in 2019, after Nike was criticised for putting plus-size models in one of their London stores as it was said to encourage people to be unhealthy.

"One of the most shocking things since launching has been the reception we've had on inclusivity - it's kind of sad how happy people have been because it means it's abnormal to see people of all shapes, sizes and races in our campaigns.

"It shows how under-represented some people feel - you should be able to go on a website and be able to imagine what something looks like on you."

Grace says they don't retouch photos as she wants people to see what clothes will actually look like on them. And of course, body image can be affected by your mental health.

In the past, Grace has spoken about her bad days and the stress she suffers from working so hard.

"My relaxing time would be working in front of the TV and I also know that it's a huge luxury for me to be able to say, 'Look, only work working hours or give yourself weekends'. At uni, I wouldn't have been able to do that and still have got my degree and run my business."

"I decided about a year and a half ago that I wanted to speak more about my mental health, whether it was on the internet or to friends and family," she says.

"I realised that as much as I was a huge advocate for talking about mental health and removing the stigma, I actually just didn't apply that to myself."

She says the nature of being a fairly new business owner means there's always something to do, but you can't let it get in the way of your wellbeing.

Grace says next year she will continue as director of her companies, but says she will be working less too.

"I feel like I'm going into 2020 stronger than ever, concentrating on the things I love such as directing the strategy, vision and creative of the business, then being able to delegate other parts."

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.

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Taking on the world's biggest gym brands

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One of the biggest fashion trends in the UK is gym wear - with the market set to be worth £6.7bn over the next five years. Unsurprisingly, massive multinational brands compete hard for a piece of the action. But at the other end of the power spectrum is 22-year-old Grace Beverley.

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38. Maya Jama: I was 'ignorant' for mocking dark-skinned black women

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38. Maya Jama: I was 'ignorant' for mocking dark-skinned black women

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When you're in the public eye, information which you may have intended not to be public can re-surface, as it did for Maya Jama in 2018. Again, this demonstrates how difficult it is for celebrities to maintain their public image and identity in a world where scrutiny is so constant and so intense.

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Maya Jama: Dark-skinned tweet 'ignorant'

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Maya Jama says she was "an ignorant, stupid child" when she tweeted a "joke" which mocked dark-skinned black women. The Radio 1 presenter said she didn't understand "the seriousness of the joke" when she posted it in 2012. In April, she apologised after facing a backlash over the tweet.

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25. NME meets Alex Mann: the viral sensation who rapped 'Thiago Silva' with Dave at Glastonbury

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25. NME meets Alex Mann: the viral sensation who rapped 'Thiago Silva' with Dave at Glastonbury

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The video of 16-year-old Alex Mann went viral, launching him into the public eye where he too was given a platform to influence.

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NME Music News, Reviews, Videos, Galleries, Tickets and Blogs | NME.COM

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Every year there's a proper moment at Glastonbury. Whether that's thousands swarming to see Dolly Parton on the Pyramid, Jeremy Corbyn turning up on the main stage or Jay-Z covering 'Wonderwall'; but in 2019 the moment didn't come from somebody on the star-studded line-up. Instead it came from Alex Mann, a 15-year-old punter who was attending the festival with his pals.

We've all seen the viral video by now, but if you've been living under a rock let us remind you what happened. Midway through Dave's blistering Sunday afternoon set on The Other stage he decided to pluck one lucky audience member from the crowd and get them onstage to rap his collaboration with AJ Tracey 'Thiago Silva' with him.

"Who is sober enough to sing these lyrics along with me?" Dave asked the crowd. Spotting Alex, sat on his pal Sam's shoulders, kitted out in a PSG shirt with Silva's name and number on the back, he shouts: "I see a PSG shirt, but do you know the lyrics?" The teen quickly raps a few bars, and Dave takes a chance on him. Alex clambers on stage, gets set up with in-ear monitors, tells the crowd he's "fucking buzzing", and then proceeds to deftly rap the entirety of 'Thiago Silva' (not just the AJ Tracey parts he was meant to) alongside Dave. The moment has since gone viral.

Since then Alex has racked up 170,000 followers on Twitter, had his performance recognised by Thiago Silva himself (the footballer slid into his DMs as he wants to chat on the phone), been contacted about a modelling contract from BoohooMan, and been booked for his first PA this Thursday in Newcastle.

And he's had a few offers from record labels about a potential music career.

"I've had a few labels and a few producers message me, so it could be a thing," he tells NME a few hours after his appearance on Good Morning Britain, "I'm looking to do one or two songs in the future, see how they go."

But despite his impressive rapping skills, being a musician still isn't top of his list of priorities. "I've just finished my GCSEs, so I'm starting college next year. I haven't really properly decided what I'm doing next, I was doing A Levels and seeing where that took me..."

A Levels aside, it looks like the opportunities are endless for Alex, as celebs are lining up to grab him for a chat. We caught up with him to discuss the now iconic performance, the advice Dave has given him since, and how Jamie Redknapp has slid into his DMs.
What was it like that first moment when you set foot on stage at Glastonbury and looked out at thousands of people?
"That's what I was literally thinking. All I was thinking was "I'm at Glastonbury festival, performing," I think it's just amazing to think about it."
What did your parents think about it?
" They found it quite funny, they think it's all quite funny!"
What about your younger brother?
"I haven't actually had a chance to properly speak to him about it, but I think he thinks it's quite amazing, a lot of his friends are messaging him about it as well!"
And obviously there are the conspiracy theorists who think it was staged, how do you respond?
"I don't really think there's any proper response I can give them. Like, it's their personal opinion. It obviously wasn't staged at all, but I can't really prove it. Cause nobody knows what happens behind the scenes or anything, but I want to say that it 100 per cent was not staged."
Have you been in touch with Dave since?
"Yeah, he messaged me on Twitter the day after. He's been really good and supportive about the whole thing. He's offered his help, and he's told me dos and don'ts on how to try and manage it all."
Have you got plans to see him again or come out at another show?
"I haven't discussed it with him yet, I think he's in Ibiza at the moment for another festival he's performing at and enjoying, so I haven't had the chance to properly speak to him, but I hope so. I hope something comes of it in the future."
Apart from AJ Tracey and Dave - who's the maddest person to get in contact with you?
"I saw Gary Lineker post about it: that was quite big. And I've had people like Jamie Redknapp message me on Twitter. I've had a lot of rappers I like as well that have been really supportive, like Dave and AJ, and I've had other rappers message me too."
You've already got a PA coming up, do you have anything else like that coming up?
"I've tried keeping stuff like that to a minimum. I'm just thinking what's actually best at the moment, I'm trying to get in touch with some managers who can properly manage it all and make sure I'm doing the right thing. Because I obviously want to increase in popularity, but then I don't want to overdo it and it to get a bit washed out."
When you were walking around Glastonbury after it happened, did you get noticed?
"Yeah it happened instantly. As I wanted to see some other artist on a different stage, and the stage was only a few minutes away, and it ended up taking me half an hour to get there as everyone was spotting me everywhere I went."
And what do you say to people who were saying you were slightly intoxicated whilst you were on stage?
"I definitely wasn't. I wouldn't have even had the proper chance to, as Billie Eilish was straight before and there was half an hour break between that, and I was at the front the whole time. So if I had to have drunk two and half hours before I went on, and I just wouldn't have been drunk by then."
What's next for you, any more festivals?
"Yeah I've been invited to Wireless this weekend, which I think I might go to. A lot of people I really like are there, and just need to work out the logistics of it all."

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NME meets Alex Mann: the viral sensation who rapped 'Thiago Silva' with Dave at Glastonbury

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Every year there's a proper moment at Glastonbury. Whether that's thousands swarming to see Dolly Parton on the Pyramid, Jeremy Corbyn turning up on the main stage or Jay-Z covering 'Wonderwall'; but in 2019 the moment didn't come from somebody on the star-studded line-up.

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24. 'Alex from Glastonbury': the video that went viral

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24. 'Alex from Glastonbury': the video that went viral

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11. Madonna calls pandemic the "great equaliser" in bizarre nude bathtub video

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11. Madonna calls pandemic the "great equaliser" in bizarre nude bathtub video

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It has been interesting to consider how celebrities have altered their public image in such unprecedented times as current, because it has torn apart so much of what the celebrity industry is based on. There have recently been several occasions on which these celebrities have missed the mark in how they have presented themselves, which has provoked much media attention, and I think this video of Madonna in the bath is one of them.

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12. Joe Rogan and Tom Segura Rip into Celebs singing "Imagine"

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12. Joe Rogan and Tom Segura Rip into Celebs singing "Imagine"

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Another one which has been closely scrutinised by the public is the video, organised by Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, of her and fellow celebrities singing the lyrics of John Lennon's 'Imagine' which, as Joe Rogan says in this video, was somewhat insensitive in current circumstances. This made me think about the difficulties and challenges which those in the public eye face in curating their 'self' in such close and constant public scrutiny.

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Joe Rogan and Tom Segura Rip Into Celebs Recording “Imagine”

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It has been interesting to reconsider the themes of this course under the current circumstances. The pandemic has forced people to conduct their day to day activities increasingly through the internet. For activists, whose activities tend to rely on organised activity such as protests, this has been a huge change, and it has been interesting to see how they have adapted accordingly. This article covers how a few of these movements have coped, with the Climate Justice movement starting a campaign called 'Climate Strike Online'. I think that the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the power of the internet to keep people connected regardless of space or time.

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Activists prepping for a rally that was supposed to take place yesterday on Wall Street thought they were being careful. They would stand a few feet away from each other while protesting a potential bailout for fossil fuel companies amid the economic disaster unfolding along with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then came a flood of unexpected news the evening before the protest: classes were canceled to keep people from passing the virus to one another, President Trump announced a travel ban, Tom Hanks became the first A-list celebrity to test positive for the virus. The last straw for the activists was the NBA suspending its season.

Mass protests are indefinitely on hold

"That was a big shocker to some of us who are big sports fans," says Pete Sikora, climate campaigns director for New York Communities for Change, an advocacy group leading the protest. "That drove home how big a deal this is." So they canceled, about 12 hours before the rally was set to start.

Mass protests are indefinitely on hold, some grassroots groups say, amid efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. Groups like the Sunrise Movement - which had also planned to join the Wall Street rally - are turning to online activism and phone banking to keep momentum going. Sunrise, which has pushed for a Green New Deal by occupying the offices of ranking Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, tells The Verge that it is postponing all of its mass mobilizations and in-person trainings until further notice.

The restrictions come at a crucial time when many community organizers would normally be in full gear. It's election season, so they're working to mobilize voters and sway presidential candidates' positions. There's also distrust in the Trump administration's ability to respond to the crisis. During previous disasters like hurricanes, people have been able to express their frustration with a botched response through protests. But the coronavirus pandemic means that doing the same now could do more harm than good. And some activists worry that the public health crisis will make situations worse for the communities they represent.

"The thing that really kind of captures public outrage is mass protests in the streets and so we're going to be fighting with one hand tied behind our back," says Sikora, whose organization also works on housing and criminal justice reform.

His group is figuring out ways to protect New Yorkers who might be disproportionately vulnerable to the pandemic and its economic fallout. As businesses slow and lay off workers, there's more pressure on people trying to make ends meet. New York Communities for Change wants to stop evictions in the state so that people aren't thrown out of their homes at a time when they're supposed to stay home to keep healthy. It's also calling for pardons or sentence reductions for elderly inmates, since prisons are susceptible to outbreaks and seniors inside could be sitting ducks.

Here's the thing, y'all. #coronavirus and #COVID19 are an #environmentaljustice issue. Where do you think thousands of elders with compromised immune systems, respiratory and heart diseases, and other so-called "co-morbidities" caused by pollution + racism w "higher risk" live?
- Juliana Pino ️‍ (@julianapino) March 11, 2020

Sikora says his organization has been puzzling its way through the rapidly changing situation just like everyone else. They might turn to online petitions and webinars, or will ask people to take pictures to post online as a form of protest. The group's office has temporarily closed and its staff are working remotely starting today.

The Sunrise Movement is asking people stuck at home to use their time to call prospective voters. They're trying to turn out votes for congressional candidates that they've endorsed in the Midwest. They're also campaigning hard for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has championed a Green New Deal. With Joe Biden now ahead of Sanders, it's crunch time for the next round of Democratic primaries on March 17th.

Sunrise had put their hopes in college students boosting their candidates - but those students may not be on campus now that classes have been suspended. To get young voters to the polls, Sunrise is organizing phone banks; they're also floating the idea of coordinating video conferences so that they can still sort of be together while making calls separately from home. It's a shift in strategy from their previous focus on talking with people as they knocked door to door.

"Of course it is more difficult to mobilize in person for the Green New Deal because we need to take care of each other in this moment, not exposing each other to unnecessary risk," says Sofie Karasek, a spokesperson for Sunrise. Making the call not to move forward with public rallies was an "emotionally difficult decision, especially when people put so much hard work into making these mobilizations happen and preparing."

A major 3-day strike coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April will no longer take place - at least not in person - a coalition of environmental groups announced this afternoon. "Instead, we will think creatively about how to disrupt business as usual," the coalition tweeted.

Greta Thunberg, who inspired youth around the world to demand action on climate change by hitting the streets, tweeted earlier this week asking people to stay home. "Keep your numbers low but your spirits high and let's take one week at the time," she said. Thunberg urged people to join a digital strike by posting photos online with the hashtag #ClimateStrikeOnline. The call has already been met with a flood of young people posting photos with protest signs from their homes.

Other groups are still figuring out how to navigate the new realities of living through a pandemic. "No decisions have been made yet but the organization is taking [COVID-19] very seriously," a spokesperson for March For Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention movement sparked by the Parkland, Florida high school shooting, emailed The Verge. "We are developing a plan on how to move forward with our planned demonstrations, digital activism, and working with our various members and chapters across the country to ensure we continue to work towards ending gun violence in America," the spokesperson said.
Update 3/13/20 1:12PM ET: This post has been updated with the Earth Day announcement.

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Activists pick up their phones and move online as coronavirus curbs protests

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Activists prepping for a rally that was supposed to take place yesterday on Wall Street thought they were being careful. They would stand a few feet away from each other while protesting a potential bailout for fossil fuel companies amid the economic disaster unfolding along with the COVID-19 pandemic.

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How To Be A Climate Activist During the Coronavirus Pandemic

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How To Be A Climate Activist During the Coronavirus Pandemic

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April was supposed to be a huge month for climate action. The plan was to have a month of global mobilization with thousands of protests and events planned by almost 1 million different organizations working together.

Activists had hoped to build on the success of last September's worldwide climate strikes, which saw 8 million people take to the streets to demand action . And with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day next month, campaigners predicted millions of people would again be out on the streets in countries across the globe, trying to drive home the urgency of the climate crisis.

Then came the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, Earth Day Network, the global organizer of Earth Day, called for the first Digital Earth Day in response to the escalating threat of COVID-19. "Amid the recent outbreak, we encourage people to rise up but to do so safely and responsibly - in many cases, that means using our voices to drive action online rather than in person," said Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network, in an online statement .

It's not just Earth Day, of course. U.S. organizations such as the Youth Climate Strike Coalition and the Stop the Money Pipeline , a coalition of 91 organizations dedicated to ending the financing of industries contributing to the climate crisis, have canceled physical mass mobilizations and public rallies in the U.S.

And Greta Thunberg, the 17-year old Swedish climate activist, has taken her weekly Friday school strike online . Last Friday, she tweeted a picture of herself with her iconic sign at home with the caption: "School strike week 82. In a crisis we change our behaviour and adapt to the new circumstances for the greater good of society."

School strike week 82. In a crisis we change our behaviour and adapt to the new circumstances for the greater good of society.

Join the #DigitalStrike - post a pic of you with a sign and use #ClimateStrikeOnline ! #schoolstrike4climate#fridaysforfuture#climatestrike#COVIDー19 pic.twitter.com/fZkjqN3DOw
- Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) March 13, 2020

Mandates for social distancing and self-isolation are simply not compatible with large-scale mass gatherings. But this creates challenges for climate activists at an absolutely crucial time for the climate crisis ― the COP26 international climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, is just seven months away, and the stakes are high. The U.N. has called 2020 the "last best chance" for addressing climate change. And with countries set to make new pledges at the annual conference to meet their climate targets, activists are looking to keep up the pressure.

"There were really high hopes that we were going to see far-reaching ambition in Glasgow at the U.N. climate talks," said Kim Bryan, associate director for traditional communications for 350.org. "But also this year we were beginning to see big commitments of divestment from big players. And we know that was in part caused by what happened last year with the youth strikes and extinction rebellion movement."

While governments must turn their attention to the pandemic, that doesn't mean that the climate crisis will cease to matter. The question is, how is climate activism still possible during a pandemic?

The underlying momentum for climate action hasn't gone away, campaigners say. Many climate activists see this moment as a way to educate more people about the climate crisis through targeted online campaigns, distributing educational material and encouraging virtual training and webinars.

They also point out that this public health crisis should also be a further push for people to act quickly and urgently on the climate crisis because large-scale social and economic disruptions are likely to be increasingly frequent as the consequences of the climate crisis become more severe.

Week 49!
📍Charlotte, NC, USA

This is what striking looks like in the era of #COVIDー19

Today was our last in-person strike before we move to #ClimateStrikeOnline - join us!! pic.twitter.com/h8I65t4v8b
- Mary Ellis Stevens 🌱 (@_Mary_Ellis) March 14, 2020

The phenomenal rise in climate awareness over the past year and a half among the general public is often attributed to youth - like the Fridays for Future movement started by Thunberg, and in the U.S., Sunrise Movement and the youth climate coalition Zero Hour, which have brought issues like climate equity to the forefront of the political debate through protests, sit-ins and mass action.

But just because people are not physically striking doesn't mean that climate activism will die down. Climate groups are pivoting to an array of virtual actions and finding creative ways to keep the climate momentum growing.

We have the opportunity now to create a regenerative system that takes care of us all.Extinction Rebellion

Some digital events already exist. Earth Day Network, along with climate initiative Exponential Roadmap and the social network We Don't Have Time is hosting the third annual #WeDontHaveTime online climate conference during Earth Day Week, April 20-25, with more than 20 hours of live talks and events.

Many other groups are now following this line and shifting their activism online.

"What the climate movement is doing now is organizing all our action digitally through digital takeovers, digital strikes, digital solidarity, videos, online content," said Jamie Margolin , co-founder of Zero Hour. "Everyone is on their phones now so we can completely take over the internet; Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tick-Tock, Facebook - everything."

The Fridays for Future website has a list of virtual actions climate activists can engage in, such as digital strikes, emailing politicians, and setting up Zoom conference calls.

"Instead of coming out and striking in person, you can take a picture and post it online with hashtags," said Joe Hobbs, a Fridays for Future organizer. "Keep up the online striking. The real point is to show that you can still take action."

Beyond moving strikes online, many organizations are seeing the forced downtime as an opportunity to get more people involved - and to regroup. Increased social isolation means they have the opportunity to strengthen and educate many of the new and existing members who were inspired by the protests last year.

"We've been going so quickly since this all took off," said Bryan from 350.org. "Every month there's been big strikes, we had the mass demonstration last September, so that actually we haven't had much chance to stop and take stock. The fact that we're all going to be sitting at home online actually means we could build more of a global community."

This means working to educate people on the causes and consequences of climate change and developing common narratives about specific issues. To this end, 350.org is currently putting together a digital "quarantine pack" with movies, podcasts, articles and online training focused on issues such as fossil fuel financing that people will be able to access from home.

Sunrise Movement is getting ready to launch online programming for people to get involved and learn more about the economy, climate change and the Green New Deal.

Even though much of their work already takes place over the internet, "we are going to be experimenting with new digital tools for putting pressure on elected officials and shifting the narrative over the coming months, even as people are in quarantine," a Sunrise press spokesperson told HuffPost.

Next week Sunrise will also launch "Sunrise School," a series of online classes to train high school and college students on organizing and campaigning tactics.

Extinction Rebellion, the U.K. based group that has engaged in civic disruption actions such as blocking five of central London's bridges in 2018, is currently designing an online platform ― "This is not a joke"― with supportive resources to help people through the current pandemic and also help them engage more with the climate crisis.

The immediate needs of the coronavirus take precedent for the group. But it also sees the current culture of providing mutual aid and solidarity as something that can be built upon to combat the climate crisis.

"We don't need to return to a system that doesn't value our health or those of our communities but instead values our economy," said Vish Chauhan, a former emergency medicine doctor who now works for Extinction Rebellion. "The other health crisis that is coming doesn't have a peak - it's called the climate crisis. We have the opportunity now to create a regenerative system that takes care of us all."

The current pandemic's connection to the climate crisis is also not going unnoticed. For climate activists, the coronavirus outbreak and the economic consequences it brings strengthen the need for clear and urgent action on climate change.

Scientists have linked climate change to an increased frequency of disease outbreaks . Experts also say that air pollution caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal is likely to increase the death rate from coronavirus infections.

" Many scientists say the climate crisis will cause more pandemics and illnesses, and the impacts of the climate crisis will cause huge disruptions to people," said Bryan from 350.org. "Having witnessed the disruption this has caused, let's try and future-proof our globe."

While activist groups move from mass marches to mass online mobilization, details are still being hammered out. But the current pandemic - and the economic measures being debated now in Congress and around the world for bailing out some of the largest polluters, such as the oil industry and the aviation sector - might end up providing the sharpest angle for climate activism in the weeks and months to come.

"There has never been a clearer case for why we need a kind of economy based on care and compassion that the Green New Deal is all about," a Sunrise spokesperson told HuffPost. "There's gonna be a big choice that we have to make as a country in the face of this crisis. Who do we take care of - and who do we protect? Is it working people who are losing their health care and their jobs and their livelihoods, or are we going to bail out some of the wealthiest among us and the people driving the climate crisis?"

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How To Be A Climate Activist During A Pandemic

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April was supposed to be a huge month for climate action. The plan was to have a month of global mobilization with thousands of protests and events planned by almost 1 million different organizations working together. Activists had hoped to build on the success of last September's worldwide climate strikes, which saw 8 million people take to the streets to demand action .

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Coronavirus Halts Street Protests, But Climate Activists Have A Plan

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Coronavirus Halts Street Protests, But Climate Activists Have A Plan

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It also comes at a crucial time. With a presidential election in the United States this year, activists had hoped to raise the profile of climate change on the public agenda. And, just days after the election, world leaders are scheduled to gather in Glasgow for United Nations-led climate talks where presidents and prime ministers will face pressure to get more ambitious about reining in greenhouse gas emissions.

Fridays for Future called preliminary online protests last week a success. Activists posted from bedrooms, gardens and balconies overlooking empty streets. Families joined in. In one video posted on TikTok, a father tucked his daughter into bed, leaving her alone with a climate monster in her closet.

Some experts, however, said reaching world leaders and the general public would be more difficult now as the pandemic shuts down large parts of public life.

"What you're going to end up doing is amplifying within an echo chamber, which is really different from what the movement wants," said Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on activism. Twitter hashtags, like #ClimateStrikeOnline and #DigitalClimateStrike, are far less visible than huge crowds in the streets, she said.

Still, Dr. Fisher noted, the young people leading climate protests are highly effective at using social media to build their movement.

That was echoed by Ms. O'Connor, the Irish activist, who said she had noticed new faces in online protests messages that she hadn't seen at her group's weekly gatherings in Cork. She said Fridays for Future organizers were adaptable and prepared to adjust strategy as necessary. "Intersecting crises will be a feature of our times," Ms. O'Connor said. "We can't let one stop action on the other."

Ms. Palmer said she hoped public demonstrations would resume before the United Nations conference in November. If not, she said, respecting advice to stay off the streets for the sake of older people, for whom coronavirus exposure is especially dangerous, would still come first.

"And that's also how we want the older generation to feel toward young people," Ms. Palmer said. "We want them to make the effort to save the planet for us in that same way."
For more climate news sign up for the Climate Fwd: newsletter or follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Coronavirus Halts Street Protests, but Climate Activists Have a Plan

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It also comes at a crucial time. With a presidential election in the United States this year, activists had hoped to raise the profile of climate change on the public agenda. And, just days after the election, world leaders are scheduled to gather in Glasgow for United Nations-led climate talks where presidents and prime ministers will face pressure to get more ambitious about reining in greenhouse gas emissions.

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44. Kardashians React to Scandalous Tabloid Stories About Them

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44. Kardashians React to Scandalous Tabloid Stories About Them

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'A lot of people rely on the Tabloids to get pretty inaccurate information and answers'. The Kardashian family are one who have to put up with false news headlines on an almost day-to-day basis, and it's interesting to see how this impacts them. Whilst looking at celebrity experience of fake news, I have also begun to consider how this fake news reduces their control over their public image and is powerful despite the fact that they can post their own representation on social media.

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KUWTK | Kardashians React to Scandalous Tabloid Stories About Them | E!

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26. How Social Media Influences us to Buy

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26. How Social Media Influences us to Buy

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Social Media is a big part of our lives. At least, if you are to believe the statistics, it's a big part of our lives:

Social media has a significant impact on the way we live our lives. And, according to a recent article in The Washington Post, our friends' posts are also compelling us to buy more and more.

There are a number of factors (both internally and externally) that compel us to consume in the society we live in. Social media is certainly one of the leading causes and it's worthwhile to point out why.

Here is how social media influences us to buy:

Personal Spending is More Visible. This is the argument from the article above. It states, "Humans are social creatures, and we have a tendency to evaluate our own standing in life relative to how our friends and neighbors are doing. We want to keep up with the Joneses, and stay ahead of the Smiths. Because of this, when we see other people spending money, we have a tendency to think that we can - or should - be spending, too." No doubt this is true! Seeing others spend money on things (houses, food, vacations), subtly prompts us to do the same.

More (and Better Targeted) Advertising. Every media platform provides opportunity for advertising (television, newspaper, radio, magazines, etc.) and each provide some level of targeting (a reader of SHAPE Magazinewill see different ads than a reader of National Geographic). But no platform in history has provided opportunity for targeted advertising like social media. As Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, (even Amazon) collect more and more personal data about us, the ads we see become more and more relevant as companies use that data to pick and choose who sees their ads.

Convenience of Shopping from Your Device. Social media advertising is also more effective because the opportunity to purchase is immediate. In the old days, if you saw an advertisement on television, you'd need to remember it for the next time you drove to the store. to buy it. This inconvenience slowed the effectiveness of those ads. But nowadays, the friction has been removed. We see an ad on social media and are immediately offered the opportunity to purchase the item in a matter of seconds with just a few clicks.

Chasing "Likes." Not only does what we see about others on social media influence us to buy, but often times we buy because of what we want others to see about us. It's just too easy to fall into the trap of chasing likes and followers on social media-the creators reward us for it. Nice things, trending products, fancy destinations, and fine food & drink play well on social media. Most of us know that, and spend more than we should, just to impress people on social media. But there are better ways to impress others.

The Fiction We Share Online. Social media feeds are fictionized versions of the real person. Think about it. Nobody posts photos from their bad-hair day on social media or shares their deepest struggles and problems. Instead, we present a mostly made-up version of ourselves to others. These fictionized versions of people that we encounter for two hours every day online paint an unrealistic version of what life looks like. When we begin comparing our lives to theirs, we begin chasing an idealized life-often by believing if we spend more, we can attain it.

The Negative Emotions Stirred Up by Social Media. The studies have been conducted and the research is in. Social media does not, on the whole, make us feel better about ourselves. For many of the reasons stated above, social media users tend to report higher levels of depression, loneliness, and lower self-esteem. These emotions of isolation and discontent often result in retail therapy or seeking to overcome our discontent with consumer-based purchases.

Influencers and Their Influence. It doesn't take long for a new company or product to get recognized by making a splash on social media. Companies and brands who used to spend time and money and goodwill building a brand can accomplish it now in less than 24 hours. Influencers are available for hire and can almost immediately spark conversation around a new trend. But just because someone has paid a well-known influencer to take a picture with their new purse or line of shoes does not mean it is something needed in our life today-or ever.

Social media, it seems to me, is here to stay. And the platforms that are being built and expanding offer wonderful opportunities to enrich our lives.

But just like the invention of fire, it is going to take some time for society to figure how to use them for good and not harm. My hope with this article is to expose some of the dangers of social media-so we can all live a bit more intentionally going forward.

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Social Media is a big part of our lives. At least, if you are to believe the statistics, it's a big part of our lives: Social media has a significant impact on the way we live our lives. And, according to a recent article in The Washington Post, our friends' posts are also compelling us to buy more and more.

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37. Do Celebrities Have a right to Privacy?

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37. Do Celebrities Have a right to Privacy?

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A quick online search of almost any celebrity will reveal a litany of stories and images - from red carpet appearances to what they eat for breakfast. These may have been published and shared by thousands of people - and seen by many more.
The media interest in publishing such stories and images is clear, but digital technology means that celebrities' personal and professional lives are now scrutinised more than ever before. This poses the question: do celebrities have a right to privacy, and if so, how far are we going to protect it?

Privacy and Public Interest - A Balancing Act

The Human Rights Convention guarantees everyone's right to privacy, as well as their right to free expression. Since the Human Rights Act came into force in 2000, people have been able to assert these rights before the UK courts. However, both rights are qualified (or restricted) rights - meaning they can be limited in certain situations. For example, if a story is in the public interest, a judge may rule that the celebrity's right to privacy should be limited for the greater purpose of informing the public.

In the case of celebrity stories or photographs, Articles 8 (privacy) and 10 (expression) often come into conflict. The rights to privacy and free expression are of equal importance legally, so it can be a challenge to strike a balance between them.

Kate Middleton: An Example

In 2012, topless photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge appeared on the front cover of a French magazine. The pictures, showing the Royal couple relaxing at a private villa, had been taken from a distance with a long-lens camera. A Palace statement described the use of the images as "reminiscent of the worst excesses of the press and paparazzi during the life of Diana, Princess of Wales". The magazine nonetheless argued there was a public interest in the relationship of future heirs to the throne.

The French court decided in favour of the Duke and Duchess and awarded compensation, showing that a distinction should be made between what the public are interested in and what is actually in the public interest. While many people may wonder what Royalty get up to on holiday, this is not enough to justify the invasion of privacy that the taking of clandestine photos leads to.

The Dilemma

Image credit: stanhua / Flickr.com

Unlike private citizens, celebrities need to attract media attention in order to promote their work - perhaps their latest film or your favourite Netflix series. This leads people, and often newspapers, to question whether they are in any position to criticise the media attention that surrounds them. JK Rowling has described a common attitude of "you're famous, you're asking for it".

An example is found in the case concerning the actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The couple had sold the exclusive right to publish their wedding photos to OK! Magazine. However, Hello! Magazine had secretly obtained photos and published them first.

Because the couple had sold the rights to publish photos, this presented a tension in asserting their right to privacy before the courts. At the UK High Court, Mr Justice Lindsay ruled that the intrusion on their privacy was not justified. However, in a blow to right to privacy campaigners, he stressed that his ruling was based on the grounds of commercial confidentiality, not the right to privacy.

New Problems

The real problem may no longer lie with newspaper editors in print, but with private individuals online.

In a case known as an injunction was granted and upheld to prevent the publication of a story detailing the sexual encounters of an individual married to someone in the entertainment industry. Lord Mance, one of the Supreme Court Justices, confirmed that "there is no public interest (however much it may be of interest to some members of the public) in publishing kiss-and-tell stories" and nor is there any "right to invade privacy by publishing them".

People were quick to point out that had been named online multiple times, raising doubt as to whether an injunction was effective at all. This presents an altogether different problem: what remedy should be available to celebrities when a private citizen invades their privacy?

Human rights are just that - they apply to us all. The question today is not whether celebrities have a right to privacy, but how the balance should be struck between privacy and free expression. Social media has given us an even greater platform to exercise our freedom of expression, but our article 8 right to privacy remains just as important.

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Do Celebrities Have a Right to Privacy? - EachOther

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A quick online search of almost any celebrity will reveal a litany of stories and images - from red carpet appearances to what they eat for breakfast. These may have been published and shared by thousands of people - and seen by many more.