Overview: Politics

Algorithms quietly make a myriad decisions for us each day... Perhaps most importantly, these algorithms decide what we see online and how much we are aware of what is going on in the world around us... Today's digital assistants are designed to abstract ever further away from pages of links towards synthesizing information on our behalf... What …

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With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

The European Political Strategy Centre gathered a select group of leading international academics to provide input to the ongoing public consultation on a regulatory environment for online platforms.

the federal government hopes to unveil a "model state policy" on self-driving cars that would offer "a path to consistent national policy,"

The job of politics... finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction... I blame the internet ... You can’t take on inequality and injustice with a coalition of people who use the same slang, listen to the same music, and post the same emojis that you do.You have to be willing t…

Plebiscite-pushers have got Europe's voters hooked on the cheap rush of direct democracy

The loss of state control, the fragility of EU institutions, and the rise of populism could bring about a disintegration process in Schengen, the eurozone or "even the Single Market", according to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2016.

The future of the EU is interesting, because it cannot make any significant decisions now, and it cannot decide to dissolve. What will happen is what is happening now: less and less does Europe make decisions, and when it does, European states pay less and less attention to them... Buildings in Brussels continue to issue edicts, and everybody else…

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

carmakers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.

the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.”... Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America... morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” ... that just doesn’t “get it,” ... not as intelligent as “us.”…

On Tuesday, the American people will see a multi-platform streaming and social broadcast of the State of the Union that reflects the ways people experience live events in 2016. We’ll be reaching people where they are — and making it possible for them to engage, respond, and share the President’s speech themselves in new and different ways... vide…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

from a locked-down Brussels to a grieving Paris to a refugee camp in Greece, Henry Porter reports on the European Union’s existential crisis.

The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center. Topics in American life that once were the legitimate subjects of debate between liberals and conservative are now off-limits and lead to immediate attack by the cultural establishment if raised at all. An…

As Jeffrey Goldberg just tweeted, "Donald Trump is now an actual threat to national security"... we will be changing how we cover him at The Huffington Post. Back in July, we announced our decision to put our coverage of Trump's presidential campaign in our Entertainment section ... "Trump's campaign is a sideshow."Since then Trump's campaign …

society had a pretty straightforward system of rewards: you give us something of value, and we’ll heap praise on you. It’s a fair trade ... that most social media gurus ... are unwilling to make ... insist on trying to “hack” the system... sheer laziness... shortcuts to notoriety rather than slowly, painstakingly, lovingly crafting something of va…

Attacks by Islamic militants, unjustified arrests, assaults, harassment, threats and tougher legal restrictions made it harder for editors, reporters and photographers to hold the powerful to account across the region this year, according to media organizations and NGOs.Hopes that politicians would increase protections for independent media after …

If there’s anything that goes some way to explaining Trump’s popularity in the midst of his quasi-fascistic views that reached a nadir with his call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, it is his social media prowess. Trump has more than 5.5 million Twitter followers and 4.5 million Facebook fans. He has a presence across YouTube, V…

If I’d told you last Christmas that the leading contender for President of the richest and most powerful country on the globe had openly said that he was OK with armbands, internment camps, extra-judicial bans, and blood rights, unless you were a card-carrying member of Conspiracy Theorists International, you probably would have laughed at me.

We are creating open-source tools and resources for publishers of all sizes to build better communities around their journalism. We also collect, support, and share practices, tools, and studies to improve communities on the web. All of our tools are open source and free... small, flexible tools that plug into each other and also work with exist…

BuzzFeed is perhaps the most prominent outlet yet to promise sponsored content for political candidates.... will create and sell native advertising for office seekers in 2016, a potentially lucrative move in an election cycle that is expected to see $1 billion spent on digital ads, up from just $22 million in 2008. The move could herald in a new m…

it is close to impossible to report well on the European Union. The bureaucratic monster only makes great news when it fails, and even then either you, your editor, or your audience will misunderstand the reasons why.

taking us towards what an American legal scholar, Frank Pasquale, has christened the “black box society”... subtitle – “the secret algorithms that control money and information” ... it’s not just about money and information but increasingly about most aspects of contemporary life... we know that Facebook algorithms can influence the moods and t…

When EU tried to create its own platforms directly, “it was spectacularly bad. It tried to create its own version of Google, called Quaero... Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.”... there a…

If there was an idea that could ‘fix’ democracy, it would have been thought-up already... When I started working on GovTrack, I thought I was building an accountability tool. If only the American public had more information they could head-off failures in government by voting more effectively in elections. ... I was wrong. The world is complic…

most politics coverage is about politicians, not the things I care about and the actions I could take... Political journalism could imagine the audience as agents, people who act. Political journalism could be genuinely empowering, if it started from the concerns of the people it’s supposed to serve and not the spectacle of elections... In t…

Over 40 new resources ... some great longreads to enjoy as the nights grow long, the productivity tips you’ll need to find the time to read them, and a free set of steak knives. The Christmas season, after all, is almost upon us.

true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction... Bostrom is arguably the leading transhumanist philosopher today... bringing order to ideas that might o…