The European Union was the first group of countries to make tech companies understand they cannot do whatever they want. …
It always starts simply: something falls on your lap, and you are unsure about it. During more peaceful times, or you’d shrug off if it’s not a life and death matter and move ahead. But we are not living quiet times. …
Information systems will be born from the ashes of the media obliterated by digital, a broader, decentralised, reshuffled replacement. But that won’t come easily.
Two stakeholders determined the whole Western post-industrial agenda: the elites and the media. They intermingled, most of the time, the latter has been controlled by the…
Guess what: last week, the discussion around the lack of transparency at the most prominent content platform in the world stood alive and kicking. The fire came from all sides, starting with accusations regarding the seriousness of the Covid-19 vaccine hoaxes circulating at the tech giant until the blocking of…
We’re building a team
Back in 2011, I was localising a platform of crowdsourced journalism for Yahoo in Brazil. I wanted to ensure our audiences that there would be checks and balances over the content they interacted with. That’s how I first tried to understand why one would believe what…
Last week, Apple and Facebook, once again, starred controversial events that, theoretically, they should be entitled to do. Facebook shut down a project to allow researchers to study political ads. At the same time, Apple decided to scan users’ content to find pedophiliac content coming from a database provided by…
The break of news raising doubts over the security of open-source software sent shockwaves through the technology realm, more specifically for the communities developing it. Open-source code is sacred for such communities, made of millions of people that work for free in the name of a highly hippish, nearly Marxist…
Whenever some disinformation event, agent or consequence comes into question, it’s very unlikely that the scapegoats are not the technology companies, politicians or the state. This is a too-narrow vision. Those are often the agents exploiting a societal weakness, yes, but they are symptoms of that weakness. They should not…
Russians. UKIP. Trump. Marine Le Pen. Bolsonaro. These are some of the names we often relate to disinformation, frequently accused of manipulating data. The shady, right-wing, unscrupulous, tyrant-wannabe actors are definitely guilty. But even if they indeed take (or took at some point) advantage of misguiding data, they are not…
