Astroturfing

Agriculture chemicals and seed company Nufarm Limited(ASX: NUF) will get some unwanted attention this morning from a report that it made a donation to a controversial public relations campaign to derail attempts to ban the use of glyphosate in Europe. The gl…

A Scottish managed services provider is running a lucrative sideline in ransomware decryption however, a sting operation by a security firm appears to show that decryption merely means paying off the malware's masterminds. The services provider, Red Mosquito…

I recently sat with Ken Bauer and had a great chat about using social media in courses to achieve numerous benefits for our students. I know I am not the only professional who has become rather frustrated with social media, especially in this era of fake news…

You may recall that a few weeks ago, a Koch brothers spokeswoman announced that their network is now willing to finance political campaigns for Democrats who are "in step with Koch policies." Koch policies? Koch policies are first and foremost their busines…

Building to Code is a monthly column about how we live among cities and each other. It regards cities as what theyve always been: not systems of capitalist resource management, but the stages that society plays out on. Recently on the Current Affairs podcast…

In mid-June 2019, readers searched the Snopes.com website hoping for verification of a headline: Donald Trump Campaign Offered Actors $50 to Cheer for Him at Presidential Announcement. The headline is attached to a 2015 story that was buried in the flurry of …

Broke: Survey questions, supplemented by a layer of latent data that gave correlational guidance at the group level but not precise individual targeting Woke: User generated, persistent data collection. The always-on trail of harvestable imprints, scored to …

Housing is a serious issue across the country, and here in Minneapolis there has been a big discussion about new zoning policies that could be a model for cities everywhere.  In true midwestern fashion, the favored way to fight this out on the ground is the …

Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist and associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, told Sputnik that Israel spends $1 million a year on an online influence campaign aimed at slowing the momentum of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movem…

Online journalist Maria Ressa, Class of 1986, knows the best and the worst of social media.  It helped drive the Philippines-based news site she co-founded, called Rappler, to 300% growth rates in its early years. Today, she warns that the weaponization of so…