I traveled once to Tripoli to interview Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Colleagues and I met him in a Bedouin tent under a full moon on the grounds of Bab al-Azizya, his walled barracks. He was a man who both courted … Read more
Zeynep Tufekci is a scholar of social movements and the technologies on which they rely. In “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” published May 16 by Yale University Press, she … Read more
Twitter has been enjoying more than a moment recently, most notably whenever President Trump tweets. Yet, 11 years after its founding and at a time when tweets are must-reads and a tool for journalists on beats from Hollywood to D.C., … Read more
One way to think of the job journalism does is telling a community about itself, and on those terms the American media failed spectacularly this election cycle. That Donald Trump’s victory came as such a surprise—a systemic shock, really—to both … Read more
Everyone has a story along the lines of mine. At a family gathering in October, I was chatting with a cousin about the campaign, and, since we didn’t see it quite the same way, each of us was speaking delicately. Read more
As I sat down to write this, I heard a gunshot. Two seconds later, another shot. Two more seconds, another. Then silence. Six months ago, in Los Angeles, the sound of gunshots would have meant two things: a crime, or … Read more
A couple months before Indonesia’s presidential election last July, all the members of the VIVAnews editorial board received a strongly-worded e-mail. The sender was the popular news site’s boss, Anindra Ardiansyah Bakrie, known as “Ardie,” the son of Indonesian … Read more
Actually, it’s about ethics in games journalism.” Earlier this year, this simple sentence came to encapsulate a vicious online debate. Was the social media storm known as “GamerGate” an honest attempt to expose the cozy relationship between the video … Read more
At a March 2013 meeting in Doha, Qatar, in which press freedom activists gathered to develop a strategy for responding to the violence in Syria, a heated discussion broke out about what constitutes journalism in an environment in which … Read more
Jonathan Zittrain is a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who examines issues of privacy and fairness in the digital world. He is co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society and of Chilling … Read more
