The launch of “Truth Social” is the latest episode in the sorry saga of Donald Trump and social media, but one which implicates new sites and actors in platform governance, including app stores. Will it go the way of Parler? — The following piece anticipates and incorporates forthcoming work with Jessica Morley and Luciano Floridi, the ideas presented here have benefited from recent conversations with Corinne Cath-Speth and Emmie Hine, and I am as usual indebted to Nayana Prakash for the space to hash these and other issues out on our…

On the evening of November 8th 2016 I was sitting with friends in a Somerville, Massachusetts apartment feeling nervous but hopeful. …

The slow, deliberative nature of representative democracy seems ill-suited to the urgency of the present moment. Can it survive the new politics of speed? This blog post has benefited from helpful discussion with the ever-insightful Jessica Morley. Deliberativeness: vice or virtue? In “Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed”, an article published in the…

So that’s the end of that. After three-and-a-half years of bitter wrangling—an argument foisted on the nation, like a crying baby, after three decades or so of bitter wrangling within the Tory party—Britain will leave the European Union later this week, not with a bang, nor even a bong. I…

The year is 2024, and in his final speech on the eve of the general election, standing next to his wife Carrie Symonds, Boris Johnson “channels the spirit of Churchill”, as the Sun puts it, asking voters for a second term so that he can “complete the Brexit miracle.” It…

I’m coming to the end of my first year* as a PhD student at Oxford University’s Internet Institute. It has been a challenging year, in ways both foreseen and not, but it has also been an endlessly fascinating, thought-provoking and perspective-shifting experience. Doing a PhD is such a personal experience…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a “democratic deficit” — and maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. As Jonnie Penn and others have argued, AI, in conception and application, has long been bound up with the logic and operations of big business. Today, we find AI put to use in an increasing…

Spoiler alert: He doesn’t die. Rare is the film review that needs to start with a spoiler alert for something which *doesn’t* happen. But so it is for Free Solo, the extraordinary new documentary profiling lifelong climber Alex Honnold as he embarks on an unprecedented feat: scaling Yosemite’s daunting, thousand-metre-high…

Several weeks on from the initial story breaking, we are still feeling the fallout of revelations that data gathered from unwitting Facebook users was used to build a system allegedly to target individual American voters. As well as taking billions of dollars from Facebook’s stock price and perhaps a few…