June 17, 1972: Five burglars are caught breaking into the Democractic National Commitee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex trying to steal documents and installing devices for wiretapping phones. The Watergate scandals unfolds. President Richard Nixon has to hand over tapes of conversations he recorded in the White House. An 18…

Media report that after Kylie Jenner had tweeted to her 24 million followers that she does not “open Snapchat anymore”, the company’s stock market value dropped by six percent from US$18.64 to US$17.51 per share. How can such a drop be explained? Do tweets steer financial markets? …

How Karl Marx helps us to understand Germany’s new digital ideology What Is Industry 4.0? In the past five years, there has been much talk in the world of digital media about “industry 4.0” and the “industrial Internet” as constituting the fourth industrial revolution. Especially in Germany, a vivid public…

Joachim C. Fest published one of the most widely read Hitler biographies in 1973. Are there parallels of its analytical approach to Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”? Joachim C. Fest’s Analysis of Hitler Demagogues, who are entangled into history’s negative dialectics, attract a massive…

Companies and the UK government pulled advertisements from YouTube after it had been revealed that some of these organisation’s ads were presented together with videos featuring anti-Semitism, white supremacist ideology, hate speech inciting violence, and right-wing extremism. Organisations that have removed ad investments from YouTube include Audi, BBC, Channel 4…

Christian Fuchs First published in The Conversation CC-BY-ND Since Edward Snowden revealed the existence of internet surveillance programmes such as XKeyScore, Prism and Tempora, there have been many discussions of digital snooping and its implications for privacy, freedom and civil rights. Public discourse has focused on the dangers of the…

Christian Fuchs First published in The Conversation CC-BY-ND There are as yet unconfirmed reports that Twitter plans to extend its 140 character limit to 10,000. But why would Twitter consider radically changing its most unique characteristic? Today’s media culture is one of extreme speed and ephemerality – facts and factoids…

Right-Wing Extremism 2.0: The Austrian Presidential Election on Social Media By Christian Fuchs CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Austria is a small country in the heart of Europe with about 8.7 million inhabitants. In international news coverage, you can normally not find much about Austria. But this small country has made it…