Month: December 2019
The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing
Quick: Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, other than your old Facebook photos? How about something you’ve written? Maybe some old sent emails in Gmail or old Gchats? But what about anything NOT on Facebook or Google? Most likely, you have some…
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Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us
Laurent Hrybyk for BuzzFeed News In April 1997, Wired magazine published a feature with the grand and regrettable title “Birth of a Digital Nation.” It was a good time to make sweeping, sunny pronouncements about the future of the United States and technology. The US stood alone astride the globe.…
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“I Found Election Interference And No One Cared”: One US Veteran’s Fight To Protect His Compatriots Online
Holly Pickett for BuzzFeed News With Frosting the dog keeping him company, Kristofer Goldsmith checks messages from a Facebook scammer who contacted him impersonating a fellow veteran. On Nov. 13, US Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and diplomat George Kent appeared in front of a full gallery of press and…
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Trump Retweeted The Name Of The Alleged Whistleblower
On Friday, a few minutes before midnight in Washington, DC, President Donald Trump retweeted a message to his 68 million followers that named the alleged whistleblower. It was an escalation from the president, who has until this week refrained from publicly disclosing the name of a CIA officer that has…
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Right-Wing Publishers Have Found A Way To Post The Supposed Trump Whistleblower’s Name To Facebook
Facebook told BuzzFeed News in November that it would be removing content that featured the name of the CIA officer and former National Security Council staffer whom prominent Republicans have claimed for months is the whistleblower whose anonymous complaint sparked the president’s impeachment. Except the name is still all over…
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The Rise — And Rise — Of Mass Surveillance
Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg via Getty Images A police officer walks past surveillance cameras mounted on posts at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. We live in a world where school cameras monitor children’s emotions, countries collect people’s DNA en masse, and no digital communication seems truly private. In response, we use encrypted chat…
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