Category Archives: digital home

Arctic shipping isn’t economical — yet

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All this talk about Occupy Greenland this week got me reading this 2013 report from the US Naval Institute about the harsh realities about shipping goods across the Arctic seas. The TL;DR: shipping loads of containers across the top of the world, while shorter in distance than sending it through Panama and Suez — isn’t necessarily cheaper when you do the basic math. Here is why:

First off, the problem is that the typical container ships are huge, and they come that way for a simple reason: the more they carry, the cheaper the cost per container to send it from one port to another. The smaller container ships that could be run in the Arctic are because the ice breakers aren’t as wide. There are also shallower channels that restrict the size of these ships when compared to the global routes. When you add all these factors up, a container going through the Arctic will cost more than twice as much as sending it “the long way around.”

Second, the Arctic isn’t ice-free year round. In actuality, even with global warming, routes are ice-free for only a third of the year, and sometimes less. On top of this, weather conditions can change quickly. Global shipping depends on tight schedules. These also involve making several stops along the way to supply just-in-time manufacturing systems, and spreading the costs of shipping across the route. A typical 40-some-day trip from the eastern US to Asia route is shared by a series of six ships making regular stops. This is called the network effect. Going across the Arctic would not have as many intermediate stops.

But what about other kinds of shipping, such as minerals or energy products that come from Arctic sources? It is possible, but still depends on all sorts of infrastructure to extract and load this material — which does not exist and probably won’t for quite some time.

Finally, with or without Greenland, to send stuff across the Arctic isn’t the same as crossing the Pacific or Atlantic oceans because the connectivity is poor. A typical route has to transit a series of narrow straits that is currently claimed by Russia, with high fees to move through these straits.

“Arctic routes do not now offer an attractive alternative to the more traditional maritime avenues, and are highly unlikely to do so in the future,” the report concludes. And while things have changed somewhat since this report was written, the factors cited above are still valid.

Beware of evil twin misinformation websites

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Among the confusion over whether the US government is actively working to prevent Russian cyberthreats comes a new present from the folks that brought you the Doppelganger attacks of last year. There are at least two criminal gangs involved, Struktura and Social Design Agency. As you might guess, these have Russian state-sponsored origins. Sadly, they are back in business, after being brought down by the US DoJ last year, back when we were more clear-headed about stopping Russian cybercriminals.

Doppelganger got its name because the attack combines a collection of tools to fool visitors into thinking they are browsing the legit website when they are looking at a malware-laced trap. These tools include cybersquatting domain names (names that are close replicas of the real websites) and using various cloaking services to post on discussion boards along with bot-net driven social media profiles, AI-generated videos and paid banner ads to amplify their content and reach. The targets are news-oriented sites and the goal is to gain your trust and steal your money and identity. A side bonus is that they spread a variety of pro-Russian misinformation along the way.

Despite the fall 2024 takedowns, the group is once again active, this time after hiring a bunch of foreign speakers in several languages, including French, German, Polish, and Hebrew. DFRLab has this report about these activities.They show a screencap of a typical post, which often have four images with captions as their page style:

These pages are quickly generated. The researchers found sites with hundreds of them created within a few minutes, along with appending popular hashtags to amplify their reach. They found millions of views across various TikTok accounts, for example. “During our sampling period, we documented 9,184 [Twitter] accounts that posted 10,066 of these posts. Many of these accounts were banned soon after they began posting, but the campaign consistently replaces them with new accounts.” Therein lies the challenge: this group is very good at keeping up with the blockers.

The EU has been tracking Doppleganger but hasn’t yet updated its otherwise excellent page here with these latest multi-lingual developments.

The Doppelganger group’s fraud pattern is a bit different from other misinformation campaigns that I have written about previously, such as fake hyperlocal news sites that are primarily aimed at ad click fraud. My 2020 column for Avast has tips on how you can spot these fakers. And remember back in the day when  Facebook actually cared about “inauthentic behavior”? One of Meta’s reports found these campaigns linked to Wagner group, Russia’s no-longer favorite mercenaries.

It seems so quaint viewed in today’s light, where the job of content moderator — and apparently government cyber defenders — have gone the way of the digital dustbin.

The case for saving disappearing government data

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With every change in federal political representation comes the potential for data loss collected by the previous administration. But what we are seeing now is wholesale “delete now, ask questions later” thanks to various White House executive orders and over-eager private institutions rushing to comply. This is folly, and I’ll explain my history with data-driven policymaking that goes back to the late 1970s, with my first post-graduate job working in Washington DC for a consulting firm.

The firm was hired by the Department of the Interior to build an economic model that compared the benefit of the Tellico Dam, under construction in Tennessee, with the benefit of saving a small fish that was endangered by its eventual operation called the snail darter. At the time we were engaged by the department of the Interior, the dam was mostly built but hadn’t yet started flooding its reservoir. Our model showed more benefit of the dam than from the fish, and was part of a protracted debate within Congress over what to do about finishing the project. Eventually, the dam was finished and the fish was transplanted to another river, but not before the Supreme Court and several votes were cast.

In graduate school, I was trained to build these mathematical models and to get more involved in how to support data-driven policies. Eventually, I would work for Congress itself, a small agency called the Office of Technology Assessment. That link will take you to two reports that I helped write on various issues concerning electric utilities. OTA was a curious federal agency that was designed from the get-go to be bicameral and bipartisan to help craft better data-driven policies. The archive of reports is said to be “the best nonpartisan, objective and thorough analysis of the scientific and technical policy issues” of that era. An era that we can only see receding in the rear-view mirror.

OTA eventually was caught in political crossfire and was eliminated in the 1990s during the Reagan administration. Its removal might remind you of other agencies that are on their own endangered species list.

I mention this historical footnote as a foundation to talk about what is happening today. The notion of data-driven policies may be thought of as harking back to when buggy-whips existed. But what is going on now is much more than eliminating people who work in this capacity across our government. It is deleting data that was bought and paid for by taxpayers, data that is unique and often not available elsewhere, data that represents historical trends and can be useful to analyze whether policies are effective. This data is used by many outside of the federal agencies that collected them, such as figuring out where the next hurricane will hit and whether levees are built high enough.

Here are a few examples of recently disappearing databases:

Now, whether you agree with the policies that created these databases, you probably would agree that the taxpayer-funded investment of historical data should at least be preserved. As I said earlier, any change of federal administration has been followed by data loss. This has been documented by Tara Calishain here. She tells me what is different this time is that the number of imperiled data is more numerous and that more people are now paying attention, doing more reporting on the situation.

There have been a number of private sector entities that have stepped up to save these data collections, including the Data Rescue Project, Data Curation Project, Research Data Access and Preservation Association and others. Many began several years ago and are sponsored by academic libraries and other research organizations, and all rely on volunteers to curate and collect the data. One such “rescue event” happened last week at Washington University here in St. Louis. The data that is being copied is arcane, such as from instruments that track purpose-driven small earthquakes deep underground in a French laboratory or collecting  crop utilization data.

I feel this is a great travesty, and I identify with these data rescue efforts personally. As someone who has seen my own work disappear because of a publication going dark or just changing the way they archive my stories, it is a constant effort on my part to preserve my own small corpus of business tech information that I have written for decades. (I am talking about you IDG. Sigh.) And it isn’t just author hubris that motivates me: once upon a time, I had a consulting job working for a patent lawyer. He found something that I wrote in the mid-1990s, after acquiring tech on eBay that could have bearing on their case. They flew me to try to show how it worked. But like so many things in tech, the hardware was useless without the underlying software, which was lost to the sands of time.

Don’t fall for this pig butchering scam

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A friend of mine recently fell victim to what is now called pig butchering. Jane, as I will call her, lives in St. Louis. She is a well-educated woman with multiple degrees and decades of management experience. But Jane is also out more than $30,000 and has had her life upended as a result of this experience, having to change bank accounts, email addresses and obtain a new phone number..

The term refers to a complex cybercrime operation that has at its heart the ability to control the victim and compel them to withdraw cash from their bank account and send it via bitcoin to the scammer. The reason why this scam works is because the victim is taking money from their account. The various fraud laws don’t cover you making this mistake. I will explain the details in a moment.

Many of us are familiar with the typical ransomware attacks, where the criminals receive the funds directly from their victims: these transactions might be anonymous but they are reversible. So let’s back up for a moment and track Jane’s actions leading up to the scam.

In Jane’s situation, the attack began when her computer received a warning message that it had been hacked and for her to call this phone number to disinfect it. Somehow, this malware was transmitted, typically via a phishing email. This is the weak point of the scam. Every day I get suspicious emails — most are caught by the spam filters, but occasionally things break through. As I was helping Jane get her life back on track, my inbox was flooded with email confirmations of an upcoming stay at a hotel. At one point, I think I had a dozen such “confirmations.” Perhaps the guest made a legitimate mistake and used my email address — but more likely, as these emails piled up, this was an attempted phishing scam. 

Anyway, back to Jane. She called the number and the attacker proceeded to convince her that she was the victim of a scammer — which ironically was true at the time, and probably the first and last thing he said that was true. Her computer was infected with all sorts of child porn, and she could be legally liable. She believed the scammer, and over the course of several hours, stayed on the phone with him as she got in her car, drove to her bank and withdrew her cash.

Now, in the cold light of a different day, Jane understands her mistake. “I was a lawyer. I should have recognized this was all a fabrication,” she told me, rather abashedly. “I should have known better but I was caught up in the high emotional drama at that moment and wasn’t thinking clearly.” Eventually, her attacker directed her to a bitcoin “ATM” where she could feed in her $100 bills and turn it into electrons of cybercurrency. Her attacker had thoughtfully sent her a QR code that contained his address. Think about that — she is standing in a convenience store, feeding $100 bills into this machine. That takes time. That takes determination. 

Jane is computer literate, but doesn’t bank online. She manages her investments the old-fashioned way: by calling her advisors or visiting them in person. She has a cellphone and a computer, and while I was helping her get her digital life back in order we were remembering where we were when we first used email many decades ago and how new and shiny it was before scammers roamed the interwebs.

So how did the scam unravel? After spending all afternoon on the phone, the scammer got greedy and wanted more fat on the pig, so to speak. She called him back on her special hotline number and he asked her to withdraw more money from her bank account. She went back to her bank, and fortunately got the same teller that she had the day before. He questioned her withdrawal and that brought the butcher shop operation to a halt when she revealed that she was being directed by the scammer.  

But now comes the aftermath, the digital cleanup in Aisle 7. And that will take time, and effort on Jane’s part to ensure that she has appropriate security and that her contact info is sent to the right places and people. But she is still out the funds. She knows now not to get caught up in the moment just because an email or a popup message tells her something. 

Avoiding pig butchering scams means paying attention when you are reading your email and texts. Don’t multitask, focus on each individual message. And when in doubt, just delete. 

Why we need more 15-minute neighborhoods

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I have split my years living part of the time in suburbs and part in urban areas. This is not counting two times that I lived in the LA area, which I don’t quite know how to quantify. I have learned that I like living in what urbanist researchers (as they are called) classify as a “15-minute neighborhood” — meaning that you can walk or bike to many of the things you need for your daily life within that time frame, which works out to about a mile or so walk and perhaps a three mile bike ride. I also define my neighborhood in St. Louis as walk-to-Whole Foods and walk-to-hospital, somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Why is this important? Several reasons. First, I don’t like being in a car. On my last residency in LA, I had a 35 mile commute, which could take anywhere from 40 minutes to hours, depending on traffic and natural accidents. At my wife’s suggestion, I turned that commute into a 27 mile car ride and got on my bike for the last (or first) leg. While that lengthened the commute, it got me to ride each day. Now my commute is going from one bedroom (the one I sleep in) to another (that I work in). Some weeks go by where I don’t even use the car.

Second, I like being able to walk to many city services, even apart from WF and the doctors. When the weather is better, I bike in Forest Park, which is about half a mile away and is a real joy for other reasons besides its road and path network.

This research paper, which came out last summer, called “A universal framework for inclusive 15-minute cities,” talks about ways to quantify things across cities and takes a deep dive into specifics. It comes with an interactive map of the world’s urban areas that I could spend a lot of time exploring. The cities are mostly red (if you live here in the States) or mostly blue (if you live in Europe and a few other places). The colors aren’t an indication of political bent but how close to that 15-minute ideal most of the neighborhoods that make up the city are. Here is a screencap of the Long Island neighborhood that I spent many years living in: the area shown includes both my home and office locations, and for the most part is a typical suburban slice.

 

The cells (which in this view are the walkable area from a center point) are mostly red in that area. Many commuters who worked in the city would take issue with the scores in this part of Long Island, which has one of the fastest travel times into Manhattan, and in my case, I could walk to the train within 15 or so minutes.

The paper brings up an important issue: cities to be useful and equitable have to be inclusive and have services spread across their footprints. Most don’t come close to this ideal. For the 15 minute figure to apply, you need density high enough where people don’t have to drive. The academics write, “the very notion of the 15-minute city can not be a one-size-fits-all solution and is not a viable option in areas with a too-low density and a pronounced sprawl.”

Ray Delahanty makes this point in his latest video where he focuses on Hoboken, New Jersey. (You should subscribe to his videos, where he talks about other urban transportation planning issues. They have a nice mix of entertaining travelogue and acerbic wit.)

Maybe what we need aren’t just more 15-minute neighborhoods, but better distribution of city services.

Time to pare down your mobile app portfolio

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When the iPhones and Android devices were first introduced, I recall the excitement. We would download apps willy-nilly, and many of them we would use maybe twice before souring on their bad or frustrating UX. The excitement was everywhere, and back in 2009, I attended the final presentations of a Washington University computer science class on how to develop new iOS apps. The class is still being taught today, and while 15 years may seem like a lifetime, we are still dealing with basic issues about app security and data privacy. With all the buzz surrounding DeepSeek this week comes the inevitable analysis by NowSecure about the major security and privacy flaws in its iOS app.

Ruh-oh. Danger Will Robinson! (Insert your favorite meme here.)

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So much for app excitement. I have come full circle: When I got my latest iPhone last year, I spent some time doing the opposite: paring down my apps to the barest minimum.

It is time to take another closer look at your app portfolio, and I suggest you spend part of your weekend doing some careful home screen editing. Now, I wasn’t one of the many millions (or so it seems) of folks who downloaded DeepSeek, or who freaked out when TikTok went down for a few hours and rushed to download Another Chinese Social Media App in its place.

But still. We should use the privacy abuses found in DeepSeek’s app as a teachable moment.

Your phone is the gateway to your life, to your electronic soul. It is also a major security sinkhole. It has become a major gateway for phishing attacks, because often we are scrolling around and not paying attention to what we are doing, especially when we get an “emergency” text or email.

But let’s talk about our apps. If you read the entire NowSecure report, you will see that you should run away from using the DeepSeek app. It will send your data across the intertubes unencrypted. When it does use encryption, it does so using older methods that are easily compromised, and has its keys hardcoded in the app making your data easy to read. It also hoovers up enough device fingerprinting info to track your movements. And its terms of service say quite plainly that all this information is sent to Chinese servers. Thanks, but no thanks.

Why did I initially pare down my apps last year?  I did this for a combination of reasons. First, it seemed like a good time to review all those cute icons and cut out the ones that were clogging my home screens. And I really wanted to get to a single screen, but accepted two screens full of apps. Also, I wasn’t comfortable with the level of private details that the bad apps were sending to their corporate overlords, or to data brokers, or to both.

To make it easier for your Great App Cull, I suggest the divide and conquer approach. I divided my apps into four categories:

Type 1 apps were those that I knew had major privacy concerns about, such as Facebook’s Messenger, Twitter, Google Meet and Maps . I am sure there were others that don’t immediately come to mind. You can debate whether the privacy concerns are real or not, but I think most of us would agree that DeepSeek would definitely fall into this bucket.

Type 2 were apps that really were so poorly designed that I would be better off using just the web versions, such as the T-Mobile and Instacart apps and several banking apps.

Type 3 were apps that I had to download to do some specific task, such as attend a conference, or because I used it maybe one or two times, such as the Bluesky app or the Ring camera app. These were also poorly designed.

Type 4 were apps that were no longer relevant to my life, such as to control my Ecobee thermostat in a place that I no longer lived, or to run a bunch of VPN apps that I was testing for CNN that I no longer used.

I am sure that years from now DeepSeek’s app will be a case study of what not to do to write secure mobile apps. This is why many countries and agencies have already banned its use on government-owned devices and why there is a bill before our Congress to do so.

How to best disconnect from Twitter

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Last month, I suggested that it is time to remove ourselves from Twitter. There are several ways to do this. You’ll see my process and you can make your own decisions. TL:DR is:

  • I stopped posting more than a year ago, but still kept my account to protect my brand as a placeholder.
  • I downloaded an archive of my tweets in multiple ways, and will tell you why this is necessary.
  • I then deleted all my tweets, using the Windows software from Cyd.social.
  • I also deleted the other digital effluvia of my account, including retweets, likes and follows).

Before we go down this journey, I would urge you all to read how to backup all of your social data, a blog that I wrote many years ago and have tried to keep current. If you haven’t ever done this, now is the time to create and download these archives. This should be a part of your regular backup processes of your data.

Backing up your social network data

That post will direct you to a particular link where you can prepare and then download an archive of each of your accounts. For Twitter, it might take a day or two to gather it together, but Twitter will send you an email when it is ready, and then you have a few days to download it. The others have somewhat different processes and schedules. You can pick and choose various options and data types to include in your archive: for example Google has dozens of services that may or may not be meaningful to save periodically.

But, and this is important: the archive of your tweets depends on having a working Twitter account. There is a page of HTML that will bring up a summary of your archive, but the tweets and follows and so forth have to exist online. It is a somewhat half-solution. I had a small hiccup with my archive that I will get to in a moment.

A better solution is to use one of the dedicated archive/deletion tools, and as I said, I ran Cyd.social, which logs into your Twitter account and then creates a complete offline archive. The hiccup was that Cyd didn’t like the very long file name that Twitter created, so I renamed it and that passed muster. Cyd uses this archive as a starting point to seek out and delete your content history.

There are two versions, as you can see from the screenshot: the free one will archive and delete all of your tweets. The paid version (which you can purchase an annual subscription initially for $36) will also allow you to be more selective and keep some of your tweets, and also delete other aspects of your account, such as followers, likes, and DMs.

I upgraded to the premium version so I could delete everything. I liked the design of the software, which tells you in advance what it is about to do to your account. Because Twitter has put in place rate limits to prevent these mass deletion operations, Cyd has to work around them and sometimes pauses during its housekeeping to foil these limitations.

One content type you might notice is not covered by Cyd is list management. I have quite a few lists, and ideally would like to convert them to followers on LinkedIn before I delete them, but I haven’t found a tool to do that.

Another thing that I noticed browsing my archive is how few of my words of wisdom were retweeted or liked. Almost all of them had no engagement whatsoever. You would think with all the years of using Twitter and various analysis tools I would have noticed this before now. Sigh.

I came across a free analysis tool from Cleve.AI that does summarize my LinkedIn activity. You can see an excerpt from my report below, which has a nice summary of my words of wisdom, shown below.

Best wishes and happy new year to you!

How to succeed at social media in this age of outrage

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Samuel Stroud, the British blogger behind GiraffeSocial has posted a column taking a closer look at how TikTok’s algorithm works — at least how he thinks it works. But that isn’t the point of the post for you, dear reader: he has some good advice on how to improve your own social media content, regardless of where it lands, and how it is constructed.

Before I get to his suggestions, I should first turn to why I used the word outrage in my hed. This is because a new Tulane University study shows that people are more likely to interact with online content that challenges their views, rather than agrees with them. In other words, they are driven by outrage. This is especially true when it comes to political engagement, which often stems from anger, and fuels a vicious cycle. I realize that this isn’t news to many of you. But do keep this in mind as you read through some of Stroud’s suggestions.

You might still be using Twitter, for all I know, and are about to witness yet another trolling of the service by turning all user blocks into mutes, which is Yet Another Reason I (continue to) steer clear of the thing. That, and its troller-in-chief. So now is a good time to review your social strategy and make sure all your content creators or social managers are up on the latest research.

Stroud points out several factors to keep track of:

  • Likes, shares and comments: the more engagement from others, the higher a post is promoted. And this also means you should respond to the comments too.
  • Watch time: Videos that are watched all the way through get boosted
  • New followers: posts that generates new followers signing up also get boosted
  • More meta is betta: Captions, keywords, hashtags, custom thumbnails — all of these help increase engagement, which means paying attention to these “housekeeping” matters almost as much as the actual content itself.
  • Your history matters: if you have had previous interactions with this creator, type of content, or other trackable habits

Now, most of this is common sense, and perhaps something you already knew if you have been using any social media platform anytime over the last couple of decades. But it still is nice to have it all packaged neatly in one place.

But here is the thing. The trick with social media success is being able to balance your verisimilitude with your outrage. It is a delicate balance, particularly if you are trying to promote your business and your brand. And if you are trying to communicate some solid info, and not just fuel the outrage fires, then what Stroud mentions should become second nature to your posting strategy.

Time to do an audio audit

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I am not a tin-foil-hat kind of person. But last week, I replaced my voice mail greeting (made in my own voice) with a synthetic voice of an actor saying to leave a message. I will explain the reasoning behind this, and you can decide whether I should now accessorize my future outfits with the hat.

Last month, Techcrunch ran a story about the perils of audio deepfakes and mentions how the CEO of Wiz, an Israeli cybersecurity firm that I have both visited and covered in the past, had to deal with a deepfake phone call that was sent out to many of its employees. It sounded like the CEO’s voice on the call. Almost. And fortunately, enough people at Wiz were paying attention and realized it was a scam. The call was assembled from snippets of a recorded conference session. But even the most judicious audio editing still can’t be perfect, and people at Wiz caught the unnaturalness of the assemblage. The reason for the difference had nothing to do with AI, but everything to do with human nature. This is because his speaking voice is somewhat strained, because he is uncomfortable in front of an audience, and that isn’t his conversational voice.

But it is just a matter of time before the AI overlords figure this stuff out.

AI-based voice impersonations — or deepfakes or whatever you want to call them — have been around for some time. I have written about this technology for Avast’s blog in 2022 here. The piece mentioned impersonated phone calls from the mayor of Kyiv to several other European politicians. This deepfake timeline begins in 2017 but only goes up to the summer of 2021. Since then, there have been numerous advances in tech. For example, a team of Microsoft researchers have developed a text-to-speech program called VALL-E that can take a three-second audio sample of your voice and be used in an interactive conversation.

And another research report, written earlier this summer, “involves the automation of phone scams using LLM-powered voice-to-text and text-to-voice systems. Attackers can now craft sophisticated, personalized scams with minimal human oversight, posing an unprecedented challenge to traditional defenses.” One of the paper’s authors, Yisroel Mirsky, wrote that to me recently when I asked about the topic. He posits a “scam automation loop” where this is possible, and his paper shows several ways the guardrails of conversational AI can be easily circumvented, as shown here. I visited his Ben Gurion University lab in Israel back in 2022. There I got to witness a real-time deepfake audio generator. It needed just a sample of a few seconds of my voice, and then I was having a conversation with a synthetic replica of myself. Eerie and creepy, to be sure.

So now you see my paranoia about my voicemail greeting, which is a bit longer than a few seconds. It might be time to do an overall “audio audit” for lack of better words, as just another preventative step, especially for your corporate officers.

Still, you might argue that there is quite a lot of recorded audio of my voice that is available online, given that I am a professional speaker and podcaster. Anyone with even poor searching skills — let alone AI — can find copious samples where I drone on about something to do with technology for hours. So why get all hot and bothered about my voicemail greeting?

Mirsky said to me, “I don’t believe any vendors are leading the pack in terms of robust defenses against these kinds of LLM-driven threats. Many are still focusing on detecting deepfake or audio defects, which, in my opinion, is increasingly a losing battle as the generative AI models improve.” So maybe changing my voicemail greeting is like putting one’s finger in a very leaky dike. Or perhaps it is a reminder that we need alternative strategies (dare I say a better CAPTCHA? He has one such proposal in another paper here.) So maybe a change of headgear is called for after all.

Distinguishing between news and propaganda is getting harder to do

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Social media personalization has turned the public sphere into an insane asylum, where every person can have their own reality. So says Maria Ressa recently, describing the results of a report from a group of data scientists about the US information ecosystem. The authors are from a group called The Nerve that she founded.

I wrote about Ressa when she won the Nobel Peace prize back in 2021, for her work running the Philippine online news site Rappler. She continues to innovate and afflict the comfortable, as the saying goes. She spoke earlier this month at an event at Columbia University where she covered the report’s findings. The irony of the location wasn’t lost on me: this is the same place where students camped out, driven by various misinformation campaigns.

One of the more interesting elements of the report is the crafting of a new seven layer model (no, not that OSI one). This tracks how the online world manipulates us. And starts off with social media incentives which are designed around promoting more outrage and less actual news. This in turn fuels real-world violence, then amplified by efforts of authoritarian-run nations who target Americans and polarize the public sphere even further. The next layer changes info ops into info warfare, feeding more outrage and conflict. The final layer is our elections, aided by the lack of real news and no general agreement on facts.

Their report is a chilling account of the state of things today, to be sure. And thanks to fewer “trust and safety” staff watching the feeds, greater use of AI in online searches by Google and Microsoft, and Facebook truncating actual news in its social feeds and as a result referring less traffic to online news sites, we have a mess on our hands. News media now shares a shrinking piece of the attention pie with independent creators. The result is that “Americans will have fewer facts to go by, less news on their social media feeds, and more outrage, fear, and hate.” This week it has reached a fever pitch, and I wish I could just turn it all off.

The report focuses on three issues that have divided us, both generationally and politically: immigration, abortion, and the Israel/Hamas war. It takes a very data-driven approach. For example, the number of #FreePalestine hashtag views on TikTok outnumber #StandWithIsrael by 446M to 16M and on Facebook and Twitter the ratio is 18 and 32 times respectively. The measurement periods for each network varies, but you get the point.

The report has several conclusions. First, personalized social media content has formed echo chambers that are fed by hyper-partisan sources which blurs news and propaganda, Journalism and source vetting is becoming rarer, and local TV news is being remade as they compete with cable outrage channels. As more of our youth engage further in social media, they become more vulnerable to purpose-fed disinformation and manipulation, and less able to distinguish between news and propaganda too. And this generational divide continues to widen as the years pass.

Remember when the saying went, if you aren’t paying for the service, you are the product? That seems so naïve now. Social media is now a tool of geopolitics, and gone are the trust and safety teams that once tried to filter the most egregious posts. And as more websites deploy AI-based chatbots, you don’t even know if you are talking to humans. This just continues a trend about the worsening of internet platforms that Cory Doctorow wrote about almost two years ago (he used a more colorful term).

In her address to the Nobel committee back in 2021, Ressa said, “Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality and no democracy.”