Siva Vaidhyanathan

We Must Fight for a Better America. We Have No Choice.

America 2050 1Division Is America’s Natural State2We Must Fight for a Better America. We Have No Choice.3The Work of Democracy Is Not Only a Group Endeavor View All We can’t predict if the United States will survive as a democratic republic until…

Like Trump, Elon Musk reveals a vapid mind super-charged by wealth and ego

Musk, despite his wealth, good fortune and global influence, is not a serious person – but he is toying with dangerous ideas It took less than 48 hours for Elon Musk to reveal just how dangerous his new toy can be to this world. Replying to a tweet…

Salman Rushdie Changed Everything

Imagine growing up in the 1980s as the child of Indian immigrants to Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States. Imagine trying to find a model, someone who mattered to the larger culture around you, and failing. None of the people who move…

Elon Musk doesn’t understand free speech – or Twitter – at all

Twitter is less like a ‘town square’ and more like any Starbucks, McDonalds, or shopping center. It has other obligations and interests that are at odds with completely unfettered speech On Tuesday, as Elon Musk just started to learn how difficult…

There’s a Reason No Smart Buyer Already Purchased Twitter

This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.…

How to Make an Omelet With Jason Epstein

A titan of publishing, Jason Epstein died at 93 last week. He left a galvanizing vision for the book business. By the time I got to know Jason Epstein, he had already reinvented publishing at least twice—the high-quality midlist paperback and the…

Facebook’s rebranding isn’t a PR move. It’s a vision.

In 2011, professional basketball player Ron Artest changed his name to Metta World Peace. “As I started to evolve as a person and things started to influence my life, I started to fall in love with meditation and Zen and Indian culture” Metta…

The Nationalism of Facebook

This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about…

What would an effective social-media regulator look like?

Last week, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a Senate subcommittee about the company’s propensity for disregarding its own research into the harms done by its content algorithms, particularly among young girls who use Instagram,…

Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet

Imagine what it’s like to work at Facebook this week. For about five years much of the world has slowly turned against the service that once promised to connect the world and spread democracy and cookies and puppies and such. But this week, in the…

Leaks just exposed how toxic Facebook and Instagram are to teen girls and, well, everyone

For years, Facebook has faced torrents of criticism from human rights groups and academic researchers, who raised alarms about the ways that the most pervasive digital social platform in human history distorts our world and promotes destructive…

What If Regulating Facebook Fails?

What if nothing works? What if, after years of scholarship and journalism exposing the dominance, abrogations, duplicity, arrogance, and incompetence of Facebook, none of the policy tools we have come to rely on to rein in corporations make any…

So the government’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook failed. Where now?

ithin 12 hours of a federal judge tossing out a state and federal antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, the market value of the adolescent company exceeded $1tn. Facebook became the fifth company worth more than a trillion, joining Apple, Amazon,…

What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure

Tenure at American universities is not given. It’s earned. Those of us fortunate enough to have had a shot at earning it understand all too well the effort it takes to earn tenure, the costs of failing, and privilege it conveys. It’s very difficult…

The New Nightmare Scenario for the Media

In 2006, The Nation ran a fold-out graphic that visualized the frightening state of major media concentration in America. Just 10 years after the Telecommunication Act of 1996 unleashed mergers under the specious assumption that size and…

Facebook is pretending it cares how its platform affects the world

The world is a lot better off without Donald Trump as president of the United States. And Facebook is a lot more peaceful without Trump’s unhinged calls for vengeance against his political opponents and fabricated tales of voter fraud echoing across…

Making Sense of the Facebook Menace

Every day, a Twitter account run by Kevin Roose, a technology reporter for The New York Times, posts a list of the top 10 sources of the highest-performing links on Facebook in the United States. On one Friday in November, the list began with CNN.…

The Hunter Biden story was a test for tech platforms. They barely passed

In 2016, major American news outlets, amplified by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, did the work of foreign and domestic purveyors of disinformation and propaganda. They took too seriously false, irrelevant and illegally acquired emails from top…

The Dangers of Seeing the World Through Ubiquitous Video

Moving images bombard our brains and fog our thoughts—but every now and then they expand our minds. We might look back at 2020 as the year of maximum screen time. Severed by the pandemic from face-to-face interactions, we have been chained to our…

There’s No Such Thing As a Tech Expert Anymore

Ideas Members of Congress clearly don’t understand the tech companies they’re supposed to regulate. But neither does anyone else. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Every time Congress holds a hearing about Silicon…