The news has been dominated this week by the Helsinki Summit, Donald Trump’s private meeting with Vladimir Putin, framed beforehand by Robert Mueller’s indictment of twelve Russian nationals for interfering in the 2016 presidential election, and afterward by Trump’s waffling on whether Russia actually interfered with the election and whether he would hold Putin responsible for this interference.
To make sense of this week’s events, here are a few recent books that help us understand Russia, the fragmented world of social media that provided an entrée for Russian interference, our post-truth culture that has energized this scandal, and what it might all mean for Christians…
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6. [easyazon_link identifier=”0190841168″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy[/easyazon_link]Siva Vaidhyanathan
If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It’s an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it’s an indictment of how “social media” has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump’s election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. READ a NY Times Op-ed by the author on Russia and Facebook…
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