The powerful lesson of a 5-year-old harassment campaign: How to wage a post-truth information war.
The Digital Maginot Line
There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological…
The Case for User Agent Extremism - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (2026)
DOWNLOAD THE FREE EBOOK: PDFEPUBPURCHASE A PRINT COPY: Buy the book from Better World Books or any online bookstore.Order a copy through your local bookstore!LISTEN TO THE PODCAST (Release dates: July 1 - August 5, 2026): Vanishing Culture Episode #1: What We Stand to Lose with Luca MessarraVanishing Culture Episode #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie LivingstonVanishing Culture Episode #3: Saving Queer Memory with Brooke PalmieriVanishing Culture Episdoe #4: Keeping African Folktales Alive with Helen Nde & Laura GibbsVanishing Culture Episode #5: A Language Worth Saving with Peter ScholingVanishing Culture Episode #6: What We've Learned with Vida Vojić & Alice BridgwoodABOUT VANISHING CULTURE: In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived. Web sites like MTV News, Gawker, and others are removed from the live web by their corporate owners, leaving only web archives like those in the Wayback Machine as the last remaining public record of their reporting and cultural impact. Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new form of digital barrier, impeding access to information at community scale. When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public's ability to access its own history is at risk. Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record aims to raise awareness of these growing issues, featuring essays from: Digital librarian Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive; Humanities scholar Luca Messarra; Book historian and social media star Allie Alvis; Game designer Jordan Mechner; Journalist Philip Bump; Writer and editor Maria Bustillos; Film archivist Rick Prelinger; Digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura; Writer and book artist Eve Scarborough; And many more… The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.
Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information
Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is complicated. Literacy-based paradigms are both widely used to help and widely critiqued. We conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across the U.S. to understand how they assess information online. We found that they tended to encounter -- rather than search for -- information, and that those encounters were shaped more by social motivations than by truth-seeking queries. For them, information processing is fundamentally a social practice. Gen Zers interpreted online information together, as aspirational members of social groups. Our participants sought information sensibility: a socially-informed awareness of the value of information encountered online. We outline key challenges they faced and practices they used to make sense of information. Our findings suggest that like their information sensibility practices, solutions and strategies to address misinformation should be embedded in social contexts online.
Frontiers | Cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence
This article collection will explore the pressing issues of cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence, including online abuse, stalking...
‘It’s frightening’: How far right is infiltrating everyday culture
Extremist messaging now woven into music and YouTube videos, with one expert saying: ‘You can be radicalised sitting on your couch’
Cybercultural: Internet History and Its Impact on Our Culture
Cybercultural is a website covering internet history and the evolution of digital culture.
“It is a racial war:” Analyzing the violent rhetoric of active club members on X - Institute for Strategic Dialogue
ISD research revealed that some members of US-based Active Clubs are using X accounts to call for violence against targeted communities.
Data Feminism for AI
Attacks on women and trans people are not happening in a vacuum. Communications scholars W. Lance Bennett and Marianne Kneuer recently argued that we are witnessing the intensification of "illiberal public spheres" around the world (Bennett and Kneuer, 2023). These are characterized by a set of anti-democratic communications tactics that include the denigration and exclusion of minoritized people, targeted attacks on the press and political institutions, and transgression of norms of civil discourse. Such tactics are enabled and amplified by the social media platforms owned by Big Tech, whose business model elevates attention above all other metrics, such that they profit richly off extremism, threats, spectacle, and lies. The success of this corporate partnership with right-wing extremism is evident in the proliferation of book bans (Magnusson, 2024), the demonization of DEI and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2022), and mob tactics to doxx, intimidate, misrepresent, and otherwise silence people that study misinformation, speak out against racial and gender violence, or rule against insurrectionists (Edmonds, 2024). At the same time, we have seen the continued work of feminists, including Latin American, Indigenous, and abolitionist feminists in the US and globally, doing the work of imagining alternate worlds (Cullors, 2021; Davis, 2022; Ricaurte, 2019; Simpson, 2017). This paper represents our own first attempt to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, feminist world for AI research.
Culture & truth : the remaking of social analysis
xii, 253 pages ; 22 cm; Argues for a new approach to thinking and writing about culture. Exposing old conceptions, the book argues that new ethnographic writing must come to terms with the dynamic nature of social reality - with history, spontaneity, and human emotions; Originally published: Boston: Beacon, 1989; Includes index; Self-Renewing 2017; Includes index
Angela Rye warns Black communities are being manipulated by online disinformation
Angela Rye warns that online disinformation exploits racial tensions and personal trauma, further dividing Black communities.
Feminist Data Manifest-No
1. We refuse to operate under the assumption that risk and harm associated with data practices can be bounded to mean the same thing for everyone, everywhere, at every time. We commit to acknowledging how historical and systemic patterns of violence and exploitation produce differential vulnerabilities for communities.
Building a Culture of (Digital) Safety
Black culture is in a lot of ways synonymous with how internet culture exists writ large. From what is now described as “Gen-Z slang” (or as Black people have always known it, AAVE) to our methods of organizing (Black feminists starting hashtag activism and creating movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #SayHerName) and even how we […]
How propaganda exploits the infrastructure of truth: A case study of #IStandWithPutin
This paper investigates the #IStandWithPutin hashtag campaign as a case study to conceptualise “infrastructural propaganda,” an influence strategy that manipulates the invisible processes and syste...
