Olivia Goldhill

US president Donald Trump’s political data strategy is closely linked to a company buying up data on religious people in the United States. Two leaders of Trump’s strategy, campaign manager Brad Parscale and data programming strategist Matt Oczkowski, are also associated with marketing agency Cloud Commerce, which bought rights to access personal information on 80 million religious people.

American voters are getting inundated with texts from political campaigns asking them to support their candidate. Many of those texts, however, are filled with errors: they address the recipient by the wrong name, assume they live in a different state, or mix up party affiliations. People get mistaken for their parents or complete strangers. Sometimes the results are comical.

Sheffield City Council claims to offer “free and confidential support” to people suffering from alcohol addiction. The UK council doesn’t keep information on who’s looking for such support quite so confidential. The council shares information on who visits that web page with at least 25 different data collection companies, among them eight data brokers and nine advertising auction companies including Google, according to a report from Brave Software.  

The difference between the protections YouTube offers its advertisers and those it provides consumers is stark. A read of advertiser-friendly content guidelines for videos uploaded to the platform, last updated in June 2019, shows the company has rigorous standards to protect advertisers from harmful content and the algorithmic ability to do so. Yet YouTube does not consistently flag these same videos as problematic to viewers, despite ongoing criticism that the platform allows conspiracy theories, the alt-right, and extremism to flourish.

A dark-money group linked to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spent about $20,000 on anti-Biden Facebook ads aimed at South Carolina voters.

Cambridge Analytica once bragged of its ability to target voters with ads based on their psychological traits in order to manipulate them better. Whether that worked has been the subject of raging debate, but now you can see those targeted ads for yourself, courtesy of documents leaked by a whistleblower earlier this week.

While voters despair at political misinformation, British politicians have seemingly treated such tactics as inspiration.

The turkey is palatable, your annoying cousin is distracted playing video games, but then your grandpa destroys the peace by claiming House speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have a drinking problem. (A widely shared claim, supported by doctored videos.) Though it would be nice to have a respite from fake news, the incessant deluge of disinformation shows no signs of stopping. And family gatherings can be a worthwhile time to talk about misinformation with older generations. 

When extremists are deplatformed—kicked off the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and 4chan—they don’t stay silent. Instead, they turn to apps with minimal standards of decency, such as Gab, and end-to-end encryption, like Telegram. The latter, a Russia-owned messaging app, has taken off among white nationalists in the US since 8chan, a similar service, closed earlier this year. Over the Atlantic, a similar trend is apparent among British far-right groups, who are making the most of Telegram’s freedom of speech policies to espouse the same anti-Islam views Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik put forward in his 2011 manifesto. 

Deepfakes are not a new threat. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the consternation surrounding a lightly doctored video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and recent rush to pass deepfake state and federal legislation. In reality, manipulated videos have been distorting truth for nearly two years. Only they were designed to harass and demean women—often celebrities—by creating AI-generated porn, and so weren’t considered worthy of widespread action.

A Chinese-made propaganda video about the Hong Kong protests went viral, apparently thanks to YouTube’s algorithm. The video—called “Who’s behind Hong Kong protests?”—argues that US agents are stirring protests in Hong Kong, and has more than half a million views on YouTube. It was created by China’s state broadcaster, China Global Television Network.

As social media platforms and politicians argue over how to handle political lies, a new propaganda tool is threatening to shape politics: The truth. Or, rather, a very selective presentation of the truth.

Barely two months after Han Junqing, from Beijing, was imprisoned for practicing the spiritual discipline of Falun Gong, he died in captivity. When his family was briefly allowed to see his body, more than a month after he died, his daughter says they discovered it had been sliced open.

Miami has a long history of responding to extreme weather. In 1992, the city faced 145 mph winds from Hurricane Andrew, which caused $27.3 billion in damages. Two years ago, it dealt with 3.9 feet of storm surge from Hurricane Irma. But Miami’s mayor, Francis X. Suarez, says the city has no means to protect itself from the kind of “super hurricanes” threatening the region.

The United Nations’ secretary-general António Guterres wanted international leaders to bring plans, not speeches to the Climate Action Summit being held in New York today. Greta Thunberg and 15 other young people don’t seem to have much faith in these plans. On Monday, hours after Thunberg addressed assembled leaders at the summit’s opening ceremony, the group of activists announced they were suing five of the biggest carbon polluters in the world—Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey—for violating their rights as children by failing to adequately reduce emissions. 

What exactly makes magic mushrooms psychedelic? How psychedelic are they? Are there any undiscovered psychedelic molecules hidden inside those freaky fungi?

When evangelical environmentalists talk about climate change, they don’t stick to sea level rise projections and the carbon emissions associated with red meat. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, national organizer and spokesperson at Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA), also points to the psalms, and the Old and New Testaments. 

The founder of Salvation Army, William Booth, was once reportedly asked about the ethics of taking money from dubious people and replied: “The trouble with tainted money is t’aint enough of it.”

The popularity of the 10,000-hour rule says more about the hope it promises than any rigorous science.

Hedonism gets a bad rap in our pleasure-espousing society. And yet, despite all its connotations with frivolity and danger, the word simply describes the philosophical belief that pleasure is a worthwhile pursuit.

Not only does the language you speak differ in its tone, syntax, and speed, it also changes the way you convey information.

Psychedelics research, already enjoying a renaissance of blossoming scientific interest, just got even bigger. In the largest ever one-time donation to the field, Johns Hopkins Medicine announced today (Sep. 4) that it has received $17m from a group of private donors. 

There’s no doubt Russian influence spread misinformation in the 2016 election. Plenty of questions remain though: Did Russian efforts successfully change election results? How can we know if election interference happens again? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we identify it early enough to to stop it?

Where cannabis first trod, magic mushrooms are sure to follow. A Canadian therapist has asked Health Canada to permit the use of psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, for medical reasons. If denied, he’s planning to file a lawsuit, claiming the health department’s decision would violate Canadians’ right to “life, liberty, and security of person”—an argument that previously convinced Canadian courts that it is unconstitutional to prohibit medical access to cannabis.