• OPINION

  The Cambridge Analytica red herring

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/03/2018

  » Facebook is being hammered for allowing the data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the US, which it may or may not have used to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target: There's nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn't offer political clients.

• OPINION

  Authoritarian cryptocurrencies are on the march

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 18/10/2017

  » With Russia and China both embracing the idea of sovereign cryptocurrencies, it's time to ask a simple question: Why is a technology threatening to decentralise money so attractive to highly centralised, authoritarian regimes?

• OPINION

  That special human 'thing' will always beat AI

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 19/12/2016

  » This year's news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavours might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be -- though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome.

• OPINION

  Merkel, Juncker fight the dreamers

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 08/07/2016

  » It is increasingly clear that the European Union (EU) is about to waste the crisis brought on by the UK's withdrawal vote. The leaders of the nation states have no stomach for any meaningful reform of EU institutions, the bureaucrats in Brussels are forced to take a back seat, and federalist dreamers are unceremoniously shunted aside.

• OPINION

  Yes, Russia abused Facebook. But did it actually work?

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 20/12/2018

  » Russia's propaganda operations during the 2016 US presidential election were broader than previously thought, according to two recently published studies. But they don't provide proof the influence campaign was as effective as the Kremlin may have hoped. Both reports, based on data provided by social networks, combine a distrust of the companies' disclosures and a naive trust in the metrics they tout.

• OPINION

  Merkel tries not to go out with a bang

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/11/2018

  » It could have been a call for decisive action by a leader no longer tethered by domestic politics. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel's appearance at the European Parliament on Tuesday was nothing of the sort: Ms Merkel unbound is the same cautious, gradualist Merkel.

• OPINION

  What's scary about Facebook's new troll findings

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/08/2018

  » Facebook's widely publicised discovery of a possible influence operation through "inauthentic" accounts warrants some scrutiny -- and some reflection about the difference between a genuine political debate on social networks versus its simulated version.

• OPINION

  EU privacy rules risk giving Google even more power

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/05/2018

  » The disingenuous way companies are attempting to comply with the letter, not the spirit, of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is only part of the problem with the new privacy rule, which goes into effect on May 25. For publishers already forced to accept Google's near monopoly on programmatic advertising on their sites, the new regulation could make things worse.

• OPINION

  Cambridge Analytica's business simply isn't data

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/03/2018

  » As the Cambridge Analytica scandal unfolds, the Western world is meeting a little-known part of its political industry, the one that has operated in developing nations since at least the 1990s. CA's methods as revealed by Britain's Channel 4 News, whose reporter posed as a potential Sri Lankan client, may be a bit extreme -- but for the most part, the consultancy has been one of many firms that have brought Western-style electioneering to lawless environments in which it has been blatantly abused.

• OPINION

  Crypto markets aren't all the same

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/01/2018

  » There's a compelling reason to consider what's going on with cryptocurrencies a purely speculative boom-and-bust roller-coaster: Over a three-month period, the prices of all the top coins and tokens are rather strongly correlated, going up and down in unison. What does that make them if not the 21st-century incarnation of tulip bulbs?

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