Internet

Editor’s Note: Information for this article was obtained primarily from interviews by the authors. Names and identifying information have been withheld in some cases to protect the identity of the interviewees. In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, reports of Russian interference and accusations of biased news coverage gave rise to a renewed […]

Turkey’s Wikipedia ban is not an isolated incident. It’s just the most recent martyr in the government’s ongoing war against information.

When it comes to IT, tech-savvy Turkey has big potential and ambitions – but could be hampered by government censorship and wary investors.

Throughout his campaign for president of the United States, Republican nominee Donald Trump has time and time again denigrated Muslim communities living on American soil and abroad. Trump’s critics have underscored how promoting the prejudicial treatment of Muslims only helps to strengthen anti-American Islamist organizations. By targeting Muslims, the arguments go, Trump inadvertently validates claims made […]

With the rise of the Islamic State, for the first time in nearly 100 years the call to prayer was heard in a caliphate. But the muezzin call of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was not merely incanted from a minaret in Mosul – in the ancient style his followers claim to espouse. Nor was it just […]

BY TYLER S. THIGPEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  The conversation that most haunted Marshall Chambers—former director of strategic initiatives for Barrow County Schools, a rural district in Georgia—happened in 2001 at one of the district’s high schools. Chambers, himself a graduate of Piedmont College in Demorest, […]

BY MIA MITCHELL Today, four billion people, or two-thirds of the planet, are offline, but that is rapidly changing. Momentum is building among private, public, and non-profit actors to expand Internet access globally. From Facebook’s Internet.org to the Alliance for Affordable Internet to Oluvus, numerous projects have launched in recent years with the shared goal […]

BY HUGO ZYLBERBERG General Keith Alexander maintained in a 2013 speech that, as director of the National Security Agency (NSA) at the time, he was doing “everything [he] could to protect civil liberties and privacy,” then added a warning: “Everyone also understands that if we give up a capability that is critical to the defense […]

BY DENISE LINN Recently, while we’ve all been busy binge-watching House of Cards, our cable companies and online content providers have been splashed across the headlines. The announced $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger and the Netflix-Comcast deal have flooded the Internet with articles about pricing, speed, and customer satisfaction. While sources have speculated about […]

BY ALEX REMINGTON In the English-speaking world, I have seen it written, the two most widely quoted sources are the King James Bible and the collected works of William Shakespeare, two Elizabethan corpora that together helped crystallize English into its present form. In the past four hundred years, no other works have had anything close […]