“My fellow-Americans,” Donald Trump said in his weekly address on Friday, “It’s an exciting time for our country. Our new Administration has so much change under way— change that is going to strengthen our Union and improve so many people’s lives.” It’s exciting, all right; in fact, it is hard to look away. Just when you think things […]
President Donald Trump’s critics have consistently underestimated his political communication skills, perhaps because he is so different from predecessors such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Both FDR and Reagan, after all, were known as “great communicators.” Read Here – Project Syndicate
Trump’s use of Twitter isn’t the victory of the poor underdog over the wealthy elite that can access traditional broadcast and print channels: on the contrary, we’ve never seen a politician with the kind of media access and exposure Trump has enjoyed. Twitter hasn’t been Trump’s route to breaking free of media gate-keeping; it’s been […]
President Obama has been called the “first social-media president.” It’s both a true and a misleading characterisation. On the one hand, the Obama White House was indeed the first presidency to make use of services like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. But on the other hand, these services either didn’t exist or weren’t used by […]
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Macedonian teens looking to get paid for ad-clicks, Russian cyber sophisticates apparently looking to tilt the outcome, and some homegrown mood manipulators broadcast outrageous and false stories packaged to look like real news. Their counterfeit posts were nearly indistinguishable from authentic coin and remain so, even in the face […]
Like most everything today, the campaign was launched with a hashtag. But instead of promoting a new album or a movie release, #AllEyesOnISIS announced the 2014 invasion of northern Iraq—a bloody takeover that still haunts global politics two years later. Read Here – Defense One
As anti-government protests escalated in Ukraine in February, activists took to Facebook and Twitter to popularize a name for the revolutionary movement. They called it “Euromaidan,” after the pro-European bent of the demonstrators and the central square in the capital where they were massing. Read Here – The Atlantic
The heart of Facebook’s experiment lies just south of the Arctic Circle, in the Swedish town of Luleå. In the middle of a forest at the edge of town, the company in June opened its latest mega-sized data center, a giant building that comprises thousands of rectangular metal panels and looks like a wayward spaceship. […]
Graeme Wearden explains what the U.S. government shutdown means and why is it happening. Read Here – The Guardian
The twin suicide bombings of a church congregation in Peshawar on Sunday have brutally dispelled the naive optimism of Pakistan, a country that believed Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, when he campaigned to “give peace a chance” in May’s general election. Read Here – The National, Abu Dhabi
looking beyond borders 