For years now, Twitter has been an important platform for disseminating news and sharing opinions about U.S. politics, and 22% of U.S. adults say they use the platform. But the Twitter conversation about national politics among U.S. adult users is driven by a small number of prolific political tweeters. These users make up just 6% of all U.S. adults with public accounts on the site, but they account for 73% of tweets from American adults that mention national politics.
Most U.S. adults on Twitter largely avoid the topic: The median user never tweeted about national politics, while 69% only tweeted about it once or not at all. Across all tweets from U.S. adults, just 13% focused on national politics, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis based on public tweets that were posted between June 2018 and June 2019.
An open database exposing records containing the sensitive data of hotel customers as well as US military personnel and officials has been disclosed by researchers.
On Monday, vpnMentor’s cybersecurity team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, said the database belonged to Autoclerk, a service owned by Best Western Hotels and Resorts group.
Autoclerk is a reservations management system used by resorts to manage web bookings, revenue, loyalty programs, guest profiles, and payment processing.
In a report shared with ZDNet, the researchers said the open Elasticsearch database was discovered through vpnMentor’s web mapping project. It was possible to access the database, given it had no encryption or security barriers whatsoever, and perform searches to examine the records contained within.
The team says that “thousands” of individuals were impacted, although due to ethical reasons it was not possible to examine every record in the leaking database to come up with a specific number.
Hundreds of thousands of booking reservations for guests were available to view and data including full names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, dates and travel costs, some check-in times and room numbers, and masked credit card details were also exposed.
Data breaches are a common occurrence and can end up compromising information belonging to thousands or millions of us in single cases of a successful cyberattack.
What is more uncommon, however, is that the US government and military figures have also been involved in this security incident.
It appears that one of the platforms connected to Autoclerk exposed in the breach is a contractor of the US government that deals with travel arrangements.
vpnMentor was able to view records relating to the travel arrangements of government and military personnel — both past and future — who are connected to the US government, military, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Within the records, for example, were logs for US Army generals visiting Russia and Israel, among other countries.
People who are “locked in”—fully paralyzed by stroke or neurological disease—have trouble trying to communicate even a single sentence. Electrodes implanted in a part of the brain involved in motion have allowed some paralyzed patients to move a cursor and select onscreen letters with their thoughts. Users have typed up to 39 characters per minute, but that’s still about three times slower than natural handwriting.
In the new experiments, a volunteer paralyzed from the neck down instead imagined moving his arm to write each letter of the alphabet. That brain activity helped train a computer model known as a neural network to interpret the commands, tracing the intended trajectory of his imagined pen tip to create letters (above).
Eventually, the computer could read out the volunteer’s imagined sentences with roughly 95% accuracy at a speed of about 66 characters per minute, the team reported here this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
The researchers expect the speed to increase with more practice. As they refine the technology, they will also use their neural recordings to better understand how the brain plans and orchestrates fine motor movements.
Google employees are accusing the company’s leadership of developing an internal surveillance tool that they believe will be used to monitor workers’ attempts to organize protests and discuss labor rights.
Earlier this month, employees said they discovered that a team within the company was creating the new tool for the custom Google Chrome browser installed on all workers’ computers and used to search internal systems. The concerns were outlined in a memo written by a Google employee and reviewed by Bloomberg News and by three Google employees who requested anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk to the press
YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets. And, according to new research from Penn State University, these channels are far from fringe—they’re the new mainstream, and recently surpassed the big three US cable news networks in terms of viewership.
The paper, written by Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips, tracks the explosive growth of alternative political content on YouTube, and calls into question many of the field’s established narratives. It challenges the popular school of thought that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is the central factor responsible for radicalizing users and pushing them into a far-right rabbit hole.
The authors say that thesis largely grew out of media reports, and hasn’t been rigorously analyzed. The best prior studies, they say, haven’t been able to prove that YouTube’s algorithm has any noticeable effect. “We think this theory is incomplete, and potentially misleading,” Munger and Phillips argue in the paper. “And we think that it has rapidly gained a place in the center of the study of media and politics on YouTube because it implies an obvious policy solution—one which is flattering to the journalists and academics studying the phenomenon.”
Instead, the paper suggests that radicalization on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life—injecting new information—but at scale. The authors say the quantity and popularity of alternative (mostly right-wing) political media on YouTube is driven by both supply and demand. The supply has grown because YouTube appeals to right-wing content creators, with its low barrier to entry, easy way to make money, and reliance on video, which is easier to create and more impactful than text.
“This is attractive for a lone, fringe political commentator, who can produce enough video content to establish themselves as a major source of media for a fanbase of any size, without needing to acquire power or legitimacy by working their way up a corporate media ladder,” the paper says.
According to the authors, that increased supply of right-wing videos tapped a latent demand. “We believe that the novel and disturbing fact of people consuming white nationalist video media was not caused by the supply of this media ‘radicalizing’ an otherwise moderate audience,” they write. “Rather, the audience already existed, but they were constrained” by limited supply.
Other researchers in the field agree, including those whose work has been cited by the press as evidence of the power of YouTube’s recommendation system. Manoel Ribeiro, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and one of the authors of what the Penn State researchers describe as “the most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of YouTube radicalization to date,” says that his work was misinterpreted to fit the algorithmic radicalization narrative by so many outlets that he lost count.
For his study, published in July, Ribeiro and his coauthors examined more othan 330,000 YouTube videos from 360 channels, mostly associated with far right ideology. They broke the channels into four groups, based on their degree of radicalization. They found that a YouTube viewer who watches a video from the second-most-extreme group and follows the algorithm’s recommendations has only a 1-in-1,700 chance of arriving at a video from the most extreme group. For a viewer who starts with a video from the mainstream media, the chance of being shown a video from the most extreme group is roughly 1 in 100,000.
Munger and Phillips cite Ribeiro’s paper in their own, published earlier this month. They looked at 50 YouTube channels that researcher Rebecca Lewis identified in a 2018 paper as the “Alternative Influence Network.” Munger and Phillips’ reviewed the metadata for close to a million YouTube videos posted by those channels and mainstream news organizations between January 2008 and October 2018. The researchers also analyzed trends in search rankings for the videos, using YouTube’s API to obtain snapshots of how they were recommended to viewers at different points over the last decade.
Munger and Phillips divided Lewis’s Alternative Influence Network into five groups—from “Liberals” to “Alt-right”—based on their degree of radicalization. Liberals included channels by Joe Rogan and Steven Bonnell II. “Skeptics” included Carl Benjamin, Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin. “Conservatives,” included YouTubers like Steven Crowder, Dennis Prager of PragerU, and Ben Shapiro. The “Alt-Lite” category included both fringe creators that espouse more mainstream conservative views, like InfoWars’ Paul Joseph Watson, and those that express more explicitly white nationalist messages, like Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern. The most exteme category, the “Alt-Right,” refers to those who push strong anti-Semitic messages and advocate for the genetic superiority of white people, including Richard Spencer, Red Ice TV, and Jean-Francois Gariepy.
This chart shows how total viewership of political videos on YouTube has overtaken the combined viewership on cable news channels.
Illustration: Kevin Munger & Joseph Phillips/Penn State University
Munger and Phillips found that every part of the Alternative Influence Network rose in viewership between 2013 and 2016. Since 2017, they say, global hourly viewership of these channels “consistently eclipsed” that of the top three US cable networks combined. To compare YouTube’s global audience with the cable networks’ US-centric audience, the researchers assumed that each cable viewer watched all three networks for 24 hours straight each day, while each YouTube viewer watched a single video for only 10 minutes.
The sagging red and olive lines show how viewership on YouTube of the most extreme political videos has declined since 2017.
Illustration: Kevin Munger & Joseph Phillips/Penn State University
Overall viewership for the Alternative Influence Network has exploded in recent years, mirroring the far-right’s real-world encroachment on the national stage. But the report found that viewership on YouTube of the most extreme far-right content—those in the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right groups, specifically—has actually declined since 2017, while videos in the Conservative category more than doubled in popularity.
Lewis says that the decline could be explained by changes in the universe of right-wing video creators. Some of the creators she included in the list of Alternative Influence Network channels have lost popularity since her study was published, while others have emerged to take their place. However, this latter group was not included in the Penn State researchers’ report. Munger said the findings are preliminary and part of a working paper.
Nonetheless, Lewis praises the Penn State paper as essential reading for anyone studying YouTube politics. She lauded it as the first quantitative study on YouTube to shift focus from the recommendation algorithm—a transition that she says is crucial. Ribeiro agrees, describing it as a fascinating and novel perspective that he believes will encourage broader scholarly analysis in the field.
One thing that’s clear is that the remaining viewers of Alt-Right videos are significantly more engaged than other viewers, based on an analysis of ratio of likes and comments per video views.
But the most extreme videos still rank highest in engagement, based on an analysis of likes and comments.
Illustration: Kevin Munger & Joseph Phillips/Penn State University
Munger and Phillips say they were inspired to illustrate the complexity of YouTube’s alternative political ecosystem, and to encourage the development of more comprehensive, evidence-based narratives to explain YouTube politics.
“For these far-right groups, the audience is treating it much more as interactive space,” said Munger, in reference to the engagement graph above. “And this could lead to the creation of a community,” which is a much more potent persuasive force than any recommendation system. When it comes to radicalization, he says, these are the sorts of factors we should be concerned about—not the effects of each algorithmic tweak.
The BBC has made its international news website available via the Tor network, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts.
The Tor browser is privacy-focused software used to access the dark web.
The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship.
Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programmes.
Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser.
The dark web copy of the BBC News website will be the international edition, as seen from outside the UK.
It will include foreign language services such as BBC Arabic, BBC Persian and BBC Russian.
But UK-only content and services such as BBC iPlayer will not be accessible, due to broadcast rights.
What is Tor?
Tor is a way to access the internet that requires software, known as the Tor browser, to use it.
The name is an acronym for The Onion Router. Just as there are many layers to the vegetable, there are many layers of encryption on the network.
It was originally designed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, and continues to receive funding from the US State Department.
It attempts to hide a person’s location and identity by sending data across the internet via a very circuitous route involving several “nodes” – which, in this context, means using volunteers’ PCs and computer servers as connection points.
Encryption applied at each hop along this route makes it very hard to connect a person to any particular activity.
Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found.
In that period, SUVs doubled their global market share from 17% to 39% and their annual emissions rose to more than 700 megatonnes of CO2, more than the yearly total emissions of the UK and the Netherlands combined.
No energy sector except power drove a larger increase in carbon emissions, putting SUVs ahead of heavy industry (including iron, steel, cement and aluminium), aviation and shipping.
“We were quite surprised by this result ourselves,” said Laura Cozzi, the chief energy modeller of the International Energy Agency, which produced the report.
The recent dramatic shift towards heavier SUVs has offset both efficiency improvements in smaller cars and carbon savings from electric vehicles.
As the global fleet of SUVs has grown, emissions from the vehicles have increased more than fourfold in eight years. If SUV drivers were a nation, they would rank seventh in the world for carbon emissions.
“An SUV is bigger, it’s heavier, the aerodynamics are poor, so as a result you get more CO2,” said Florent Grelier from the campaign group Transport & Environment.
[…]
SUVs started to become popular in the 1980s, and often earned nicknames such as “Chelsea tractor” as a result of the wealthy city suburbs they became associated with. Since then, sales have continued to rise, and the vehicles are often marketed as a status symbol.
However, opposition to SUVs in cities is also rising. Recent protestsin Berlin demanded a ban on the vehicles after a driver hit and killed four pedestrians, while activists at a Frankfurt motor show protested against the vehicles’ impact on the climate. SUVs are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes, and although they are often marketed as safer, those driving them are 11% more likely to die in a crash than people in normal cars.
Cozzi said a number of factors were driving the demand for bigger cars. While perceptions of heightened safety or increased social status could play a role at the individual level, she also pointed towards manufacturers’ changing offering.
She said the difficult market situation led carmakers to look for the most profitable models in their ranges.
“There is a really big need for car manufacturers to find the margins wherever it is possible, and the SUV segment seems to be one of those places,” she said.
Most U.S. adults on Twitter largely avoid the topic: The median user never tweeted about national politics, while 69% only tweeted about it once or not at all. Across all tweets from U.S. adults, just 13% focused on national politics, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis based on public tweets that were posted between June 2018 and June 2019.
Most U.S. adults on Twitter largely avoid the topic: The median user never tweeted about national politics, while 69% only tweeted about it once or not at all. Across all tweets from U.S. adults, just 13% focused on national politics, according to a new 
