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The chaos of WallStreetBets and the QAnon-fueled storming of the U.S. Capitol showcased the reality-shaping power of Internet communities. Who’s supposed to stop them when they go too far?
SHARE The phenomenon of climate change and its causes are broadly agreed upon by scientists. The same, however, cannot be said for the public. The sheer volume of dissenting voices and polarised opinion on the internet caused one postdoctoral researcher at NYU Abu Dhabi, Thomas Marlow, to investigate one of the suspected culprits – automated bots. His findings, published last month, are striking: bots were responsible for 25 per cent of all Twitter posts on the topic over a two-month period. That’s machines directed by humans to spread disinformation. The effects of this are hard to m...
Commentary: Social media and the mob factor Special to The Enterprise Social media has an unimagined, unequaled, uncontrollable, and unpredictable ability to mobilize groups of people for antisocial action; to take a sliver of society and turn it into a mob. Last month this new force in society was on display, from mobilizing anti-vaxxers in Los Angeles to the U.S. Capitol riot, resulting in five deaths, to the run-up of a weak stock, GameStop, by 1,800 percent. These events, coupled with some strains of political thought being restricted on Facebook and Twitter, along with the outright bann...
It’s an irresistible tale: Young investors linked by social media beat Wall Street pros at their own game. Hedge funds, betting on a retail chain called GameStop to plunge in price, instead see a barrage of small investors snap up shares and send the stock soaring, eventually forcing the funds to lose billions. The reality is more mundane: Big hedge funds also helped propel the stock upward and the small investors’ moves, while noble-sounding, probably were illegal. Why We Wrote This Everyone invested their own meaning in the GameStop saga. But what on the surface appeared to be a David a...
Creates 3D-printable elevation maps of Earth's surface. I originally made it because I couldn't find a tool to make a particular 3D model I wanted, and then decided to open source it. However, to use the code you need to download ~80 GB of elevation data, which I thought would be a stumbling block for a lot of other hobbyists, so I put together a little web interface and hosted it myself. It sometimes breaks even over a month from the occasional donation, and I think it's gotten me at least one job, but the best thing is the emails I get from users showing me what they've made with it. Seeing...