Based on Twitter and Facebook data gathered during the 2011 Arab revolutions, the authors of this Peaceworks report find that new media informed international audiences and mainstream media reporting, but they find less evidence that it played a direct role in organizing protests or allowing local audiences to share self-generated news directly with one another. ...

There’s good reason to fear that A.I. systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed by folies à deux relationships with machine personalities that don’t really exist. These risks ...