Review bombing

Customer reviews on the internet have long been corrupted by shills, Google’s advertising schemes and SEO optimisation, but a tsunami of AI generated garbage is now rendering them useless unless users exercise great care.

The discrete charms of the analogue world

The backlash against digitisation, artificial intelligence and the appropriation of human culture by a handful of technology giants is exemplified by a growing interest in classic analogue synths, rather than their soulless digital successors.

Under siege

The growing cyber, foreign interference, and disinformation threat from hostile state and non-state actors motivates a call for Australia to use all tools of statecraft to help shape the information space.

Online advertising, not social media, killed traditional journalism

Traditional newspapers relied on advertising revenue to subsidise their journalism and so when most adverts shifted online, journalism suffered as a result, and this – rather than the rise of social media – is the crucial factor.

Real journalists can lead the war against deepfakes

This year is vital for democracy and AI is already wreaking havoc on a news landscape struggling to cope with a range of other threats and crisis.

Navigating the minefield of misinformation

We’re bombarded with misinformation by criminal scammers, foreign governments and ideological zealots, but we can make it easier to identify and avoid by being aware of our own biases and emotions.

Compassion fatigue

There’s so much bad news that people are avoiding news sites, programmes and newspapers, as there’s a limit to how much war, violence, famine and hatred they can take, so appealing to people’s sense of compassion may hold the key to keeping them informed and even taking action to fix our troubled world.

Anger management

Our political worldview is becoming less about what we think and more about what we feel. There’s a reason for that.

Fear and loathing in Australia

As we muddle through the complexities of the 21st century, progress appears to be stifled by a media keen on angering its audience, rather than informing them.

The enemy within

Tucker Carlson’s lickspittle ‘interview’ with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was yet another shot fired by Russia and his American apologists in the propaganda war against Ukraine and NATO, but what more can be done to counter the disinformation campaigns undermining Western democracies?

Tucker Quisling

Tucker Carlson is not the first American reporter to travel to a foreign dictatorship and produce propaganda in the guise of journalism, but he is none the less contemptible for that.

Rollerball

The late, great, Norman Jewison’s 70s science fiction film ‘Rollerball’ depicted a United States in which a handful of massive, unaccountable corporations controlled all information – is this dystopian vision becoming reality?