The shooter who killed 49 in New Zealand broadcast 17 minutes of his attack on Facebook. Watching and sharing videos like this inspire future killers and is disrespectful to victims, says a technology professor.
When Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to reach out to those who opposed the attempted coup last week, he didn't dial-in to a government-supported media outlet.
Like many people in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, social scientist Zeynep Tufekci was shocked by the killing of three Muslim students there in February. At a hastily organized vigil the following night, she was reminded of the power of community in addressing problems.
We need to be moving to a model where activists demand "no representation without conversation," said Zeynep Tufekci in a discussion about privacy, social media censorship, hashtag activism and global youth protests at the South by Southwest festival in Austin.
Gezi Park. Tahrir Square. Hong Kong. Ferguson. What form is youth activism taking and how is it different from what came before? The World brings you a multimedia experience from South by Southwest in Austin as part of our #SafeMode series.
From the Sony hack to #BringBackOurGirls, here are the top international security, privacy, digital diplomacy online activism and cyber-warfare stories of 2014.
Just who runs protests in places like Kiev and Hong Kong? It's not an easy question to answer, but that doesn't mean the protest movements in those places lack energy or direction. In fact, their loose structure may be a new model for political organization.
False rumors briefly spread this week that Ghanaian soccer star Michael Essien had Ebola. But what actually happens if someone spreads a lie like that on the Internet? Not much, as it turns out.
Many Facebook users were upset the company experimented on the emotional states of 689,000 users without their consent. For dictators, this just gave them more fodder to convince the public Facebook is evil.
The abducted Nigerian girls remain front-and-center for the international media. But Zeynep Tufekci of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill warns that all the global attention could backfire and end up empowering Boko Haram.
Around the world, revelations about NSA spying have caused outrage and protests. But not so much in the US. In fact, older Americans seem more worried than digitally plugged-in youth, whose electronic lives are being monitored. One researcher says young people don't seem so worried about the government acting as Big Brother.