What happened in Zambia?

⚠️ Update: Real-time network data confirm that social media and messaging platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are now restricted in #Zambia on election day in addition to the earlier WhatsApp restriction #ZambiaDecides2021

📰 https://t.co/pTzmnesKzP pic.twitter.com/Nw58eCTfu8

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) August 12, 2021

Several groups, including Access Now and NetBlocks, reported that the country had blocked access to WhatsApp and other social media platforms. That the Zambian government was considering taking this step during its elections was first reported last week by the Lusaka Times.

Initially, Zambia’s government denied reports that it was considering a social media blackout, but it followed up with a statement by the country’s Information and Broadcasting Services Permanent Secretary Amos Malupenga, who ahead of the shutdown said, “Government, therefore, expects citizens to use the internet responsibly. But if some people choose to abuse the internet to mislead and misinform, Government will not hesitate to invoke relevant legal provisions to forestall any breakdown of law and order as the country passes through the election period.”

The Zambian government is expected to keep access to social media restricted as of yesterday, all the way through to Sunday, 15 August, when vote counting is expected to be completed. NetBlocks explains that citizens in that country can currently circumvent the block using VPN services. There have already been incidents of violence reported before the elections kicking off. This social media shutdown might dampen some instances of further violence but it will also make it more difficult to react to possible flare-ups and let citizens move out of potentially dangerous situations.

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FacePay, as the name suggests, is a facial recognition system that lets users pay for things using biometric data — specifically those chiselled (or possibly crafted-from-pudding — hey, people are all different) features you’re carting around all day.

Moscow Metro 2033?

How it works in this particular instance is that eligible users will download the Moscow Metro app, upload a photograph of themselves and then link a bank card. Then, when they hit a metro turnstile, they just stand on the marked spot (as seen in the image above) and the little camera will deduct money from their account and permit them ingress. Easy, right?

But it does rather rely on trusting access to your facial features to an outside entity. There are already questions about who owns your face in an era where biometric information is being gathered and stored. Facial recognition is already in widespread use in China, where it’s currently preventing children from playing more video games than the government there believes is healthy. Korea is conducting public transportation tests when it comes to face-based payment, and Georgia already has the tech in place.

South Africa doesn’t really have this sort of public transportation, so we’re unlikely to see a version of it any time soon. At worst, we’ll see it turn up on the Gautrain, at best it’ll one day be implemented on a (hopefully self-driving) minibus taxi — but by then it’ll be a mature technology and hopefully all the questions around it will have been worked out.

At the moment, it’s not known how long the Moscow Metro will keep facial data after the trial is complete and what sort of security is protecting that data. There’s also no information on whether that data will be shared with police or other law-enforcement agencies. Then there’s the question as to whether users will be permitted to opt out of using facial recognition as a payment method once it becomes more commonplace. It’s entirely possible that facial recognition will be forced on the citizens of a given country, should the technology become widespread enough. Whether it’s worth it is something to consider, before we get to that point.

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The latest is Ireland, which has just announced its national AI strategy, “AI – Here for Good”. It aims to become “an international leader in using AI to benefit our economy and society, through a people-centred, ethical approach to its development, adoption and use”.

This is to be obtained via eight policy commandments, including increasing trust in and understanding of AI by using an “AI ambassador” – a veritable AI high priest – to spread the message around the country. Another aspect is to promote AI adoption by Irish businesses and the government within a special moral and ethical framework. There are several shortcomings in this strategy, which it shares with similar efforts by other countries (leaving aside more obviously bad AI strategies, such as that underlying China’s surveillance state).

The hype is tripe

Such strategies uncritically share the hype and hysteria surrounding AI. A typical example would be the chief executive of Google’s owner Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, claiming in 2016 that “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire”.

He would say this, as his company’s business model critically depends on AI, and on people trusting the technology. Ireland’s strategy goes precisely along with such hype by repeating the claim that AI could double Irish economic growth by 2035. It doesn’t detail whose growth, or how.

The strategy lauds various useful existing AI-based apps – which, for instance, improve cycling infrastructure in Dublin, provide Irish language tools, save energy, and comfort dementia suffers – but it is hard to see how more of these could double economic growth.

Most notably, AI is central to a few digital platform firms such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba – GAFAA for short. They enjoy winner-takes-most benefits due to the fact that current AI requires large amounts of data. As more people use your platform, the profitability of the data grows exponentially.

This has given a huge first-mover advantage to those companies that got it right, turning them into monopolists and gatekeepers. Digital platform firms disrupt existing businesses by out-competing them every time – a good example being how Google, basically an online search-engine, disrupted the advertisement-driven business model of newspapers, or how Apple is selling more watches than the centuries-old Swiss watch industry.

These platforms also depress the start-up of new firms, for instance by buying up all potential new competitors. This stifles innovation.

And increasingly, entrepreneurs have to compete on these platforms – for example, Amazon Marketplace. They can be at the mercy of abuses such as fake product reviews by competitors; rulings on such issues by the gatekeepers that are unpredictable and opaque; and sudden algorithm changes that can affect their business by making them, for example, less visible to potential customers. Then there is the phenomenon of digital subsistence entrepreneurs – online sellers who barely earn a living wage.

This radically different (anti-) competition landscape – sometimes labelled “platform capitalism” – has caused regulators and antitrust authorities substantial headaches. The EU recently adopted proposals for a Digital Markets Act (DMA) and a Digital Services Act (DSA), which try to rein in the actual and potential abuses on large AI-based digital platforms.

If AI and automation had been a force to reckon with, we would have seen skyrocketing labour-productivity growth and rising unemployment. Instead, we see stagnating productivity growth – for example, the UK’s is the lowest in 200 years – and some of the lowest unemployment rates in western economies in decades.

Ireland’s AI strategy ignores the above problems with platform capitalism. The name Google appears only once in the entire document, and Amazon and Facebook not at all. There is no reference to digital platforms, platform capitalism, the DMA, DSA or the EU’s many antitrust actions against Google. The omission is like Hamlet without the Prince.

Ireland’s AI strategy should have specified how and when AI will achieve the economic benefits it mentions – and who will reap them. It also should have offered a vision of how to make sure that the nation does not suffer from the GAFAAs or become a mere agent of them.

Firms don’t use it

The strategy also assumes that a lack of trust in AI is due to people not understanding the technology well enough. So voilà, teaching people data science and having an AI ambassador, like a modern-day prophet, is the answer. One may expect precisely the opposite outcome: the better people understand AI, the less they will trust it.

This would actually be desirable, of course. In the US, where understanding of AI is fairly advanced, adoption rates of AI are in fact meagre. A recent US Census Bureau survey of more than 800,000 US firms found that only 2.9% were using machine learning as recently as 2018. A 2020 survey by the European Commission also pointed to very low adoption levels.

Many other surveys confirm the low adoption rate of AI. Firms do not adopt it, not because they don’t trust it, but because it makes little business sense. It is too expensive, usually with paltry returns, and comes with an exorbitant environmental price tag – and all that before you factor in the domination of the incumbents.

Ireland’s “AI – Here for Good”, like many similar national strategies, seems to believe in miracles, for instance that various circles can be squared. These include enabling access to large volumes of relevant data for all firms while protecting everyone’s privacy, and turning the country into a powerhouse for training sizeable deep-learning models and massive data centres while cutting CO₂ emissions. It admits no trade-offs.

The implied message is that Ireland can pluck wonderful fruits from a thicket of thorns, just so long as it trusts in AI and adheres to its particular ethical commandments. Transhumanists, GAFAA, and other winners-takes-all in the digital economy will approve wholeheartedly.

• Wim Naudé is Professor of Economics, University College Cork
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

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In March 2021, the working group produced a final report. The report comes at a critical time in light of the high-profile cyberattacks on SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as ransomware attacks on critical civilian infrastructures and essential public services.

Multi-stakeholder inclusion

The Cyber OEWG was established in 2018. It was tasked to continue cybersecurity negotiations in a more democratic, inclusive and transparent way. The process is open to all interested member states.

The Cyber OEWG publicly consults with non-state organizations over concerns about new threats posed by communications technologies. These include online interference in electoral processes, cyberattacks on supply chains and infrastructure and ransom attacks on medical facilities.

Civil society organizations have raised concerns with Cyber OEWG about the potential humanitarian consequences of malicious activities related to information and communications technologies (ICT). They demand considering the societal impacts of cyber threats in favour of merely focusing on the economic and political impacts.

Impacts of malicious cyber activities

Increasingly, rampant cyberattacks target critical civilian infrastructures, including health facilities, pipelines, water plants and food supply chains. Attacks on technology firms have also become commonplace.

These cyber incidents have impacted organizations of all sizes, including those with less awareness and capacity to defend themselves, such as civil society organizations and small businesses. Civilians may also be affected through ensuing personal data breaches and disrupted public services.

Harm to individuals resulting from a data breach can be physical, financial, emotional or reputational. Disrupted public services have also resulted in death by delaying treatment.

Centering civilian security

People experience cyber threats, incidents and harms differently depending on their gender identity, ethnicity, race and other social and cultural hierarchies. Those who are in vulnerable and marginalized positions may be disproportionately harmed by cyberattacks.

Organizations such as the UN Institute for Disarmament Research and the Association for Progressive Communications examine these uneven aspects of cybersecurity. Addressing these inequalities in cybersecurity requires human-centric and inclusive approaches to cybersecurity.

A human-centric approach to cyber-security prioritizes people when assessing cybersecurity threats, incidents, technologies and practices. It recognizes that people’s intersecting identities shape their cybersecurity needs and experience of cyber incidents. Consequently, cybersecurity measures and instruments should be designed to address structural inequalities which lead to insecurity.

Disaggregated data by socio-economic factors on people’s participation in cybersecurity fields and on victims of cyber incidents need to be collected. Efforts to increase underrepresented and minority groups’ participation in cybersecurity workforce should go beyond providing access to education and skills development. Further, cybersecurity skills-building should be tailored to the specific needs and capabilities of targeted population groups, including people with disabilities, the elderly and children.

Building a cyber-resilient society

The exploitation of vulnerabilities in ICT systems and their weakening of encryption standards can undermine trust and confidence in cyberspace overall. When any one sector or state is more secure, we all reap the benefits. On the other hand, enabling insecurity by design and malicious ICT acts degrade the entire security of the cyber ecosystem.

Threats to cybersecurity can emanate from any sector within society, due to human error, natural disaster, technical issues or cyberattacks. The effect can cascade across sectors and levels in unanticipated ways — as demonstrated in the cyberattacks targeted at giant tech firms.

To address the origins and systemic effect of cybersecurity threats, we need to build societal cyber resilience. This would require equal distribution of the resources needed to build cyber capacity and the broad, participation of all affected stakeholders — governmental, private sector and civil society — to shape cybersecurity research, policy and practice.

While facing the same persistent cyber threats experienced by states and private entities, civil society organizations are equipped with far fewer resources to defend themselves. Addressing such cross-sectoral cybersecurity resource inequalities could be done through establishing cyber-incident response teams that cater to the need of all affected stakeholders, not just firms operating critical infrastructures.

Cybersecurity funding for financially constrained sectors, such as civil society organizations and small businesses, is also needed. It is crucial to provide cyber skills building programs for employees in these organizations, including awareness of cyber threats, the importance of cyber hygiene habits and how to respond to cyber incidents.

Good practices at the national level include formalizing civil society organizations’ participation in shaping cybersecurity-related legislation and policies. This would include developing measures to deter cyberattacks, designing cyber capacity building programs and sharing information about cyber threats.

States have started to embrace this inclusive approach to cybersecurity. Several Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, have established national cyber incident response teams that accept reporting from civilians.

Recently, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States — an intelligence alliance knows as the Five Eyes — committed to develop a collective response against the threat of ransomware.

The UN is making incremental progress towards multi-stakeholder inclusion and prioritizing civilian security in cybersecurity negotiations. However, much work still needs to be done to follow up on the Cyber OEWG’s proposed actions. Future cybersecurity discussions must establish an accountability mechanism for states’ cyber operations and resolve how international law applies to cyberspace.

• Debora Irene Christine is Researcher, United Nations University Insitute in Macau, United Nations University
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

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Already, plenty of data about millions and millions of faces exist. We have volunteered our faces in social media posts and photos stored in the cloud. But we’ve yet to determine who owns the data associated with the contours of our faces.

In the age of Big Tech, we need to grapple with what expectations we can and should have about who has access to our faces. The recent riot at the U.S. Capitol has put the question into the spotlight as facial recognition becomes a vital tool in identifying rioters: What is the power of facial recognition technology, and are we ready for it?

Even before the riots, facial recognition technology was being used in many ways that we probably haven’t seriously considered, and many of us have voluntarily contributed to creating data about our faces, either explicitly or implicitly. Facial recognition technology, for example, is ubiquitous in public spaces.

As we make decisions on whether to use facial recognition technology for law enforcement, surveillance and other initiatives with ostensible social purposes, we need to stop and ask ourselves: What are the costs of losing our faces to data? There are serious consequences, including the right to privacy and our ability to live our lives free of surveillance.

In Belgrade, according to reports and a video by local non-governmental organization the SHARE Foundation made in support of their initiative #hiljadekamera (Thousands of Cameras), high-definition cameras will be deployed in the Serbian city for a variety of surveillance functions.

The director of SHARE, Danilo Krivokapić, says facial recognition technology in those cameras will track individuals’ movements as they wander around the city. Photos that already exist in the system are matched up with the data captured by the cameras, and are then analyzed through a supplied artificial intelligence system. This creates the possibility for tracking a person’s movements, via facial recognition technology, in real time as they move through Belgrade.

But this isn’t just happening in Belgrade. Governments and surveillance go hand in hand, and facial recognition technology gives governments more options and ways to track and constrain the movement of people within their borders.

The city of London decided last year to deploy cameras capable of facial recognition alongside its 627,727 CCTV cameras. The move lead to protests.

Corporations also employ FRT

It’s not just governments that want your face.

Last year, Cadillac Fairview, one of the biggest commercial real estate companies in North America, was called out by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada for installing inconspicuous cameras in directories at 12 of their malls throughout Canada, including Toronto’s iconic Eaton Centre.

These cameras captured five million images of customers and used facial recognition software that generated more data about those images, including gender and age. Although the images were deleted, the data generated from the images was kept on a server by a third party.

In response to the privacy commissioner’s report, New Democrat MP Charlie Angus stated:

“We have a right to be able to go in public places without being photographed, tracked, put into data surveillance machines, whether it’s for corporations or for police and government.”

Unfortunately, Angus is wrong — there is no such right. And since Cadillac Fairview didn’t keep the photos, just the data about the faces in the photos, the problem was about consent, not violating privacy rights.

What rights do we have when we volunteer our faces to datafication? Journalist Rebecca Heilweil documents the many ways we bring facial recognition technology into our lives. Many of us are familiar with Facebook’s photo-tagging technology that tags not just your face, but other people in your photos. This technology is also present in Google and Apple’s photo apps.

But this kind of facial recognition technology is being extended into other realms. For example, Subaru deploys facial recognition technology to detect distracted driving. Apple offers HomeKit features that cross-reference data collected from various devices, and uses facial recognition to tell you if a friend recognized from your photos is at the door.

Nest Hub Max from Google employs facial recognition technology to literally look for you, in the way that it’s always listening for the words: “OK, Google.” Hirevue uses AI to evaluate potential employee images for suitability and likelihood for success.

Fundamental part of who we are

The human face is one of the most basic things that very young children recognize and learn as their brains sort out the world.

It is a fundamental part of who we are as a species, and its importance is almost too vital to even articulate. Is the data associated with that face — that is, the digital representation of your face that matches up to your actual face or photos of your face — part of that fundamental part of you that you get to keep to yourself? Or is that a foolish expectation in our data-intensive world?

Which brings us back to the U.S. Capitol insurrection. There is a certainly a sense of justice to see facial recognition technology deployed to bring white supremacists to justice. But at what cost?

We know about the biases in our existing data against people of colour, women and of low-income status. We know police who use these biased data in the name of algorithmic policing has resulted in harassment of targeted communities and the wrongful arrests of Black people.

The stakes are high, not just for law enforcement, but for our rights to privacy as individuals. Our expectations of data collection and privacy are not in line with the realities of data collection and storage, facial or otherwise. So it’s important to consider our rights in the context of our humanity.

Our personal data has been and is being collected at an astounding rate every day. That’s resulting in a fundamental change not just in economic and ethical terms, but in the way we live as human beings. Our understanding of human rights, and the corresponding laws to protect them, need to be rebooted to account for how data collection is fundamentally changing.

• Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

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These technological changes have fuelled a substantial new private policing sector that includes commercial companies but also online vigilantes. This change is comparable to the “quiet revolution” seen in the 1970s when conventional private policing, particularly the use of uniformed security officers, emerged on an industrial scale.

Despite its scale, online private policing activity has been largely ignored by researchers and politicians. Yet it is already creating some significant issues that need addressing.

This new online private policing sector exists most obviously in the numerous companies providing services. These include designing, testing and maintaining security systems, responding to cyber-attacks and moderating websites for harmful or illegal content.

But many other organisations have also developed their own cybersecurity structures to better protect themselves from online crime. In most large organisations, these structures are led by what are generally called chief information security officers (CISO) but there are also many other new cybersecurity roles such as security architects and ethical hackers.

Globally, this new sector is estimated to support around 6 million jobs and is predicted to be worth US$248 billion (£190 billion) by 2023. This is much more than the traditional private security industry, which is only predicted to be worth around US$167 billion (£128 billion) by 2025.

One of the most interesting roles to emerge in this new sector is that of the moderators who police the content published on the internet. They play an important role in preventing the publication of undesirable material, from hardcore pornography and footage from war zones through to abusive and inappropriate language.

There has been virtually no academic research of these important operatives. But media reports have raised concerns over the welfare of these staff, who often have to view large amounts of distressing content, including images. So their conditions of employment and capabilities should be more of a priority for researchers and regulators.

Online vigilantes

The internet hasn’t just stimulated new forms of commercial private policing but has also enabled a new type of vigilantism to flourish. For example, the limited law enforcement response to the masses of scam emails and bogus websites we’re at risk from everyday has led to the growth of “scambaitors”. These are private individuals who try to engage with scammers and waste their time or simply raise awareness of their scams.

One of the problems with scambaiting is the humiliation and racism often involved. For example some scammers have been encouraged to do repetitive tasks such as draw street maps and rewrite books, paint themselves or pose naked in humiliating positions, all of which have then been publicised. Sometimes this is done with explicit or implicit racist commentaries, relating to the fact that many of the scammers are black West Africans.

Perhaps the most controversial area of online vigilantism that has emerged is paedophile hunting. Organised groups of internet users pose as children in online chatrooms to lure and expose paedophiles.

The actions of these groups have clearly helped the police and led to the exposure of real paedophiles who have subsequently been charged and convicted. In 2018, at least 150 people in England and Wales were charged using evidence provided by paedophile hunters.

But some groups have made their exposures and confrontations public, in some cases even live-streaming them online. This has led to innocent people being falsely and publicly condemned, while others have killed themselves after the exposure. It has also been revealed that some of the people enacting this “justice” are themselves convicted criminals – whereas police forces themselves often bar people with criminal records from joining.

The rapid growth of both commercial and amateur attempts at policing the internet shows there is a demand that is not being met by the traditional provider of law enforcement, the state. But the problems that are emerging from this private security activity demonstrate why it isn’t enough to leave such significant operations to the market or volunteers.

The first “quiet revolution” eventually resulted in many jurisdictions introducing regulations to better control the activities of private security. This new shift at least warrants further research and investigation to determine if the controls are adequate. The suspicion is that they are not.

• Mark Button is Professor of Security and Fraud, University of Portsmouth
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

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The fine is the biggest ever handed down by the FTC. It certainly sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. Facebook’s Q2 earnings, reported the same week, were a better-than-expected $16.9bn. The fine is the amount of money Facebook makes in 27 days. Facebook investors are relieved. Its share price has risen.

The same week, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage launched World4Brexit, a US-based fundraising operation aimed at enabling “friends of the UK from around the world” to donate to the ongoing campaign to ensure that the UK leaves the EU. World4Brexit is based in Michigan and is a registered non-profit organisation, which means that it can accept individual donations of up to $5,000 without having to name donors.

The Labour Party has called for an investigation following concerns that the organisation will allow foreign “dark money” to subvert the democratic process. Similar concerns have been raised about the Brexit Party possibly receiving donations through Paypal in ways that don’t comply with UK electoral law.

Even if the Labour Party gets its investigation, nothing much will happen. These two events dramatise a tension between money and politics that is unique to the 21st century.

Bigger business, deeper pockets

Wealthy individuals and organisations have a disproportionate influence over elected representatives. This has long been the case, and certainly predates the rise of companies such as Facebook, Google and Cambridge Analytica. But the amount of money these companies have to spend is unprecedented. Apple was the first company to be valued at more than $1 trillion. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is worth around $900bn; Facebook $560bn. The world’s ten richest corporations now own more wealth than the poorest 180 states combined.

As the wealth of these corporations has grown, so the amount they’ve spent on lobbying has grown too. In 2002, for example, Google spent less than $50,000 on lobbying Washington. In 2017, it spent $18m – more than any other company in the world. In 2018, it spent $21m. Google also spent more money than any other corporation in the US on political donations in the 2016 presidential election

The use of lobbyists by corporations is widespread. Non-corporate organisations haven’t been able to keep up. For every $1 spent on lobbying by labour unions and public interest groups combined in 2015, $34 was spent by large corporations and the associations which represent them.

The new technology of lobbying

There is nothing especially new in corporations translating their wealth into political power or in the fact that power is concentrated among wealthy organisations and individuals.

What is new is that technologies have emerged which concentrate power in the hands of the wealthy and increase inequality of access – on a scale unimaginable only a few years ago. Wealthy companies can move money around the globe instantly and anonymously, in official currencies or in cryptocurrencies, issued by no state. They can use this invisible money to purchase the services of lobbyists, or to donate to political campaigns, in ways that are almost impossible to trace. And they can access information that can be used to bolster their lobbying efforts in ways not open to poorer individuals and organisations.

Human civilisation now has greater access to information than at any point in its history. In an ideal world, this fact should be liberating and empowering. It should enrich democracy, inform citizens and make for a more reflective and egalitarian politics. But we don’t live in an ideal world.

We live in a world in which information – and the expertise necessary to analyse it – comes at a price that only wealthy organisations can pay. From the outside, lobbying may look the same as it always has, but it isn’t – it’s driven increasingly by an information divide. A divide between those who can afford it and those who can’t.

.@peggy_grande, Chair of W4B, welcomed @Nigel_Farage at our launch event yesterday. A special thank you to everyone who joined us to show that #Brexit is important for the US and the world. #BetterOffOut pic.twitter.com/gj3LLjEvuC

— World 4 Brexit (@world4brexit) July 23, 2019

If you want to glimpse this, take a look at the new niche industry which has emerged to help companies leverage complex data in the service of supplying political intelligence and altering the political agenda.

FiscalNote is an example. Based in the US, it uses “artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing” to scrape the internet for data on politicians, regulations and public policy developments in order to provide paying clients with up-to-the-minute data they can use to target politicians and mobilise grassroots support.

Its clients are some of the wealthiest companies on Earth, including Nestlé, the world’s largest food company ($247bn), Nouryon, the Dutch chemical company ($5bn), and the US Corn Growers Association, which represents the interests of the US field corn and Ethanol industry ($50bn). FiscalNote charges between $US10,000 and “several hundred thousand dollars” a year to enable organisations that can afford it to achieve lobbying successes far beyond what smaller, less resourced organisations can achieve.

EU elections concluded last week. @FiscalNoteInEU's team compiled a list that includes the names, parties, and countries for MEPs in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. View it here: https://t.co/PTe1ZXO0tc pic.twitter.com/JTbjoHbn41

— FiscalNote (@FiscalNote) June 4, 2019

We all know now that new technologies have made it easier than ever to influence elections, and to move money around the world in ways which are harder to trace. What’s less visible is the extent to which they have made it easier for the wealthy to lobby more effectively for their interests.

Big data hasn’t levelled the playing field. It has simply allowed wealthy organisations and individuals to further entrench their dominance. And regulators can’t keep up. New technologies make it almost impossible to trace the global flow of money World4Brexit may receive to fund its political campaigning. The FTC’s stern rebuke of Facebook was nothing of the kind. Institutions are scrambling, and failing, to keep pace with the technological changes shaping our politics.

• Phil Parvin is Senior Lecturer in Politics, Loughborough University
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

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