Individual news organizations tweet upwards of 100 times per day—a content diet even the most obsessive tweeter can’t digest. Instead, we pick out small bites, our personal interest and bias helping us choose what tweets we see and which accounts aren’t worth a follow. With each retweet and mention, Twitter’s algorithm goes to work, shaping our feeds for us. And if we’re not careful, we’re soon stuck inside a chamber of the algorithm’s making, where only the things we want to hear (or see) are echoed back.

But Ania Medrek has built an app for that.

It’s called Echology. Medrek developed the app while researching the echo chamber phenomenon on social networking sites during her final year as a Master’s candidate at OCAD University in Toronto. An extension for Twitter, Echology takes note of what accounts you follow and scrapes each news tweet for important keywords. After you click the small Echology button below each tweet, the app randomly generates related tweets from news providers you don’t follow. The suggestions appear under the heading “People who’ve read this may not have read,” a conscious spin on the way sites like Amazon and Facebook recommend products and content. But, Medrek clarifies, Echology doesn’t just show opposing political views. It presents everything in between, the diversity of each news story and the context needed to understand each headline.

If you were to click the Echology button under a news tweet summarizing the latest congressional testimony from Mark Zuckerberg regarding Facebook’s data privacy, for instance, the app might generate a tweet from Politico with new reactions from lawmakers, a story from NPR that highlights a different section of the day’s testimony, and BBC coverage on the U.K. Parliament’s response. These are tweets from news providers you don’t follow, and would not have appeared in your feed otherwise.

Before the idea for Echology was born, Medrek read dozens of studies about the echo chamber phenomenon. What she found surprised her: there were distinct, non-human reasons for the polarization, aggression, and ignorance she had seen percolate on her own Twitter feed for years, reasons explaining how and why one news story plays out in countless different ways with countless different consequences, almost all unseen to the average user. Medrek “tweezed out” the 25 most important and compiled them onto deck of cards, each with its own factor. One reads “misleading headlines,” another “hashtags,” and a third, especially important one: “personalization.”

Personalization is just what it sounds like: the ability to make your Twitter feed unique by filtering out who you follow and who you don’t. When it comes to news, Medrek says, personalization is dangerous. “You start seeing only one perspective,” she says. “You’re not understanding the people around you.” And following a range of news sources won’t necessarily help you break free of a social network’s algorithm, which is programmed to show you more of the content you interact with. “It can trump your decisions,” Medrek says. “The algorithm can decide, oh, but you only actually ever click on this point of view, so we’re actually going to hide and suppress the others, even though you chose to follow those [accounts] too.” You may follow CBC on Twitter, but if you only ever click on articles from CTV News, you’re less likely to see CBC tweets on your feed. It’s the algorithm giving you what it thinks you want.

Medrek knew that to break free of the echo chamber, Twitter users would need to see news stories the algorithm was blocking. So, armed with her deck of 25 contributing factors, Medrek sat down with a group of news industry professionals for what called “participatory design” workshops. After three meetings, Echology had taken shape. 

Once she linked Echology to her own Twitter account, Medrek was intrigued by what she noticed. “The different tones, the hierarchy of words, what you chose to highlight and what you didn’t totally shapes peoples news experiences,” she says. “Those little differences mean a lot.” Visitors to OCAD’s graduate exhibition, where Medrek debuted the project in May, tried out Echology and had similar reactions. “People we’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know I needed this, but now that I see it, I need this,’” she says.

Echology isn’t ready to be distributed to the public yet, but Medrek aims to find more developers and work out the app’s kinks, like improving how Echology recognizes keywords in each news tweet. And the workshops she held during the development stage could morph into tools for teaching in high schools, colleges, and newsrooms.

Thinking about and engaging with the echo chamber phenomenon can bring change, Medrek says, pointing out that most social media companies are genuinely open to finding new solutions. “But it’s not just on tech giants to solve this,” she says, “it’s on journalists, it’s on designers. So there’s hope.”

UPDATE (05/24/2018): This story has been slightly modified to clarify information about social networks’ algorithms and the titles of those in the news industry involved with Echology.

On the morning of the U.S. election last November, I logged onto Twitter and spent several hours arguing about privilege—mostly white, but also male—with someone who believed the entire concept was, itself, racist and sexist because he “judges people individually,” systemic issues be damned. As often happens, the discussion devolved to me calling him “willfully obtuse” and 20 minutes later, “fucking stupid.” I’m not terrific at debating, but I am fairly certain of two things: privilege is real and nobody has ever been convinced of that on Twitter, even without name calling.

We all know how that day ended: with the the unfathomable, terrifying, and depressing culmination of a campaign that saw a brick heaved through the Overton window, followed by a molotov cocktail and several bags of dog shit. On November 9, several tech companies woke up wondering just what role they played in getting a neophyte demagogue elected to the office of President of the United States. Twitter, for its part, finally had to take a hard look at its service and its contribution to public discourse.

Its approach up to that point was mostly to avoid the question. Sure, they locked out “alt-right”¹ nihilist haircut Milo Yiannopoulos, but the cesspool of humanity he controlled just kept on keeping on in their unceasing war against “cuckservatives” and “libtards” alike. After the election, Twitter admitted its staff were having “challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct,” added new controls for shielding oneself from such conduct (really, just a slightly more sophisticated version of the Twitter mute button), and started shutting down some of the more egregious “alt-right”² accounts. Delightfully, this caused several terrible people, such as actor-turned-racistuncle-to-the-entire-internet James Woods, to leave in a “free-speech” huff. But former “Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” David Duke still gets to tweet, so let’s call the effort inconsistent at best.

Twitter is motivated to try and fix things. Last fall there were rumours that the company could be bought by Google or Disney or Salesforce or Microsoft, but nothing ever came of it. Which is fair—who wants to assume that much liability? Meanwhile, its problems seem like a more focused version of the web at large, where newspapers are shutting down comment sections and at least one major advertising network is pulling its service from sites such as Breitbart.

It’s getting easy to start thinking that maybe the entire internet was a terrible idea, and Twitter encapsulates that perfectly. The things that make Twitter fun and addictive—It’s instant! It’s pithy!—also strip complex subjects of any kind of nuance. Twitter rewards snark, invective, and cynicism, lighting up your brain like a slot machine every time someone clicks “favourite” or “retweets” you. More than anything, Twitter feels like all of the loudest people—including me—yelling at each other. Sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement, but always, always yelling.

Could I be a better at debating issues with people on the Internet? Sure. It would just take a little patience, some empathy and a concerted effort to fight every instinct I have while scrolling my feed. But even then, I’m not sure I could convince the willfully obtuse or the fucking stupid that systemic racism and sexism actually exist.

Twitter, for all the time I spend on it—and genuinely enjoy it—just might not have the gestell for grown ups to talk about grown-up things. I suppose that’s why someone like Donald Trump enjoys it so much.

1 The “alt-right” is a big tent of awful people, including racists, misogynists and other assholes. Yiannopoulos’s specific brand of altright is the narcissistic pseudo-intellectual who gives the appearance of wanting to watch the world burn, but is really too shallow to care about much beyond their own microfame among white guys with bad opinions about ethics in video game journalism.

2 Real, actual, literal Nazis.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

I recently found myself the recipient of a barrage of condemning tweets. No surprise that self-righteousness and outrage prevail on Twitter, but I was still frustrated. There’s no room for trying to understand. They’ve already decided I’m on the other side. Today’s social media splits society into extremes. We’re in or out. Refugees are sanctified or demonized. Islam is spirituality or terror. #lovewins or you’re going to hell. The wall Trump wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico is literal, but there are also the figurative walls we put in place and which create divides.

In June, I sarcastically lambasted the University of British Columbia for its handling of the inquiry into what they called “serious allegations” against Steven Galloway, chair of the Creative Writing Program. Galloway was suspended in November of 2015, and a retired Supreme Court judge, Mary Ellen Boyd, was brought in to investigate. UBC announced this publicly, and some faculty breached his right to privacy by giving media interviews, which led to public hearsay. In the time of Jian Ghomeshi, assumptions were made.

Galloway had hired me to profess Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults, and was suspended from his post during my time at UBC. My tweet wasn’t about his innocence. What was meant to be a statement in support of liberty, justice, and its process was used against me. There were calls to revoke my Governor General’s Literary Award (heard that one before…) and suggestions that I was a rape apologist.

Many university campuses have a sordid legacy of suppressing reports of sexual assault. When a case does reach court, as recently seen with the atrocious Brock Turner case, there doesn’t seem to be real justice. The people are mad. And we should be. The law is failing us. But that doesn’t give us free rein to crucify someone. It is not guilty until proven innocent.

My outspokenness on the subject wasn’t about Galloway. We aren’t friends; I never conferred with him over my statements. Equally, it wasn’t about the alleged victims. I was on neither side of the wall. I live in an open-space loft. I was speaking out against an inequitable series of events which have resulted in slander. The disorder and vagueness of UBC’s dealings with Galloway—publicizing his dragging through the mud without any facts that might reveal its justification—scared me. After all, I was employed by them once.

I tried to explain how my point was for humanity, and our liberties in this country. Our constitutional right is to be tried in a court of law, not by social media. Boyd’s investigation only substantiated one of the claims, but UBC felt its trust in him had been broken. Okay, fire him and move on. That’s their right as an employer. It is not their right, or anyone’s right, to throw him under the bus and roll over him without even knowing what street you’re on.

My initial tweet, “Steven Galloway is a true visionary, and I look forward to his next book. He can be ‘unsubstantially’ inappropriate with me any day,” was impetuous and easily misconstrued. I wrote what I was feeling at the time, and wrote it in a confined space. Because the internet is a place of permanence, no one lets you forget. The condemnation that followed equated to intimidation and censorship.

If you post something people disagree with or don’t fully understand, you’re bound to be attacked and lose followers. In this superficial, stat-obsessed world, freedom of expression is at risk. If you aren’t confident in your point of view, you might allow yourself to be oppressed. What should really be silenced is digital self-righteousness. A person’s heart amounts to more than 140 characters. Take the time to know it.

Illustration by Kris Noelle

Critics of social media say it’s nothing but white noise—but it can also amplify women’s voices

Antonia Zerbisias walks into the newsroom on what is her second last day before retirement. It’s early evening on October 30, 2014, and somewhere in between saying some of her last hellos and goodbyes to colleagues at One Yonge Street and attending to whatever final bits of business a columnist and writer has left after more than 25 years at the Toronto Star, she types out a tweet: “It was 1969 when, if you found you were the only girl in the rec room and no parents were home, it was your fault”

Period.

Then, “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

Minutes later, two more tweets, divulging memories that time couldn’t erase after 40 years.

“ … 1970: My friend’s friend from out of town ‘forgot his wallet’ in his hotel room …”

Period. “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

“ … 1974: A half-empty 747 to London. Traveling alone. Fell asleep…”

Period. “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

Hours before sending out these tweets, Zerbisias was messaging back and forth with longtime friend and Montreal Gazette justice reporter Sue Montgomery, together fuming over public reaction to the women who were then, for the first time, coming forward with their allegations of abuse against CBC’s former golden boy radio host, Jian Ghomeshi.

Zerbisias and Montgomery had watched, stunned, as the subsequent flood of questions on Twitter, Facebook, and the comment sections of online articles came in from coast-to-coast: Why didn’t the women report anything when it first happened? Why were they only coming out now?

The victim-blaming narrative infuriated both women, and Montgomery suggested they start a list with the names of women who had been raped but had never reported it—just to prove a point. She wanted to do something to “remove the fucking stigma” and get people to speak up and act up. Zerbisias agreed, suggesting they use social media to get their message out far and wide, landing on the hashtag: #BeenRapedNeverReported.

And so, at 2:55 p.m. she sent out her first tweet:

“#ibelievelucy #ibelievewomen And yes, I’ve been raped (more than once) and never reported it.”

Period. “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

“The rest is history as they say,” Zerbisias says with a laugh over the phone from her home in Toronto one evening in January. Three months after co-creating the hashtag that ignited a global conversation on why women don’t report rape, the describing word Zerbisias still uses over and over again is “overwhelmed.”

“I didn’t decide to start anything. It just happened. The time was right,” she says. “It seems to me that all we’ve been talking about on social media for the past two years is rape. That’s what focus of feminism is today. Much of the third wave, as it were, is about rape rage.”

“Social media is not just another way to connect feminist and activist voices—it amplifies our messages as well,” Jessica Valenti told Forbes magazine in 2012. Valenti is a columnist with the U.S Guardian and founder of Feministing, a feminist pop culture website, who, among other accolades, has been credited with bringing feminism online. Indeed, it seems today women’s voices are often heard loudest through our screens—a trend some are calling “hashtag feminism.” Although the term itself may be debatable, the phenomenon it points to is not: #Bringbackourgirls, #WhyIStayed, #WhyIleft, #YesAllWomen, #YouKnowHerName, and #BeenRapedNeverReported.

Odds are if you’re a Twitter user, or at all savvy to social media, you’ve come across these hashtags. Each was born out of public outcry in the wake of high-profile tragedies: The kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian girls by militant rebels Boko Haram; Janay Palmer’s decision to stand by hubby NFL running back Ray Rice after he knocked her unconscious in an elevator; the publication ban on Rehtaeh Parsons’ name; and the Elliot Rodger shooting rampage, in which six University of California, Santa Barbara students were killed. These hashtags were quickly taken up by millions around the world as outraged rallying cries for change—for women to raise their voices in unison and scream “enough is enough.”

Historically, feminists did this by marching and picket lines, staking out their causes with signs and speeches. Today many are turning their campaigning efforts toward the most public of public spheres: social media. But what’s the point of it all? When feminists grab their phones and type out an 140 character message, does it inspire positive change? Do these virtual mantras carry actual power?

Answering the questions surrounding the legitimacy of hashtag campaigns begins with a look back at the very roots of feminism, says Emily Lindin, founder of The UnSlut Project—a multimedia initiative working around cyberbullying and slut shaming. Social media most obviously lends itself to a spirit of solidarity between women, and speaks to the idea of a globalized sisterhood, hardly a new idea to the movement at all.

Lindin says the power of hashtag feminism lies not only in the content of a message, but the number of times that message is retweeted. Within the act of using a hashtag is a real sense of unity, or as Lindin so eloquently puts it: a way to “add your voice to a chorus.”

“It’s easy but impactful,” she explains to me one night in a phone call from California. “Feeling that you’re part of something, part of a movement; you’re not just feeling that way—you really become part of it.” Take the campaign she launched in the fall of 2014, #Okgirls. The hashtag originated from news that three high school girls from the city of Norman, Okla., alleged to have been raped by the same boy at their school, and, unfortunately to no one’s surprise, felt abandoned by the school and larger community once the word broke.

Lindin wanted her campaign to create solidarity for the three girls to connect with a globalized network of other sexual assault survivors—to reach out to the young women who had, unwillingly, opened themselves to bullying and potential triggers, just by being online. After all, as Lindin says, one of the hazards created by merging social media and feminism is the vulnerability of opening yourself to trolls, which at best means a slew of derogatory comments, slander, and hate speech. At its worst: death threats, which Lindin herself has experienced. “It works in the way that terrorism works,” she says. “If you speak out we attack you and we threaten you so just stop. Don’t speak up.”

Thinking of the Oklahoma girls, Lindin devised a plan. After contacting the mothers of the girls who had already began the hashtag #YesAllDaughters, Lindin created #Okgirls and asked people to use the hashtag to write direct messages of support and encouragement to the girls using Facebook and Twitter.

“For the #OKgirls: I was raped and then bullied in high school too. You are not alone. I stand with you. #survivor”

“#OKgirls: There is immutable, unmistakable power in your voices. Hear ours too: We believe you. It’s not your fault. Now, #NotOneMore.”

“#OKgirls: Your voices are strong, brave, clear. It’s okay to sometimes feel afraid, but know that there are so many in your corner now.”

Lindin then collected these, and hundreds of other similar tweets and curated them into a set of emails—partly to weed out the nasty comments, but also to allow the girls to remain offline and take a break from watching their own stories blown up in headlines and news stories. She emailed the girls’ mothers the lists of these tweets, which line after line, read as statements of commitment from survivors and allies to stand up and stand by the three girls as one unified community. “It was amazing,” says Lindin.

In January, 2014 Maisha Z. Johnson sends a tweet criticizing her former high school in California. The school had made headlines after spectators at a basketball game chanted, “USA, USA, USA,” to a Pakistani student while he stood at the free-throw line. Almost three hours later she’s calling out her online harassers with hashtags #OhYouMadHuh #WhyYouMadAboutJusticeTho. As evening rolls on, she switches her focus to a less serious subject matter: “The moon is gorgeous right now! I can’t stop staring at her.”

Twitter is all about expression; a space for free thought to abound, no matter how minuscule, seemingly insignificant, obxinious or profound. The phenomenon of status updates in social media offers a moment-by-moment transference of information from “real life” to whomever is behind a screen in a near instant. A point Johnson, a American-writer-activist-poet-turned-social-media-expert unintentionally proves through her own Twitter account, which is that the platform acts as a global space for women to express what she calls their “lived experience”—uncensored and unfiltered.

“I’m not asking for anyone else’s permission for what I tweet,” she says. “I’m not making sure I have the right terminology or anything like that, I’m just expressing myself.” That relationship between terminology and self-expression is pivotal and oftentimes problematic.

Too often, Johnson says, people, particularly women, are pre-occupied with finding the right wording to describe and define their own experiences and, as a result, remain silent. It’s easy for elitism and academia to dominate conversations about why a woman struggled to find an abortion clinic in her home province with vocabulary like “privilege” or “social transformation.” Twitter, says Johnson, brings us back to our “real selves”.

Real language can be used to connect with people, rather than being stuck in a bubble of academics—people who, says Johnson, may have all the vocabulary, but aren’t necessarily committed to communicating about the everyday.

Criticisms of hashtag feminism cover an array of understandably troubling aspects of digital culture that threaten to undermine the well-intentioned changes of social justice work: the temptation to make a hashtag go viral, for example, by picking a sensationalist message for the sake of garnering more attention, or even the inherent privilege associated with owning a smart phone, which raises questions of access and barriers to technology.

Freelance writer Meghan Murphy also writes on her own blog, Feminist Current, that hashtag campaigns give rise to the invention of the “feminist celebrity,” by invariably providing more visibility to certain perspectives on the grounds of popularity while silencing other more marginalized voices, which, in turn, she argues, erodes the very ideology of unity within the movement itself.

However, the most dangerous effect of hashtag feminism seen by Johnson today lays in the constraints of the 140 character limit. The threat: Over simplification. Take the issue of domestic violence, which Johnson herself advocates around in her own writings. On its own, the term, “domestic violence,” evokes images of a cis-man, presumably a husband, assaulting his wife, a cis-woman.

What happens to everyone else—LGTBQ folk—who do not fit into this normative understanding of a relationship? How can we communicate the dynamics of violence in an abusive same-sex or trans relationship, such as the fear of being “outed” by a threatening partner under a single blanket term, “domestic abuse”? And how do we do that surrounded by so many other social media campaigns against spousal abuse? The problem is we often can’t—well, at least not right away.

Johnson believes Twitter is an entry point for inevitably larger, more contextualized conversations. It is a tool designed to stay informed and get in the know about what’s happening, as well as to find the right language to talk about or express an issue.

Lindin agrees. Twitter should be recognized as a chance to jump aboard an idea, she says, not ignite any form of back-and-forth exchange. The 140 character limit is plenty to declare, “here I am,” and add your voice to a cause, but there is a deficiency to expound on the nuances of a topic.

“I told my boyfriend and he called me a whore. Broke up with me. #beenrapedneverreported.”

“The first question the police asked was, ‘what were you wearing?’ I was 10. #beenrapedneverreported <3”

“I’ve #BeenRapedNeverReported because I knew I would be blamed because I had been drinking.”

By the time Zerbisias went to sleep on the night of October 30, 2014, the hashtag was trending in the U.S. By morning she was receiving emails from American and European media asking for interviews. Four days later, the hashtag was translated into French—and who knows how many other languages since. “I was thrilled because it meant women were not allowing themselves to be re-victimized,” she says. “That they were saying ‘fuck you,’ I’m gonna say this.” The hashtag gave women and men the power, space and freedom to come out and reclaim their attack, declaring that they were indeed raped like so many, many others. It was exhilarating to watch, Zerbisias recalls.

Yet, she refused most of the interviews, and turned down offers from organizations and advocacy groups asking her to get involved with their projects. “That’s not my responsibility,” she says. “I’m a writer, I’m not a social worker, I’m not a jurist, I’m not a policy maker, I’m not a law maker, I’m not even an organizer.”

Headlines from around the world applauded Zerbisias and Montgomery for inventing the hashtag that ignited a global discussion into why 90 percent of women never report their sexual assaults to police. “The question,” says Zerbisias, “is, ‘What next?”

Illustration by Matt Daley

Are we too apathetic when it comes to social media user experiments?

A few months ago, Facebook got into trouble for experimenting with some of their users. In the name of “science,” the company decided to start tweaking people’s newsfeeds with an excess of either positive or negative status updates from friends. The study showed that exposure to these updates could make people more positive or negative themselves. In short, Facebook made some people sad. On purpose.

Shortly after Facebook published its study, the dating site OK Cupid admitted that it, too, was screwing with its users. The company told people who weren’t matches that they were perfectly compatible. It removed photos from profiles. It tracked conversations between people. Its motive was simple: to see what would happen and maybe improve its own matching algorithm.

Both of these experiments were wildly fascinating. They were also wholly unethical. Neither company had anything even close to informed consent from the people they toyed with. These sites treated their users like guinea pigs, which is weird because I’m not entirely sure it’s even legal to treat guinea pigs like guinea pigs anymore.

The response to these experiments was strange. Some people were outraged, obviously. But most either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Facebook—a site with more than a billion active users—decided to screw with random people’s emotions and the general response was an overwhelming “Meh.” Data collection is bland and uninteresting.

Maybe we just aren’t surprised when this stuff happens anymore. If you use the Internet, you’re experimented on. It isn’t new. In the early 2000s, I worked for a digital agency and one of our clients was a large retail website. For about six weeks, we showed half the site’s visitors yellow “buy” buttons, while the other half saw shiny new green buttons. The green ones showed a marginally higher click rate, which, extrapolated over a year, meant about $50 million. So all the buttons turned green. This is basic A/B testing—an exercise in using data to determine and influence behaviour.

By today’s standard, that kind of experiment is quaint. In the last decade, the Internet has become exceedingly good at tracking and manipulating people. Amazon uses browsing and purchase history to flog products, Google “scans” (but doesn’t “read”) email to try targeting ads, and pretty much every website you visit weighs and measures the actions you take for their own gain. As far as the Internet is concerned, you are the sum total of your clicks, likes and purchases. You are a data profile they can apply an algorithm to and nothing more.

It’s not the worst deal. You get a worldwide network of infinite information and constant communication; they get to sell you stuff. As far as Faustian pacts go, that seems sort of fair. But how far does it go? We get upset when a government starts peeking at our data, but we willingly hand it over to Facebook, Amazon, and Apple and, well, everyone else, assuming that the “Terms of Service” we didn’t actually read are reasonable. (It’s worth noting that Facebook inserted the clause saying they could experiment on you only after their emotion experiment had been conducted, but before they told anyone about it.)

I’m not bringing this up to fear-monger about the evils of modern technology. I like technology, I use Facebook and I shop with Amazon. And I understand that sometimes it brings on big sweeping cultural shifts. But we’re on the cusp of owning Apple Watches that can send our heartbeat to our spouse. Or, theoretically, Facebook. Or a doctor. Or an insurance company. Given where technology is headed, it’s not too much to ask that the companies handling our data be honest about what exactly they’re doing with it (or that we bother to pay attention).

Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel, The Circle, examined people willfully (even gleefully) handing over their information, their privacy and, ultimately, their humanity. People who didn’t like the book criticized that Eggers doesn’t understand technology; that he just doesn’t get it. After seeing the the crowd at Apple’s iPhone and Watch announcement react with almost religious fervour, though, I’m convinced saying Eggers doesn’t understand technology is a lot like reading 1984 and saying George Orwell doesn’t understand government.

*Warning: working knowledge of Taylor Swift lyrics required*

We are never ever ever ever / Asking for it

— FeministTaylorSwift (@feministtswift) July 4, 2013

GENDER = SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. THAT NOT MEAN THAT GENDER IS INCONSEQUENTIAL, ELECTIVE, OR NONEXISTENT. HULK SMASH BARRIERS, NOT IDENTITIES!

— FEMINIST HULK (@feministhulk) June 9, 2013

It is illogical to train female humans to fear harm from strangers, then call them “oversensitive” about Internet trolls

— Feminist Spock (@FeministSpock) December 23, 2010

And the saddest fear / Comes creeping in / That you never loved me / Or her / Or anyone / Because all women are objects to you / Yeah!

— FeministTaylorSwift (@feministtswift) July 1, 2013

IT NOT ACTUALLY COUNT AS CHALLENGING YOUR OWN PRIVILEGE IF YOU EXPECT COOKIE EVERY TIME YOU DO IT.

— FEMINIST HULK (@feministhulk) March 27, 2013

Insulting men by calling them women is as meaningless as calling a rock a tree.The two are different, not unequal.

— Feminist Spock (@FeministSpock) December 19, 2010

Today was a fairytale / You were the prince / I was a beautiful submissive girl with no personality / It was kind of a terrible day actually

— FeministTaylorSwift (@feministtswift) June 27, 2013

HULK NO FEAR PATRIARCHAL HEGEMONY! HULKS SMASH HEGEMONY AND EAT FOR BREAKFAST! SPRINKLE ON GRANOLA (ALWAYS WASH CAREFULLY FIRST).

— FEMINIST HULK (@feministhulk) September 28, 2012

It is not logical to shame survivors or those who are unsure about their own experience. It is rational to #talkaboutit

— Feminist Spock (@FeministSpock) December 19, 2010

Someday / I’ll be / Living in a country with marriage equality / And all you’re / Ever gonna be is mean

— FeministTaylorSwift (@feministtswift) June 26, 2013

GLOBAL OUTRAGE. POLITICAL GROTESQUERY. HULK PAUSE WITH PUMPKIN TEA, PONDER PRIVILEGE (INCL OWN). DISCOMFORT, EMPATHY = ALSO FORMS OF SMASH!

— FEMINIST HULK (@feministhulk) September 18, 2012

I am most grateful to @Feministhulk for smashing gender binaries. I do hope to study them scientifically first.

— Feminist Spock (@FeministSpock) December 19, 2010

I’m just a girl / Trying to find a place in this world / Outside the virgin-whore dichotomy / Because my sexuality doesn’t have to define me

— FeministTaylorSwift (@feministtswift) June 25, 2013

TEACH GIRLS STRENGTH. TEACH BOYS NURTURING. TEACH BOTH THAT “BOY” AND “GIRL” ARE JUST SUGGESTIONS. SMASH START EARLY!

— FEMINIST HULK (@feministhulk) March 26, 2012

Go ahead and follow @thismagazine on twitter!

https://twitter.com/BarackObama

American politics have always been of serious interest for Canadians. Not only does the American President affect Canadian politics and procedures, but American elections are also just a heck of a lot more interesting to watch than our own. There’s something incredibly exciting about sitting around with your friends and watching the votes come in, as Wolf Blitzer and his associates furiously tap screens that zoom in and out on the states (CNN went very high-tech this year). Last night’s Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney battle was no exception—and as always, in and amongst the surging patriotism and mountains of hope, there was absurdity. Here, we bring you some of the election’s biggest WTFs.

1.)  Mitt Romney, on election day, tells reporters he only wrote a victory speech. That worked out well.

2.)  Mitt Romney takes forever to concede, finally addressing the public early this morning. He was scrambling to write his defeat speech, okay?

3.)  Donald Trump calls for a revolution when Obama wins. Tweeting things like, “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” and, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” business mogul Trump made it pretty clear that he was upset with the night’s results. Some tweets were deleted, including the outrageous, “More votes equals a loss…revolution!” Trump’s strong dislike for Obama is no secret (remember when he insisted that the President wasn’t American?), but this is ridiculous. What exactly is Trump hoping to gain? Being upset with the election’s outcome is one thing; deciding that it’s proof of an unjust system (and thus cause for revolution) is entirely another. At least NBC’s Brian Williams commented on its preposterousness.

4.)  Karl Rove says calling Obama’s victory in Ohio is premature. Even as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and even the Conservative Fox News said the state was Obama’s, Romney advisor Rove said, in an interview with Fox, that with 991 (20 percent) of the state’s votes still uncounted, it was too soon to know. This caused anchor Megyn Kelly to address the network’s number crunchers directly and find out if they, given Rove’s assessment, stood by their projection. They did. And, turns out, they were right. Woo!

5.)  Richard Noyes alleges that the liberal media was biased against Romney. The Media Research Centre’s Research Director Noyes wrote an editorial, published today by Fox News, which listed five reasons why this supposed bias was a major cause in Romney’s loss. Among them were accusations that the liberal media defended biased debate moderators (who were in favour of Obama), tried to hide the truth about America’s poor economy, and attacked “Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.” If I’ve learned one thing in journalism school, it’s that no media establishment is completely without bias—it’s literally impossible to be 100 percent neutral, in any circumstance—and that goes for both political camps. Also, Noyes should give America more credit than that: it’s a smart country, and its people can tell when they’re being fed nonsense. Plus, the media is an overly used and very easy target when pointing the finger. Why is only the liberal media to blame?

6.)  Ann Coulter is…still Ann Coulter. A sore loser, the Conservative writer tweeted: “The good news is the promise of continued massive unemployment among young people.” Ugh.

7.)  People think Justin Bieber is American and urge him to vote. This caused the Canadian (HUZZAH!) pop prince to take to Twitter, saying, “im 18…but i cant vote…im Canadian.” Sorry to crush the hearts of 14-year-old girls everywhere else, but he’s ours.

8.)  Obama beats Justin Bieber for the most retweeted post on Twitter of all time. Shattering Bieber’s record of over 220,000, Obama’s “Four more years.” tweet (featuring a heartwarming photo of Mr. and Mrs. Obama in a sweet embrace) has been retweeted over 680,000 times. Confession: this is actually a total FTW. Obama FTW!

http://specialolympicsblog.wordpress. com

“Every day I get closer to living a life like yours.”

It was 2008 when John Franklin Stephens, who has Down syndrome, wrote those words, but their importance has not diminished in the four years that have passed. A Special Olympics athlete and global messenger, Stephens recently had to once again defend his humanity—and, it seems, the world is listening.

During Monday, Oct. 22’s American presidential debate on foreign policy, outspoken conservative political commentator Ann Coulter set the internet ablaze with her tweet that she approves of “Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.”

Coulter meant for the tweet a to be a jab at President Obama. But for Stephens, it was a chance to set her, and the rest of the world, straight on using the r-word. In an open letter on the Special Olympics website, Stephens powerfully and succinctly outlines why using “retard” as an immature slur is so awful. And it has caught the world’s attention, with publications from Gawker and Jezebel to the Daily Mail and Huffington Post writing about it, commending Stephens. Here are his words, in full:

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow. So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.

Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.

Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.

Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.

After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.

I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.

Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.

No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.

Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.

A friend you haven’t made yet,

John Franklin Stephens

Global Messenger

Special Olympics Virginia

https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter

What Stephens did is admirable. While Coulter’s comment surely enraged him—and many others—he responded with maturity, poise, and intelligence. It would have been easy to reply in the heat of the moment, lashing out at Coulter, thus sinking to her level. Instead, Stephens acted with the utmost dignity. He was forward and brave with his words, laying blame where blame was due. But he was also honest, sincere, and sensitive, explaining exactly how using the word “retard” as an insult hurts him so much. The letter is both heart wrenching and heartwarming, outlining how Down Syndrome has affected and shaped Stephens’ life.

“I get the joke — the irony — that only dumb and shallow people are using a term that means dumb and shallow,” Stephens wrote in his 2008 Denver Post piece. “The problem is, it is only funny if you think a ‘retard’ is someone dumb and shallow. I am not those things, but every time the term is used it tells young people that it is OK to think of me that way and to keep me on the outside.” And that’s the real shame. Because if anyone deserves to be excluded, it’s Coulter.

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

A suspect wanted for questioning by Vancouver police following the June 2011 riot that erupted after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup playoffs. The law is still grappling with how to track crime in the age of social media and ubiquitous cell phone cameras. Image courtesy Vancouver Police.

After the sheer surprise of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots had dissipated, Canadian commentators tried to figure out what it all meant. Most beat their usual political drums—months later we’re blaming the pinko anarchists, capitalist pigs, and beer companies for making their products so darn tasty and portable.

But this being 2011, many who broke windows with one hand held camera phones in the other. And as myriad pictures and videos of the event began to circulate, another worrying spectre emerged: social-media vigilantism. Images of those involved in violence and property damage spread quickly around the Web, often with the explicit intention of shaming, catching, and even punishing the perpetrators with acts of “citizen justice.”

“We have seen Big Brother and he is us,” portentously intoned social-media expert Alexandra Samuel to the Globe and Mail. And really, who could blame her? Anyone who has ever taken public transit or gone to a movie knows our fellow Canadians can’t always be counted on to be fair, or even terribly nice. But if our mistakes and trespasses used to be judged by the mostly neutral bodies of the State, this new technology means we now run the risk of being tried and even convicted by the body politic.

This speaks to a phenomenon increasingly difficult to ignore, as centuries-long practices of law and social norms, whether privacy, ownership, knowledge, or even statecraft, are threatened by new technologies. These are worrying prospects to be sure, partly because they’re just so new. But here’s a radical idea: rather than throwing up our hands, or simply calling for the use of less technology, we need to spend time thinking about how we will reshape our legal and social institutions to deal with the inevitable change that is on its way. To protect the relative freedoms of liberal society, we need to build policing of technology right into our legal structures.

After all, it’s not as if what we’re experiencing now doesn’t have some precedent. Take the telephone, for example. Though it was an incredible leap forward in communication, it also presented the rather sticky problem that your communication could be recorded and put to unintended ends. Similarly, having a point of communication in your home meant that people could contact you at any time, whether you happened to be eating dinner or not.

Our legal structures responded by enforcing laws about the conditions under which telephone calls could be made, recorded, and submitted for evidence in a legal trial. Maybe just as importantly, we also developed social strictures around the phone, including general rules about appropriate times for calling and the right way to answer. Like most social norms, some people follow them and some don’t, but at least legally speaking, our rules around the telephone generally seem to work.

What we need, then, is a similarly measured response that institutes civic and legal codes for how surveillance technology can be used, whether that is encouraging social sanction for inappropriate use, or articulating under what circumstances public footage can be submitted for legal evidence. In the same vein, it would also mean the legal system has to deal with the dissemination of information for vigilante purposes, and ratchet up consequences for those who take the law into their own hands. It would involve the tricky process of the law considering intent and context, but given the different degrees in murder charges and Canada’s hate-crime laws, that kind of legal subtlety seems to make our system better, not worse.

Implementing these changes will take decades, not years, because the changes here are huge, involving how the State exercises its authority, but also how we as members of a society relate to one another. Yet the purpose of the legal system has always been to police out those two aspects of our lives. And rather than only decrying the downsides of mob mentality, the unfettered exchange of private information or the Web’s detrimental impact on established business, we need to think about preserving the good in this new technology.

Because there’s another worry looming here too, and it also is about historical precedent. In the 19th century, the rise of printing technologies and cheap reading materials drastically altered how ideas were spread. The State responded by instituting literary study into the then-new school curriculum so that the young might “learn to read properly.” Certainly, there were upsides: national cohesion, shared values, and proscriptions against anti-social behaviour. But it also meant that the radical element was contained and made safe, as youth were taught to think usefully, not dangerously.

We sit at the cusp of a similar moment in the history of information, and it’s certainly true that it occasionally feels like a riot— out of control and of our very basest nature. The fitting response, then, is much like the delicate dance of riot-policing done right: a reaction that enforces some order on chaos, while still protecting the rights and privileges such acts are meant to restore.