"Noam Cohen, The New York Times contributing writer and 'The Know-It-Alls' author, discusses his essay in the New York Times Sunday Review about the threat big tech companies pose to the public."

"Noam Cohen, a former New York Times tech columnist, discusses his book THE KNOW-IT-ALLS: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. It’s a fascinating biographical history of Silicon Valley pioneers, and is sure to make for a robust debate on the wider effect of tech culture on politics and society."

A comparative review of Leslie Berlin's book "Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age," and Noam Cohen's book “The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball.” 

"We are beginning to understand that tech companies don’t have our best interests at heart. Did they ever?"

"In 2004, Peter Thiel created a company, Palantir, that built on his PayPal cofounder Max Levchin’s algorithms for analyzing and making judgments based on an individual’s highly personal digital records."

"After the election of Donald J. Trump, technology companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google have been called to account for magnifying the anger and misinformation of the voters who helped propel him to the presidency."

"YouTube’s reliance on Wikipedia to set the record straight builds on the thinking of another fact-challenged platform, the Facebook social network, which announced last year that Wikipedia would help its users root out 'fake news.'"

"Algorithms should be another important check on the system, revealing patterns of unfairness with a clarity that can be obscured in day-to-day life."

"Dipayan Ghosh, former Facebook private and public policy advisor and New America Institute fellow, and James Williams, former Googler and Time Well Spent co-founder, discuss the pressure facing big tech over fake news, bots and manipulative business practices."

"On the latest Recode Decode, “Digital Deceit” authors Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott explain the “fundamental flaw” in the digital economy that must be fixed."

"Digital Disinformation: How Silicon Valley's Implicit Alignment with Malicious Actors Subverts Democracy"

"But the reality is that the digital wilderness stretches far beyond Facebook, to a much larger tech ecosystem that deserves holistic examination and, potentially, regulation in the days ahead."

"The central problem of disinformation corrupting American political culture is not Russian spies or a particular social media platform. The central problem is that the entire industry is built to leverage sophisticated technology to aggregate user attention and sell advertising."

"Trump claimed that Google and Facebook suppress conservative content. The reason why is simple: we see what they think we want to, because it’s in their business interest"

"In our experience, getting the government to cooperate with the private sector so that the private sector could help the government was a critical agenda item—and a persistent uphill battle."

"The EU may have issued a record-breaking fine on Google last week. But by focusing on one big player, it overlooks industrywide practices that harm consumers."

"Key American companies are adapting their policies around the world in ways that may prove dangerous for U.S. national security."

"Amidst a fresh cycle of reports last week, Facebook confirmed that it had data partnerships with no less than 60 device manufacturers, including four Chinese firms -- Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL. These companies maintained access to Facebook user data as well as information on a user's friends -- even though Facebook did not collect prior consent."

"The United States has become identified with the global internet economy — for better and worse."

"When application programming interfaces -- or "APIs'' -- were first conjured up by software engineers years ago, no one would have imagined the role these benign and esoteric technical protocols could play in attacking American democracy."

"Our challenge is not just to overcome the natural resistance of corporations to regulation, but to break free of self-defeating partisanship."

"While the spotlight has been on Facebook, the broader issue is that most of the industry is not transparent about its practices with data brokers because there are no regulations that directly require such transparency. "

"But as Facebook, Google, Twitter and like companies now contritely cover their tracks and comply with the government’s requests, they simultaneously remain quiet about a critical trend that promises to subvert the nation’s political integrity yet again if left unaddressed: the systemic integration of artificial intelligence into the same digital marketing technologies that were exploited by both Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency."

"If there is anything we should learn from the Cambridge Analytica revelations, it is that unless things change, we can expect the spread of disinformation and the systemic manipulation of voters to happen all over again, not only in U.S. national elections but throughout the world." 

"When Spotify and Netflix joke about how they know so much about us, it’s entertaining. But there is a darker side to the intersection of digital data-mining and micro-targeted advertising."

"Facebook’s intervention to fix the News Feed is important — regardless of whether it works — because it signals a recognition that the relationship between media and democracy is in crisis."

"The recruiting industry is replete with arbitrary measures of competence and qualifications, each of which can perpetuate bias in its own right."

"China’s claim that the regulation is meant to enhance individual privacy rights is a facade. The government wants to quell international competition by raising the barrier to entry for outside players. "

"We have watched as the American technology industry has started up, conquered the world, and then -- in rapid succession -- inspired and fractured our democratic political system."