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TikTok faces the music on both sides of the Atlantic, but the US and EU are playing different tunes
The US and EU have taken wildly different approaches to platform regulation, and TikTok is feeling the effects of both this week
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Josh Cowls
The state of the White House race, 196 days out
Spoiler alert: it's a coin flip
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Josh Cowls
Welcome (back) to plus/minus!
Plus ça change...
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Josh Cowls

July 2023

From the archives: Solving for X, The newest addition to the meta alphabet
How to wreck a platform, in 280 days or fewer.
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Josh Cowls

April 2022

“Severance”: Apple’s warped satire of… Apple?
Warning: abundant spoilers for the first season (and speculation about the second season) of Severance follow.
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Josh Cowls

February 2022

From the archives: Truth Social—App stores as a new front in the platform governance of Donald Trump
The launch of Truth Social is the latest episode in the sorry saga of Donald Trump and social media, but one which implicates new sites and actors in…
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Josh Cowls

October 2020

A nervous onlooker’s guide to the 2020 presidential election, which will be fought in four…
On the evening of November 8th 2016 I was sitting with friends in a Somerville, Massachusetts apartment feeling nervous but hopeful. For…
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Josh Cowls

April 2020

From the archives: Flattening the curve forwards—The new speed of politics and the new politics of speed
The slow, deliberative nature of representative democracy seems ill-suited to the present moment. Can it survive the new politics of speed?
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Josh Cowls

January 2020

September 2019

Want to stop no deal and five more years of Boris? The only answer is a tactical pact
The year is 2024, and in his final speech on the eve of the general election, standing next to his wife Carrie Symonds, Boris Johnson…
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Josh Cowls

August 2019

Four Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting a PhD
I’m coming to the end of my first year* as a PhD student at Oxford University’s Internet Institute. It has been a challenging year, in…
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Josh Cowls

March 2019

Deciding how to decide: Six key questions for reducing AI’s democratic deficit
Artificial intelligence (AI) has a “democratic deficit” — and maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. As Jonnie Penn and others have argued…
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Josh Cowls
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