Zeynep Tufekci

Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations.

Given exponential growth dynamics of infectious diseases, containing an epidemic is straightforward early on, but nearly impossible once a disease spreads among a population.

Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech - it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard.

Attention, to a terrorist group, is often what the well-meaning, outraged response is to your two-bit Internet troll: it is the food that feeds them.

Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power.

You might be tempted to think that China has a Streisand-effect problem, in which trying to censor an event creates even more publicity. But that assumes the Chinese government doesn't understand the Streisand effect, and that can't be right, because if one government understands attention dynamics online, it's China's.

A 'fair' fight between non-equals is not fair, and being blind to power is an implicit endorsement of the powerful.

It's not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree - eventually, at least some of the time - on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn't mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform.

Our social networks, our news, our mundane existence and our important moments are all mediated by algorithms, whose proprietary, profit-driven, ad-financed nature seeps into every small micro-interaction.

Automated gender analysis of my writings often marks me as male, probably because I write about technology, and also about war. But our algorithmic overlords are onto me: I mostly encounter three types of ads online: weight loss, beauty products, and online degrees from shady for-profits.