Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
Fake News: Can Teenagers Spot It?
If we are to make it less of a threat to democracy, that effort is going to need to start in schools.
From ACM Opinion
How to Hack an Election (Without Touching the Machines)
On Monday morning, just 24 hours before polls opened in the US midterm elections, President Trump sounded an alarm with a Tweet: "Law Enforcement has been strongly...
From ACM Opinion
The Internet Is Splitting in Two Amid .S. Dispute With China
Western bigwigs were a no-show at China's biggest web conference. But in their absence, the local overseers of the nation's technology industry were only too happy...
From ACM Opinion
Humans Are Getting More Botlike on Twitter
We know for sure that Cesar Sayoc, who allegedly targeted high-profile Democrats with mail bombs in late October, isn't a Russian bot.
From ACM Opinion
Even a Few Bots Can Shift Public Opinion in Big Ways
Nearly two-thirds of the social media bots with political activity on Twitter before the 2016 U.S. presidential election supported Donald Trump.
From ACM Opinion
'This Is How Donald Trump Stays President for Four More Years'
Donald Trump often claims Facebook and Google are "rigged" to favor the political left. Now he's building a 2020 campaign infrastructure that can circumvent them...
From ACM Opinion
No, A.I. Won't Solve the Fake News Problem
In his testimony before Congress this year, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, addressed concerns about the strategically disseminated misinformation...
From ACM Opinion
Trolling, Hacking and the 2016 S Presidential Election
Late in 2016, then-US President Barack Obama mused in an interview with The New Yorker magazine that he had probably been elected because his campaign had begun...
From ACM Opinion
A Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared
More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft with a vision for putting a personal computer on every desk.
From ACM Opinion
Brett Kavanaugh and the Information Terrorists Trying to Reshape America
Since the advent of Donald Trump's candidacy, there's been a ton of focus on botnets and sockpuppets—automated and semiautomated social media accounts that use...
From ACM Opinion
How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital Age
Despite the ubiquity of computers in modern society, the vast majority of today's students never study computer science or computer programming.
From ACM Opinion
Why Silicon Valley Should Fear Europe's Competition Chief
Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, is surely the most feared person in Silicon Valley.
From ACM Opinion
Google at 20: How Two 'Obnoxious' Students Changed the Internet
In the summer of 1995, a second-year grad student called Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective students. Larry Page, an engineering...
From ACM Opinion
Former Google CEO Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two by 2028, and One Part Will Be Led by China
Eric Schmidt, who has been the CEO of Google and executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, predicts that within the next decade there will be two distinct...
From ACM Opinion
In 1968, Computers Got Personal: How the 'Mother of All Demos' Changed the World
On a crisp California afternoon in early December 1968, a square-jawed, mild-mannered Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage at San Francisco's...
From ACM Opinion
What Worries People about Future Science and Tech Innovations?
Many Americans see the future crowding into the present and some of the innovations ahead unnerve them, especially as they reshape ideas about human dominion.
From ACM Opinion