There are a lot of good but sometimes slightly technical descriptions of what has been going on with FTX & its founder ‘SBF. This is the simplest non-technical way I can describe it to non-crypto people (Ie the 99% of people who have never heard of @cz_binance or Sam etc) FTX was a crypto-exchange site. It’s a bit like a foreign exchange trading site. People send in £, €, $ and turn it into bitcoin, Ethereum & others. As a result a lot of people’s money - $billions in fact - is held by FTX, mostly in these crypto-assets.

I have dedicated The Missing Cryptoqueen book to a special group of people. The 'armchair investigators' and 'citizen journalists' who warned everyone about OneCoin long before we started our podcast. The book is about Dr Ruja. But also how ordinary people took her scam down 1/ As OneCoin grew and grew, a small group of curious and brave people started asking questions. Mostly on a niche website called 'BehindMLM'. Even as early as 2014 - just weeks after it's launched - BehindMLM identified it as a ponzi scheme.

behindmlm.com/mlm-reviews/on…

The Missing Cryptoqueen book is now out!

The story of the multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme OneCoin, crypto-hype, investor FOMO & a missing founder.

Our podcast was just one part of this crazy story. Now here's the rest...

penguin.co.uk/books/112/1120… As always there are too many people to thank. But especially to @EburyPublishing & brill editors @SuzanneConnelly & @Aagoodfellow. Scores of contributors. And many BBC colleagues, especially @ByrnesyGsy - who is now firmly set as part of our Cryptoqueen team.

A short thread on the relationship between social media, hypocrisy and political extremism. It’s been bugging me for years. 1/9 Everyone is a a hypocrite at some level, since it’s impossible to act the same in private and public. However, digital technology has (re)created the widespread belief that hypocrisy is now a defining feature of people in power. 2/9

Trying something new for the new episode of The Missing Cryptoqueen. For fans of the series who want to know more (or see more) here are a few photos & links about the key characters in episode 9. 1/7 We often excerpt from Ruja’s June 2016 London Arena event. (Including at the start of episode 1). Here she claimed OneCoin was ‘the bitcoin killer’ and announced a ‘new blockchain’.

Her speech in full: 2/7

Ever feel like politics is one giant reality TV show?

Let me tell you about one of the most bizarre & fascinating interviews I've ever done - which airs today on BBC Radio 4 at 2.45pm. (Final episode of mine & @gemmanewby's series 'Watching Us'). 1/6 It's with Bill Pruitt - a producer on early seasons of The American Apprentice, which starred Donald Trump 2004 - 2015.

Reality TV 'made' Trump. I don't mean 'made him famous'. I mean the producers, including Bill Pruitt, created the Donald Trump you now know. 2/6

I can’t believe what I’m seeing! While running a facial recognition pilot, one man (understandably imho) covered himself up. The police forced him to show his face (& then fined him for disorderly conduct). This is dangerous & terrifying. If this is rolled out, there will be hundreds - probably thousands - who will do exactly what this man has done: principled refusal to comply. What will the police do then?

Far too much in today's @CommonsCMS report on disinformation to discuss here. But a couple of quick thoughts that might be helpful. (Full report is here: publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cm…). /thread. It does not, as some seem to think, say that social media platforms should be defined as 'publishers'. Rather they are somewhere in between a platform & publisher & we need a new definition & rules for them. I agree with that. We can't always rely on old categories.

Question: who is it on here whose view / opinion you respect so highly that, if in conflict with your own, you revisit your position? I'm getting ratioed here

Today the Science & Technology Select Committee published its report about regulating social media. Here it is: parliament.uk/business/commi… Couple of thoughts. #Thread It’s not bad. It says that platforms should have a ‘duty of care’, for kids using their services - such as default high privacy & filtering certain harmful content. Also wants Ofcom to be regulate that duty, so it can check if they’re up to scratch & fine if not. Reasonable, imho

I founded a research centre specialising in machine learning algorithms. I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican. She’s completely right & I’m delighted a politician is actually talking about this as it’s going to become a huge issue.

https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1087627739861897216

(And this video - which was circulating last year - is a very visual illustration of how bias can be built in & automated in apparently ‘neutral’ machines).

I can’t quite believe what I’m reading in this @nytimes investigation: that Facebook had a firm working to discredit its critics, in part by linking them to George Soros. nytimes.com/2018/11/14/tec… Interesting that as late as 2016 “Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it.”

The BBC is running a 'fake news week'. To mark the occasion, I thought I'd do a thread. 'Fake news' is a very unhelpful term, which describes at least three different problems, which have three different solutions. #Thread There is monetised fabrication. People knowingly pumping out rubbish ('The Pope supports Trump') because it's a way of making money through Facebook / Google's ad-revenue model. My colleague @carljackmiller covered it brilliantly here for @BBCClick bbc.co.uk/news/technolog…

A lot of debate at the moment about what is driving the ‘populist’ moment. The left tends to say the financial crisis; the right says immigration. I believe both miss the role of the internet in changing the nature of political communication. (Thread) Obviously social media helps outsiders left & right. It lowers the cost of mobilisation & organisation. And because outsiders have felt ignored & smeared by ‘MSM’ they were all early adopters. EDL, Swedish Democrats, Syriza - all were miles ahead of establishment parties.

A few quick thoughts below about the DCMS committee report into fake news, rushed out after it was leaked by Dominic Cummings, which says democracy is under threat from micro-targeting, fake news, data misuse. bbc.co.uk/news/technolog… It’s very similar to the argument I make in my book The People Vs Tech (available in all good etc etc). Many similar recommendations too. Ignore the headlines: though originally about fake news, it’s actually more about platform responsibility & micro-targeting.

Publication day!! The People Vs Tech is out in paperback today. To celebrate, I'll share a few short reflections from the book (which is available from all good stores, hopefully some bad ones too, and from @PenguinUKBooks here: penguin.co.uk/books/1116305/…) Thread! 👇🏻 This isn’t an anti-tech whinge. Rather an argument that there is an incompatibility problem, between an old system (mass party nation state level representative democracy) and a new one (borderless, networked internet technology).

#Zuckerberg due to appear before the Senate Committee in a couple of hours - so here’s a short thread about what (I think) matters. Obviously there will be the usual bluster & politicking - with committee members desperate to show they’re representing public concern about data etc. You can count a lot of that as background music.

PSYCHOGRAPHICS: a thread.There’s a lot of misunderstanding about this specific micro-targeting technique: what it is, if it works, and whether #cambridgeanalytica used it during the Trump campaign. This is my effort to explain it. 1/11 It is a technique of targeting users w/ messages informed by their personality type. It mostly revolves around working out individual personalities based on the well-known ‘OCEAN’ domains (‘Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness & Neuroticism).

I have now written more than one book, so hopefully have learned something about the process. Here at the ten things I wish I knew when I started. I hope they help any budding authors out there! (Thread) 1) You will save more versions of word docs than you thought possible. You NEED a clear & logical system to save, order & back up files from day one. And never delete old versions. While working on draft 15, you'll recall a line in draft 3 that didn't work then but does now.

First, I wish we'd be a little more imaginative. While other world leaders paint visions for the future, we're starting to sound like a broken record: 'tech firms need to stop extremism on the internet'. (Thread).

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There is still a mistaken view that algorithms will be able to spot 'extreme' content automatically. It's the algorithm fantasy: 'they can predict your next book, they MUST be able to spot extremism'. It doesn't work like that. 2/??