They rejoiced when Twitter and WhatsApp made the Arab Spring possible, and were convinced they had built the weapon that would tear down autocrats and beget new, more transparent democracies. But over time a harsher truth has emerged. Those same networks became ISIS’s most potent tool. They were exploited by Russian trolls and the political targeteers at Cambridge Analytica to manipulate voters. And the subsequent call for a new kind of cyberspace—where we understand the real identities of everyone we are dealing with on the web—delighted the Chinese and the Russians. What better way to hunt
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