The political implications of the Internet, with an emphasis on the last election

I teach a class on Internet applications, implications, and technology and last semester one of our foci was the impact of the Internet on the election. I recently gave a two-hour lecture on the topic, pulling together material we had covered chronologically during the semester. These are the topics covered in the lecture:

• Historical context
• Lying
• Fact checking
• Fake news for money
• Fake news for politics
• Fake images
• Trump dominated social media
• More historical context - disillusion
• Non-political consequences
• Hacking USA
• The Internet is ephemeral
• Breitbart – “alt right” press
• Money behind the scenes
• Europe
• (Imperfect) fixes
• Future fake media

I created a PowerPoint deck for the lecture. The slides are fairly simple -- typically a mnemonic image, a few words and perhaps a food-for-thought question (as illustrated below) -- but they also have notes and links to sources for those wishing to study the material further.