Author: TheGuardian

Editor’s Note: The “Momo Challenge” is a hoax about a nonexistent Internet challenge that was spread by users on Facebook and media outlets. It was reported that children and adolescents were being enticed by a user named Momo to perform a series of dangerous tasks including violent attacks and suicide. Despite claims that the phenomenon had reached worldwide proportions in as far back as July 2018, the number of actual complaints was relatively small and no police force has confirmed that anyone was harmed as a direct result of it since. It has become the most talked about viral...

Why is it so hard for white people to talk about racism? It is a question posed by the white academic Robin DiAngelo, whose book “White Fragility” has spent seven months hovering at the top end of the New York Times bestseller list. “The problem with white people,” she says, “is that they just don’t listen. In my experience, day in and day out, most white people are absolutely not receptive to finding out their impact on other people. There is a refusal to know or see, or to listen or hear, or to validate.” As a sociologist, she...

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report from the British government denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters.” The 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections. “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalized ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned Damian Collins, chairman of the UK’s Digital,...

In the grim, grey aftermath of world war, children were born on an unprecedented scale in a population explosion. The baby boomers, born between 1946 and the mid-1960s, had arrived. It was time for a new life. It was time for the young to grow up with faith in a better tomorrow. Time, however, has a way summarizing reality. When baby boomers reached adolescence, creating the modern designation of teenager in the process, it was as if the floodlights had been switched on, revealing a colorful, contrary, anti-authoritarian America. Anthropologist Helen Fisher inelegantly described the maturing of this huge...

David Blight has written a must-read life of the escaped slave who held America “to the lightning scorn of moral indignation.” If Frederick Douglass had been born white in 19th-century America, he would be remembered as a self-made man in the style of Thomas Edison. In 20th-century America, postwar, he could have been a counselor to presidents, like James A Baker, or perhaps a media personality, even Walter Cronkite. But he was born a slave, in Maryland in 1818, and he escaped to freedom and a life of voice and pen, thundering against slavery and for justice and the...

There is much Donald Trump might learn from a visit to the westernmost tip of the Great Wall of China – not least that if you are really determined to keep outsiders from entering your country, cow and horse excrement can be useful allies. Local historians claim that was one of the secret weapons Ming dynasty soldiers used to repel nomadic raiders, hurling bucketfuls of manure into the desert winds to blind the barbarians as they galloped towards this sand-swept Gobi outpost. Civilized People and Barbarians According to some historical accounts, tribes in the north of China were militarily...