75. Small J.P., Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (Routledge, 1997).
76. Lewis K. et al., ‘The Structure of Online Activism’, Sociological Science, 2014.
77. Gabielkov M. et al., ‘Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter?’, ACM SIGMETRICS, 2016.
78. Quotes from author interview with Dean Eckles, August 2017.
79. Widely attributed, but no clear primary source.
80. One common example of ad tracking is the Facebook Pixel. Source: ‘Conversion Tracking’, Facebook for Developers, 2019. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel
81. Timeline from: Lederer B., ‘200 Milliseconds: The Life of a Programmatic RTB Ad Impression’, Shelly Palmer, 9 June 2014.
82. Nsubuga J., ‘Conservative MP Gavin Barwell in “date Arab girls” Twitter gaffe’, Metro, 18 March 2013.
83. Albright J., ‘Who Hacked the Election? Ad Tech did. Through “Fake News,” Identify Resolution and Hyper-Personalization’, Medium, 30 July 2017.
84. Facebook ad revenue per user in the US and Canada was $30 in Q1 2019, which would suggest $120 per annum. If users are worth 60 per cent less without browser data, it implies average data value of (at least) $120 x 0.6 = $72. Estimates from: Facebook Q1 2019 Results, http://investor.fb.com; Johnson G.A. et al., ‘Consumer Privacy Choice in Online Advertising: Who Opts Out and at What Cost to Industry?’, Simon Business School Working paper, 2017; Leswing K., Apple makes billions from Google’s dominance in search – and it’s a bigger business than iCloud or Apple Music’, Business Insider, 29 September 2018; Bell K., ‘iPhone’s user base to surpass 1 billion units by 2019’, Cult of Mac, 8 February 2017.
85. Pandey E. and Parker S., ‘Facebook was designed to exploit human “vulnerability”’, Axios, 9 November 2017.
86. Kafka P., ‘Amazon? HBO? Netflix thinks its real competitor is… sleep’, Vox, 17 April 2017.
87. Background on design from: Harris T., ‘How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind – from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist’, Medium, 18 May 2016.
88. Bajarin B., ‘Apple’s Penchant for Consumer Security’, Tech.pinions, 18 April 2016.
89. Pandey E. and Parker S., ‘Facebook was designed to exploit human “vulnerability”’, Axios, 9 November 2017.
90. Although now a central feature of social media, the ‘like’ button originated in a very different online era. Source: Locke M., ‘How Likes Went Bad’, Medium, 25 April 2018.
91. Lewis P. ‘“Our minds can be hijacked”: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia’, Guardian, 6 October 2017.
92. ‘Who can see the comments on my Moments posts?’, WeChat Help Center, October 2018.
93. Background on censorship from: King G. et al., ‘Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation’, Science, 2014; Tucker J., ‘This explains how social media can both weaken – and strengthen – democracy’, Washington Post, 6 December 2017.
94. Das S. and Kramer A., Self-Censorship on Facebook, AAAI, 2013.
95. Davidsen C., ‘You Are Not a Target’, 7 June 2015. Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGiiQUMaShw&feature=youtu.be
96. Issenberg S., ‘How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters’, MIT Technology Review, 19 December 2012.
97. Background and quote from: Rodrigues Fowler Y. and Goodman C., ‘How Tinder Could Take Back the White House’, New York Times, 22 June 2017.
98. Solon O. and Siddiqui S., ‘Russia-backed Facebook posts “reached 126m Americans” during US election’, The Guardian, 31 October 2017; Statt N., ‘Twitter says it exposed nearly 700,000 people to Russian propaganda during US election’, The Verge, 19 January 2018.
99. Watts D.J. and Rothschild D.M., ‘Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media’, Columbia Journalism Review, 2017. See also: Persily N. and Stamos A., ‘Regulating Online Political Advertising by Foreign Governments and Nationals’, in McFaul M. (ed.), ‘Securing American Elections’, Stanford University, June 2019.
100. Confessore N. and Yourish K., ‘$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump’, New York Times, 16 March 2016.
101. Sources: Guess A. et al., ‘Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign’, 2018; Guess A. et al., ‘Fake news, Facebook ads, and misperceptions: Assessing information quality in the 2018 U.S. midterm election campaign’, 2019; Narayanan V. et al., ‘Russian Involvement and Junk News during Brexit’, Oxford Comprop Data Memo, 2017.
102. Pareene A., ‘How We Fooled Donald Trump Into Retweeting Benito Mussolini’, Gawker, 28 February 2016.
103. Hessdec A., ‘On Twitter, a Battle Among Political Bots’, New York Times, 14 December 2016.
104. Shao C. et al., ‘The spread of low-credibility content by social bots’, Nature Communications, 2018.
105. Musgrave S., ‘ABC, AP and others ran with false information on shooter’s ties to extremist groups’, Politico, 16 February 2018.
106. O’Sullivan D., ‘American media keeps falling for Russian trolls’, CNN, 21 June 2018.
107. Phillips W., ‘How journalists should not cover an online conspiracy theory’, The Guardian, 6 August 2018.
108. Background on media manipulation from: Phillips W., ‘The Oxygen of Amplification’, Data & Society Report, 2018.
109. Weiss M., ‘Revealed: The Secret KGB Manual for Recruiting Spies’, The Daily Beast, 27 December 2017.
110. DiResta R., ‘There are bots. Look around’, Ribbon Farm, 23 May 2017.
111. ‘Over 9000 Penises’, Know Your Meme, 2008.
112. Zannettou S. et al., ‘On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities’, arXiv, 2018.
113. Feinberg A., ‘This is the Daily Stormer’s playbook’, Huffington Post, 13 December 2017.
114. Collins K. and Roose K., ‘Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan’, New York Times, 4 November 2018.
115. Background on real-life spillover: O’Sullivan D., ‘Russian trolls created Facebook events seen by more than 300,000 users’, CNN, 26 January 2018; Taub A. and Fisher M., ‘Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match’, New York Times, 21 April 2018. Analysis of the #BlackLivesMatter online movement also uncovered Russian accounts contributing to both sides of the debate: Stewart L.G. et al., ‘Examining Trolls and Polarization with a Retweet Network’, MIS2, 2018.
116. Broniatowski D.A. et al., ‘Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate’, American Journal of Public Health, 2018; Wellcome Global Monitor 2018, 19 June 2019.
117. Google Ngram.
118. Takayasu M. et al., ‘Rumor Diffusion and Convergence during the 3.11 Earthquake: A Twitter Case Study’, PLOS ONE, 2015.
119. Friggeri A. et al., ‘Rumor Cascades’. AAAI Publications, 2014.
120. ‘WhatsApp suggests a cure for virality’, The Economist, 26 July 2018.
121. McMillan R. and Hernandez D., ‘Pinterest Blocks Vaccination Searches in Move to Control the Conversation’, Wall Street Journal, 20 February 2019.
122. Quotes from author interview with Whitney Phillips, October 2018.
123. Baumgartner J. et al., ‘What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting’, Columbia Journalism Review, 2019.
124. Quotes from author interview with Brendan Nyhan, November 2018.
125. Source: Web of Science. Search string: (
126. Nelson A. et al., ‘The Social Science Research Council Announces
the First Recipients of the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants’, Social Sciences Research Council Items, 29 April 2019; Alba D., ‘Ahead of 2020, Facebook Falls Short on Plan to Share Data on Disinformation’, New York Times, 29 September 2019.
127. ‘Almost all of Vote Leave’s digital communication and data science was invisible even if you read every single news story or column ever produced in the campaign or any of the books so far published’. Quote from: Cummings D., ‘On the referendum #20’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog, 29 October 2016. In October 2018, Facebook established a public archive of political adverts – an important shift, although it still only captures the first step of the information transmission processes. Source: Cellan-Jones R., ‘Facebook tool makes UK political ads “transparent”’, BBC News Online, 16 October 2018.
128. Ginsberg D. and Burke M., ‘Hard Questions: Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?’ Facebook newsroom, 15 December 2017; Burke M. et al., ‘Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being’, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010; Burke M. and Kraut R.E., ‘The Relationship Between Facebook Use and Well-Being Depends on Communication Type and Tie Strength’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2016.
129. Routledge I. et al., ‘Estimating spatiotemporally varying malaria reproduction numbers in a near elimination setting’, Nature Communications, 2018.
6. How to own the internet
1. Background on Mirai from: Antonakakis M. et al., ‘Understanding the Mirai Botnet’, Proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium, 2017; Solomon B. and Fox-Brewster T., ‘Hacked Cameras Were Behind Friday’s Massive Web Outage’, Forbes, 21 October 2016; Bours B., ‘How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet’, Wired, 13 December 2017.
2. Quoted in: Bours B., ‘How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet’, Wired, 13 December 2017.
3. Background on WannaCry from: ‘What you need to know about the WannaCry Ransomware’, Symantec Blogs, 23 October 2017; Field M., ‘WannaCry cyber attack cost the NHS £92m as 19,000 appointments cancelled’, The Telegraph, 11 October 2018; Wiedeman R., ‘The British hacker Marcus Hutchins and the FBI’, The Times, 7 April 2018.
4. Moore D. et al., ‘The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm’, Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), 2003.
5. Background on Elk Cloner from: Leyden J., ‘The 30-year-old prank that became the first computer virus’, The Register, 14 December 2012.
6. Quotes from author interview with Alex Vespignani, May 2018.
7. Cohen F., ‘Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments’, 1984.
8. Background on Morris Worm from: Seltzer L., ‘The Morris Worm: Internet malware turns 25’, Zero Day, 2 November 2013; UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Robert Tappan MORRIS, Defendant-appellant. 928 F.2D 504, 1990.
9. Graham P., ‘The Submarine’, April 2005. http://www.paulgraham.com
10. Moon M., ‘“Minecraft” success helps its creator buy a $70 million mansion’, Engadget, 18 December 2014.
11. Background on DDoS from: ‘Who is Anna-Senpai, the Mirai Worm Author?’, Krebs on Security, 18 January 2017; ‘Spreading the DDoS Disease and Selling the Cure’, 19 October 2016.
12. ‘Computer Hacker Who Launched Attacks On Rutgers University Ordered To Pay $8.6m’, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of New Jersey, 26 October 2018.
13. @MalwareTechBlog, 13 May 2017.
14. Staniford S. et al., ‘How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time’, ICIR, 2002.
15. Assuming R=20 and infectious for 8 days, equivalent to 0.1 infections per hour.
16. Moore D. et al., ‘The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm’, Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), 2003.
17. ‘Kaspersky Lab Research Reveals the Cost and Profitability of Arranging a DDoS Attack’, Kaspersky Lab, 23 March 2017.
18. Palmer D., ‘Ransomware is now big business on the dark web and malware developers are cashing in’, ZDNet, 11 October 2017.
19. Nakashima E. and Timberg C., ‘NSA officials worried about the day its potent hacking tool would get loose. Then it did’, Washington Post, 16 May 2017.
20. Orr A., ‘Zerodium Offers $2 Million for Remote iOS Exploits’, Mac Observer, 10 January 2019.
21. Background on Student from: Kushner D., ‘The Real Story of Stuxnet’, IEEE Spectrum, 26 February 2013; Kopfstein J., ‘Stuxnet virus was planted by Israeli agents using USB sticks, according to new report’, The Verge, 12 April 2012.
22. Kaplan F., Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
23. Dark Trace. Global Threat Report 2017. http://www.darktrace.com
24. Background and quotes from: Lomas A., ‘Screwdriving. Locating and exploiting smart adult toys’, Pen Test Partners Blog, 29 September 2017; Franceschi-Bicchierai L., ‘Hackers Can Easily Hijack This Dildo Camera and Livestream the Inside of Your Vagina (Or Butt)’, Motherboard, 3 April 2017.
25. DeMarinis N. et al., ‘Scanning the Internet for ROS: A View of Security in Robotics Research’, arXiv, 2018.
26. Background on AWS outage from: Hindi R., ‘Thanks for breaking our connected homes, Amazon’, Medium, 28 February, 2017; Hern A., ‘How did an Amazon glitch leave people literally in the dark?’, The Guardian, 1 March 2017.
27. Background on AWS performance: Amazon Compute Service Level Agreement. https://aws.amazon.com, 12 February 2018; Poletti T., ‘The engine for Amazon earnings growth has nothing to do with e-commerce’, Market Watch, 29 April 2018.
28. Swift D., ‘“Mega Outage” Wreaks Havoc on Internet, is AWS too Big to Fail?’, Digit, 2017; Bobeldijk Y., ‘Is Amazon’s cloud service too big to fail?’, Financial News, 1 August 2017.
29. Barrett B. and Newman L.H., ‘The Facebook Security Meltdown Exposes Way More Sites Than Facebook’, Wired, 28 September 2018.
30. Background on Love Bug: Meek J., ‘Love bug virus creates worldwide chaos’, The Guardian, 5 May 2000; Barabási A.L., Linked: the New Science of Networks (Perseus Books, 2003).
31. White S.R., ‘Open Problems in Computer Virus Research’, Virus Bulletin Conference, 1998.
32. Barabási A.L. and Albert R., ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’, Science, 1999.
33. Pastor-Satorras R. and Vespignani A., ‘Epidemic Spreading in Scale-Free Networks’, Physical Review Letters, 2 April 2001.
34. Goel S. et al., ‘The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion’, Management Science, 2016.
35. Background on left-pad from: Williams C., ‘How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript’, The Register, 23 March 2016; Tung L., ‘A row that led a developer to delete a 17-line JavaScript module has stopped countless applications working’, ZDNet, 23 March 2016; Roberts M., ‘A discussion about the breaking of the Internet’, Medium, 23 March 2016.
36. Haney D., ‘NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program?’ 23 March 2016, https://www.davidhaney.io
37. Rotabi R. et al., ‘Tracing the Use of Practices through Networks of Collaboration’, AAAI, 2017.
38. Fox-Brewster T., ‘Hackers Sell $7,500 IoT Cannon To Bring Down The Web Again’, Forbes, 23 October 2016.
39. Gallagher S., ‘New variants of Mirai botnet detected, targeting more IoT devices’, Ars Technica, 9 April 2019.
40. Cohen F., ‘Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments’, 1984.
41. Cloonan J., ‘Advanced Malware Detection – Signatures vs. Behavior Analysis’, Infosecurity Magazine, 11 April 2017.
42. Oldstone M.B.A., Viruses, Plagues, and History (Oxford University Press, 2010).
43. Background on Beebone from: Goodin D., ‘US, European police take down highly elusive botnet known as Beebone’, Ars Technica, 9 April 2015; Samani R., ‘Update on the Beebone Botnet Takedown’, McAfee Blogs, 20 April 2015.
44. Thompson C.P. et al., ‘A naturally protective epitope of limited variability as an influenza vaccine target’, Nature
Communications, 2018.
45. ‘McAfee Labs 2019 Threats Predictions Report’, McAfee Labs, 29 November 2018; Seymour J. and Tully P., ‘Weaponizing data science for social engineering: Automated E2E spear phishing on Twitter’, Working paper, 2016.
7. Tracking outbreaks
1. Background on Schmidt case from: Court of Appeal of Louisiana, Third Circuit. STATE of Louisiana v. Richard J. SCHMIDT. No. 99–1412, 2000; Miller M., ‘A Deadly Attraction’, Newsweek, 18 August 1996.
2. Darwin C., Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world, under the command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. (John Murray, 1860).
3. Hon C.C. et al., ‘Evidence of the Recombinant Origin of a Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-Like Coronavirus and Its Implications on the Direct Ancestor of SARS Coronavirus’, Journal of Virology, 2008.
4. Forensic File Update on Janice Trahan Case, CNN, 14 March 2016.
5. González-Candelas F. et al., ‘Molecular evolution in court: analysis of a large hepatitis C virus outbreak from an evolving source’, BMC Biology, 2013; Fuchs D., ‘Virus doctor jailed for 1,933 years’, The Guardian, 16 May 2007.
6. Oliveira T. et al., ‘hiv-1 and hcv sequences from Libyan outbreak’, Nature, 2006; ‘hiv medics released to Bulgaria’, BBC News Online, 24 July 2007.
7. Köser C.U. et al., ‘Rapid Whole-Genome Sequencing for Investigation of a Neonatal MRSA Outbreak’, NEJM, 2012; Fraser C. et al., ‘Pandemic Potential of a Strain of Influenza A (H1N1): Early Findings’, Science, 2009.
8. Kama M. et al., ‘Sustained low-level transmission of Zika and chikungunya viruses following emergence in the Fiji Islands, Pacific’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2019.
9. Diallo B. et al., ‘Resurgence of Ebola virus disease in Guinea linked to a survivor with virus persistence in seminal fluid for more than 500 days’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2016.
10. Racaniello V., ‘Zika virus, like all other viruses, is mutating’, Virology Blog, 14 April 2016.
11. Beaty B.M. and Lee B., ‘Constraints on the Genetic and Antigenic Variability of Measles Virus’, Viruses, 2016.
The Rules of Contagion Page 31