Our picksTikTok Worry | Cost of Killer Heat | Sinking British Coast, and more

The Sociologist Who Could Save Us from Coronavirus (Adam Tooze, Foreign Policy)
Ulrich Beck was a prophet of uncertainty—and the most important intellectual for the pandemic and its aftermath.

QAnon’s New Conspiracy: Democrats Are Stealing African Children (Philip Obaji Jr., Daily Beast)
QAnon supporters are seeking new platforms and followers in Africa to smear Joe Biden ahead of the U.S. election with wild accusations of an international pedophile cabal.

The Dangerous Art of Social Media and Messaging Manipulation (Perry Carpenter, Forbes)
The 2020 U.S. election cycle is destined to become the most contentious ever, in my opinion. On one hand, you have anxious voters overstressed and distracted due to the Covid-19 pandemic; on the other, social media channels and legions of their consumers are under siege, and influence from the propagation of misinformation campaigns are at a speed and scale of dissemination never seen before.

Foreign Threats Loom Ahead of U.S. Presidential Election, Intelligence Officials Say (AP / CBC)
Russia believed to be spreading disinformation to undermine confidence in system

The Cost of Killer Heat: A Rising Risk of Death in Poor Nations (Eric Roston, Bloomberg)
Economists studying the cost of greenhouse gas emissions conclude in a new study that it will be significant for heat-related deaths alone.

U.S.  Elections Face Phishing Attack Vulnerabilities: Study (D. H. Kass, MSSP Alert)
With only three months left until U.S. voters head to the polls, most state and local election administrators are inadequately armed to fight off phishing tactics used by hackers intent on breaking into networks, a new report said. States vary widely in their cybersecurity readiness, Area 1 Security found in its report entitled Phishing Election Administrators, for which it collected data on phishing vulnerabilities from more than 10,000 U.S. state and local election administrators. Inasmuch as hackers regularly use phishing emails to lure victims into activating malware, the quality of email protection used by organizations has an “inordinate bearing” on overall cybersecurity posture, the Redwood City, California-based, anti-phishing specialist said.

Britain’s Coast at Risk as Scientists Issue Dire Climate Change Warning (Sean Martin, Daily Express)
AN EXTRA 23 million people, including hundreds of thousands in the UK, will see a drastic increase in coastal flooding within the next 30 years as climate change continues to ravage the planet, experts have warned.

How Climate Change Is Changing the Way We Build (Trevor English, Interesting Engineering)
Changing weather across the globe is altering how engineers design buildings.

The U.S. Is Right to Worry About TikTok (Jordan Schneider, Lawfare)
Do American politicians’ concerns over TikTok have any merit, or is this just an instance of overblown fearmongering? ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has a more complicated relationship with the Chinese government than many American critics may realize. But if the government were intent on pressuring ByteDance to help with some kind of interference abroad, the company has little wiggle room.
The potential for Chinese government interference in ByteDance is considerable—and like other tech firms in China, there’s little the company can do about it. The Chinese government is no stranger to using orchestrated networks on Western platforms to influence foreign opinion and interfere in elections.

Mathematicians Urge Peers to Stop Working on Racist “Predictive Policing” Technology (Mathhew Rozsa, Salon)
“It is simply too easy to create a ‘scientific’ veneer for racism,” the open letter states