Avi Asher-Schapiro

Is big tech getting too big? What influence will the industry have over politicians in the future? How will AI transform the way businesses operate? These are some of the questions we put to Kara Swisher, a veteran technology journalist who closely watches Silicon Valley. is a close observer of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley.

Civil liberties and immigration rights groups worry Donald Trump's incoming administration could use powerful law enforcement surveillance and big data technology to press ahead with some key policies, risking infringing on privacy rights.

Republican Trump has repeatedly said he would "militarize" certain law enforcement activities, which could involve using the military for domestic law enforcement, though he has not provided any specifics.

Meta - the owner of Facebook and Instagram - is struggling to fully contain and address hate speech ahead of the U.S. election, according to research shared exclusively with Context.

Non-profit Global Witness tested how Facebook was dealing with hate speech ahead of the presidential vote by analysing 200,000 comments on the pages of 67 U.S. Senate candidates between Sept. 6 and Oct. 6.

Four years ago, Nigerian Ernestino Amaechi got a visa to study business in the U.S. but now he worries he might be forced to go back home and be separated from his two American-born children if visa rules are tightened after the U.S. election.

Originally from the southern Rivers State in Nigeria, where he got his undergraduate degree, Amaechi now works as a part-time teacher at a community college thanks to a scheme that allows students to stay on after they graduate and get work experience.

Forget polling or prediction markets - if you want to take the political temperature of the United States ahead of the presidential election, look at the stock prices of the country's biggest private prison conglomerates, said Bianca Tylek.

Tylek, executive director of the non-profit group Worth Rises, was on vacation when President Barack Obama issued an executive order aimed at phasing out the federal government's use of privately run prisons in 2016.

For more than a month, a team of some 270 firefighters has been battling a wall of flames consuming two Indigenous territories on the edge of Brazil's Amazon rainforest.

Their focus is to protect villages from the rapidly advancing fire line, said Ana Maria Canut, chief of operations in Mato Grosso state for Prevfogo, Brazil's main forest firefighting organisation.

As the U.S. braces for a fiercely competitive election, Checo Yancy has helped register 20,000 fellow formerly incarcerated individuals to vote, just a fraction of the people in his home state of Louisiana who have had their civil right restored.

"It's taken on a special urgency. Everyone is trying to get every vote they can get," said Yancy, co-founder of the non-profit Voters Organized to Educate (VOTE).

Brain-reading devices anyone can buy on the internet can decipher your moods, your focus, and in the not so distant future, maybe even the words you are thinking.

Such advances carry incredible promise for medicine, wellness, and consumer electronics. But they could also usher in a dystopian future where our thoughts are no longer our own. 

So how do we regulate them with human rights in mind?

Electronic devices that capture and analyse brain signals are becoming more mainstream, with brain-reading meditation apps, brain-computer video game interfaces and even attention-tracking headphones hitting the consumer market.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, last month publicly tested an augmented reality interface where users navigate the world with neurological signals picked up from a wristband. 

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have endorsed vastly different visions for the U.S. economy and one particularly stark point of disagreement is how to treat the growing wealth of the richest Americans.

The top 1% of rich Americans controls a third of all the nation’s wealth – more than the combined sum owned by the poorest half of the population.