Meet Facebook’s latest fake
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a 35-year-old billionaire who keeps refusing to sit in front of international parliamentarians to answer questions about his ad business’ impact on democracy and human rights… Read more »
Category: social media
YouTube overhauls its problematic verification program
YouTube’s verification program is getting a massive overhaul, the company announced today, which will likely result in a number of less prominent creators losing their verification status. Previously, YouTube allowed… Read more »
The portrait of an avatar as a young artist
Alice Lloyd George Contributor Share on Twitter Alice Lloyd George is an early stage investor based in New York and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with… Read more »
How to get your ads working, and whether PR is worth it
Julian Shapiro Contributor Share on Twitter Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com…. Read more »
This game uses troll tactics to teach critical thinking
The best medicine against online disinformation is an informed society that’s thinking critically. The problem is there are no shortcuts to universal education. Enter Finnish Public Broadcasting Company, Yle, which… Read more »
UK police arrest a number of climate activists planning Heathrow drone protest
UK police have arrested a number of environmental activists affiliated with a group which announced last month that it would use drones to try to ground flights at the country’s… Read more »
The MIT Media Lab controversy and getting back to ‘radical courage’, with Media Lab student Arwa Mboya
People win prestigious prizes in tech all the time, but there is something different about The Bold Prize. Unless you’ve been living under a literal or proverbial rock, you’ve probably… Read more »
Brexit means clear your cookies for democracy
Brexit looks set to further sink the already battered reputation of tracking cookies after a Buzzfeed report yesterday revealed what appears to be a plan by the UK’s minority government… Read more »
Facebook’s lead EU regulator is asking questions about its latest security fail
Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in Europe has confirmed it’s put questions to the company about a major security breach that we reported on yesterday. “The DPC became aware of… Read more »
Reps from DHS, the FBI and the ODNI met with tech companies at Facebook to talk election security
Representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security met with counterparts at tech companies including Facebook, Google,… Read more »
Pandora now lets you share music and podcasts to your Instagram Stories
Pandora today announced a new integration with Instagram that will allow users to share to their Instagram Story their favorite music and podcasts. The feature comes well over a year… Read more »
How Zhihu’s become one of China’s biggest hubs for experts
Zhihu may not be as well known outside of China as WeChat or ByteDance’s Douyin, but over the past eight years, it has cultivated a reputation for being one of… Read more »
Mobile gaming is a $68.5 billion global business, and investors are buying in
By the end of 2019, the global gaming market is estimated to be worth $152 billion with 45% of that, $68.5 billion, coming directly from mobile games. With this tremendous growth… Read more »
Earbuds lets audiences stream the playlists of athletes, entertainers and each other
Earbuds, a new startup from Austin founded by former Detroit Lions lineman Jason Fox, wants to bring the power of social media to your eardrums. The company is one of… Read more »
Facebook still full of groups trading fake reviews, says consumer group
Facebook has failed to clean up the brisk trade in fake product reviews taking place on its platform, an investigation by the consumer association Which? has found. In June both… Read more »
Instagram and Facebook are experiencing outages
Users reported issues with Instagram and Facebook Sunday morning. The mobile apps wouldn’t load for many users beginning in the early hours of the morning, prompting thousands to take to… Read more »
Facebook to admit ownership of Instagram, WhatsApp in hard-to-read small-print
For the first time in more than half a decade, Facebook wants to inform you that it owns Instagram, the hyper-popular rival social networking app it acquired for a $1BN… Read more »
Don’t miss this epic Twitter fight between the IAB’s CEO and actual publishers
Grab popcorn. As internet fights go, this one deserves your full attention — because the fight is over your attention. Your eyeballs and the creepy ads that trade data on… Read more »
The Great Hack tells us data corrupts
This week professor David Carroll, whose dogged search for answers to how his personal data was misused plays a focal role in The Great Hack: Netflix’s documentary tackling the Facebook-Cambridge… Read more »
Tories test Boris Johnson campaign messages on Facebook
Flurry of ads fronted by new PM may be testing waters before potential early election Follow all the latest politics news on our live blog The Conservatives have begun testing… Read more »
‘The Great Hack’: Netflix doc unpacks Cambridge Analytica, Trump, Brexit and democracy’s death
It’s perhaps not for nothing that The Great Hack – the new Netflix documentary about the connections between Cambridge Analytica, the US election and Brexit, out on July 23 –… Read more »
TikTok tests an Instagram-style grid and other changes
Short-form video app TikTok, the fourth most downloaded app in the world as of last quarter, is working on several new seemingly Instagram-inspired features — including a Discover page, a… Read more »
Twitter tests a new way to label replies
Twitter is testing a new way to make conversation threads easier to follow, with the launch of a new test that labels notable replies with special icons. If the original… Read more »
Twitter to attempt to address conversation gaps caused by hidden tweets
Twitter’s self-service tools when it comes to blocking content you don’t want to see, as well as a growing tendency for users to delete a lot of the content they… Read more »
Facebook reportedly hasn’t contacted the regulator it says will oversee Libra’s privacy and data security
A Swiss regulatory agency that Facebook executive David Marcus said in congressional testimony would be responsible for overseeing data and privacy protections for the company’s newly launched cryptocurrency, Libra, has… Read more »
Snap turns to search giant Baidu to court Chinese advertisers
Two years have passed since Snap Inc first struck a deal with Baidu that authorized China’s largest search engine to be a reseller of Snapchat ads for companies in Greater… Read more »
Facebook reportedly gets a $5 billion slap on the wrist from the FTC
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has reportedly agreed to end its latest probe into Facebook‘s privacy problems with a $5 billion payout. According to The Wall Street Journal, the 3-2, party-line… Read more »
Twitter returns after an hour-long outage
After an hour of sweet freedom, the world has been returned to the grasp of Twitter. At about 2:50 pm ET, the desktop and mobile site were down, displaying a… Read more »
Apple has pushed a silent Mac update to remove hidden Zoom web server
Apple has released a silent update for Mac users removing a vulnerable component in Zoom, the popular video conferencing app, which allowed websites to automatically add a user to a… Read more »
Higher Ground Labs is betting tech can help sway the 2020 elections for Democrats
When Shomik Dutta and Betsy Hoover first met in 2007, he was coordinating fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and she was a deputy field director… Read more »