It involved holding the domain owner at gunpoint

You may have shrugged when you heard that some Facebook staff are suing the company over working conditions. But welcome to my world – content moderation – where we deal with the worst of humanity so you don’t have to. Naked migrants are being tortured with molten metal in Libya; Facebook’s quality assurance (QA) department is challenging whether that baby in Myanmar is dead; Dave and Doreen are using its report function as a weapon again. All their tedious posts end up on a screen in front of us, punctuated by atrocities, porn and distasteful jokes.

It sounds like the famed astrophysicist would rather Elon Musk spent less time thinking about Cybertrucks and more time making Star Trek real. Could SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk become a real-life Zefram Cochrane, the fictional inventor of warp drive on Star Trek? Astrophysicist and science personality Neil deGrasse Tyson seems to think so.

The message from Israel arrived on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon for 36-year-old Beau Villereal. At his family’s sprawling 42-acre property outside Live Oak in Florida’s rural north, Villereal sat alone in his bedroom trawling for news about Donald Trump to share on the rightwing Facebook page he runs with his mother and father.

Jerome Pesenti is encouraged by progress in artificial intelligence, but sees the limits of the current approach to deep learning.

Reddit recently released its year-in-review report highlighting the most popular posts, active subreddit communities, and viral trends.

Baron Cohen pointed out that Page and Brin still have voting control of the company, and accused Google of facilitating the spread of white supremacy.

TikTok, the social media sensation du jour, has apparently been hobbling users who have physical disabilities. It did so in a misguided attempt to shield these people from bullying — heavy emphasis on the word “misguided.” According to a report from Netzpolitik, leaked documents reveal TikTok had special rules in place for those with some visible or …

A review of 120-plus studies suggests social media causes more harm than good.

The Russian government has blocked the stock photography website Shutterstock, according to the English-language news site Meduza. Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, explained that Shutterstock was blocked for “insulting state symbols” a likely reference to photos on the site showing miniature Russian flags planted in dogshit.

Students whose grades are below average could benefit by devoting less time to social networking sites.

Adult performers say it has unfairly removed their accounts, despite no explicit images.

Twitter has said it will "pause" plans to disable inactive accounts following user backlash, a day after announcing plans for a huge cull of such accounts. The social network said it now would not remove accounts until it had a process for "memorialising" dead users on the network.

In the 2010s, celebrity culture was domesticated by a free photo sharing app, and the paparazzi were left stranded on the pavement.

The Cyberspace Administration of China issued a new policy Friday designed to prevent the spread of fake news and misleading edited imagery and video, known as deepfakes. The new policy criminalizes the publication of such content with proper disclosure that it is indeed fake.

More than 18 months later

The "Borat" actor Sacha Baron Cohen launched a full-throated attack against tech companies and accused them of allowing hate speech to proliferate on their platforms in a 25-minute speech to the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday night.

Presenting a keynote address at an ADL conference, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen wasn't kidding around when he painted a bleak picture of our emerging world: "Today ... demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed.

Who knew that Instagram was one of the world’s largest open-air drug markets? The true tale of a bodybuilder from Boston’s ’burbs turned social media influencer who built an illicit empire—one outrageous post at a time.

In 2010, I joined Twitter. This momentous development went unnoticed by the world’s press – but to be fair, it went almost unnoticed by me, too. Certainly, I had no particular trepidation about getting involved in social media. The internet still embodied more promise than threat: the iPad was just arriving; Uber and Airbnb were finding their feet; “gamification” was going to solve everything from obesity to voter apathy...