A little over two years ago, Facebook announced that it had messed up. This was before the 2016 election, before Cambridge Analytica, before a data breach exposing the information of 30 million users. Even then, this announcement was still pretty serious. Following a Wall Street Journal report, Facebook disclosed that it had been miscalculating video viewership for two years — in that same period of time, the social network was heavily pressuring advertisers and media organizations to invest in its video platform.

When Jeff Bezos took the stage at a Wired conference this week, he told the audience that it was part of a business leader’s job to make potentially unpopular decisions, like working with the military. One day later, on Tuesday, an Amazon employee explained exactly why those decisions might be unpopular. In a public letter posted to Medium, an anonymous worker at the company outlined concerns about Amazon’s facial recognition tool, Rekognition. The product has been under fire since May, when the ACLU revealed that the company was offering it to police departments, raising serious civil liberties concerns.

Four major U.S. public funds that hold shares in Facebook Inc on Wednesday proposed removing Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg as chairman following several high-profile scandals and said they hoped to gain backing from larger asset managers. State treasurers from Illinois, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, co-filed the proposal. They oversee money including pension funds and joined activist and original filer Trillium Asset Management.

Twitter has barred hundreds of right-wing accounts for posing as soulless, “nonplayable” liberal activists.

Not only did Facebook inflate ad-watching metrics by up to 900 percent, it knew for more than a year that its average-viewership estimates were wrong and kept quiet about it, a new legal filing claims. A group of small advertisers suing the Menlo Park social media titan alleged in the filing that Facebook “induced” advertisers to buy video ads on its platform because advertisers believed Facebook users were watching video ads for longer than they actually were.

Facebook believes spammers, not a nation state, were behind the data breach of 30 million accounts, according to a published report. The spammers aimed to make money through deceptive advertising and masqueraded as a digital marketing company, people familiar with the company’s internal investigation told the Wall Street Journal.

YouTube’s creators do some soul-searching.

New research sheds light on how the structure of online social networks causes misinformation to go viral on the internet. The findings, published in PLOS One, indicate that social “echo chambers” act like kindling that gives misinformation the initial flare up it needs to quickly spread. “While the link between ‘echo chambers’ and ‘fake news’ has been both widely discussed and been the subject of significant research effort, this discussion has largely left out the impact of the complex network dynamics that are so quintessential to online social media,” said study author Petter Törnberg, a sociologist from the University of Amsterdam.

After touting his space tourism mission (now set for 2019), Jeff Bezos also weighed in on the current state of social media and the internet in general on Monday. "I think the Internet in its current incarnation is a confirmation bias machine," he said.

The platform has cast itself as the internet’s kindest place. But users argue harassment is rampant, and employees say efforts to stem it are under-resourced and deprioritized.

Dick pics are widely considered a form of sexual violence. But while that is often true, they can also be funny, sexy and playful. Apparently, some straight guys even send them to each other.

Clicking ‘Like’ is something most of us do without thinking. It’s a form of social currency that gives us a momentary jolt and revs up our dopamine centers. Yet who knew all our ‘Likes’ could predict our personality and be turned into a tool of political persuasion against us?

A Chinese live-streaming celebrity has been detained for five days for "insulting" the country's national anthem. Yang Kaili, a 20-year-old with tens of millions of followers, had appeared on camera singing the anthem while flailing her arms around. The live-streaming platform, Huya, had earlier taken down her video and banned her channel.

Donald Trump has 55 million followers on Twitter. But his tweets reach less than half of that, according to an analysis by SparkToro. More than 60% of the US president’s Twitter following, or about 33 million accounts, have been deemed fake by the marketing software firm. It ran all of Trump’s followers through a machine-learning based tool that picks up signals that an account might be spam, propaganda, a bot, or inactive. If the account racks up seven to 10 signals or more, it was counted as fake.

A recent purge by Facebook and Twitter of a host of independent media sites has pushed thousands of people out of work and has killed one of the most effective forms of expressing political dissent. [And you better not try to post this at Reddit, if you know what’s good for you.]

Facebook knows us well enough to know the truth: We don’t care enough about our privacy to stop using it.

Instagram says its new technology proactively detects bullying in photos and captions.

Some 30 million user accounts were stolen in a huge hack of Facebook, the company has confirmed. The breach – the worst in the company’s history – appears to have been carried out by an unnamed attacker, Facebook suggested. It said the FBI was “actively investigating” the hacker, and that it had “asked us not to discuss who may be behind this attack”.

Social media has created a world in which everyone seems ecstatic – apart from us. Is there any way for people to curb their resentment?

Google is going to shut down the consumer version of Google+ over the next 10 months, the company writes in a blog post today. The decision follows the revelation of a previously undisclosed security flaw that exposed users’ profile data that was remedied in March 2018.

Delta Air Lines played some slow jams when landing at LAX, and rapper T-Pain argued on Twitter that the musical selection needed improvement. According to People, T-Pain posted the following on Twitter: “@Delta we gotta change these boarding/taxiing songs more often guys,” he wrote. “All of Us Million milers (quick brag) have to hear these same joints multiple times a day. I gotta go perform in the Staples Center in a minute and Adele just put me in the weirdest mood. Now I’m crying. Thanx.”

Former National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn was one of the first to exploit the new battlefield that would ultimately help bring him down.

Facebook is releasing its own smart speaker with a screen and a camera. It really hopes you don't find the Portal creepy. The Portal, and the larger Portal +, is built specifically for video calls. It's essentially a smart speaker with a touchscreen that includes a couple unique features. Among them is a user detection system that will cinematically zoom in on a person's face or follow them as they move around a room. The idea behind the device is to make video chats more like actually hanging out together.

Facebook recently disclosed that the security of 50 million profiles was compromised when attackers stole “access tokens” that allowed them to break into these accounts. Facebook discovered the breach Tuesday, Sept. 25, and it reset access tokens, forcing users to log back in to their accounts, on Thursday, Sept. 27. The company disclosed the attack last Friday. In addition to Facebook accounts, the stolen access tokens may also compromise accounts on any third-party website that uses Facebook Login.

Critics say legislation ‘violates freedom of expression’

According to a new report from The New York Times, a top Trump campaign aide sought proposals from an Israeli company that would work to build an army of fake social media profiles to sway the outcome of the 2016 election. Despite requesting these proposals, the Times could not confirm whether the campaign staff actually acted upon them.

Really, Google? I know not many of us used your Google+ social network, but those of us who did use it really, really liked it.

I made a pretty aggressive video about this the other day for LinkedIn.

The company was hacked at one of the most difficult times in its history. It still faces fallout over its role in a Russian disinformation campaign.

Thirty million people have been affected by a massive hack of Facebook, with the attackers gaining access to millions of victims' highly sensitive personal data. On Friday, Facebook provided more details about the attack that it first disclosed two weeks ago — and said the FBI had asked it not to discuss who might be behind the attack.

Brian Acton, one of the co-founders of the popular messaging app WhatsApp, said he "sold my users' privacy" when Facebook acquired the company. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock in 2014, its biggest acquisition ever. "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit," Acton told Forbes. "I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."

U.S. investigators failed in a recent courtroom effort to force Facebook to wiretap voice calls over its Messenger app in a closely watched test case, according to two people briefed on the sealed ruling.

Cyber attackers stole data from 29 million Facebook accounts using an automated ...

To be alive and online in our time is to feel at once incensed and stultified by the onrush of information, helpless against the rising tide of bad news and worse opinions.