Warning that users who call for the suspension of bigoted accounts might just be afraid of a real debate, Facebook representatives told reporters Tuesday that classifying hate speech can be difficult because some posts actually make very interesting points. “At Facebook, we are committed to combating violence and hate speech on our platform, but can you really call these posts hate speech when a lot of them are based on science and logic?”

The former host of Fear Factor is now the Larry King of the Intellectual Dark Web.

A newly mandatory app is eating up Chinese workers’ time—so they’re finding ways around it. By Philip Spence.

What started as a niche social media trend has spread to big brands like Walmart and Home Depot.

Kids are obsessed with YouTube unboxing videos. The toy industry is taking notice.

The operation was run by a local restauranteur who was placed under US sanctions for attempting to interfere with US elections. Slaying online trolls can be a lonely business. Just ask Russia's Lyudmila Savchuk, who first exposed the story of Russia's disinformation campaign back in 2014. The journalist and 33-year-old mother of two, Savchuk started noticing websites and social media accounts attacking local opposition activists in her hometown of Saint Petersburg with a frequency she hadn't seen before.

Anti-vaccination content on Facebook extends beyond the thoroughly debunked myth that vaccines cause autism, a new study reports. Instead, a team of researchers found four flavors of anti-vaccine misinformation that may discourage parents from vaccinating their children.

Tech has a bad reputation for pulling money out of musicians’ pockets, but Splice is changing that. The audio sample marketplace and music production collaboration tool has now paid out $15 million to artists since 2013, doubling in the last year. Splice lets musicians sell their sounds for royalty-free use, and songs by Eminem, Ariana Grande and Marshmello that were powered by those samples have topped the charts.

Young people these days are incredibly socially engaged. They’re inciting worldwide movements against global warming, choosing to get vaccinated despite their parents’ protests and cleaning up garbage for fun. Since early March, people from around the world have been picking up trash from beaches, roads, parks and everywhere in between, sharing before-and-after photos of their cleanup successes across social media.

Who will join the eggstagram olympics next?

Facebook Inc said it removed 1.5 million videos globally of the New Zealand mosque attack in the first 24 hours after the attack. "In the first 24 hours we removed 1.5 million videos of the attack globally, of which over 1.2 million were blocked at upload...," Facebook said in a tweet bit.ly/2HDJtPM late Saturday.

Dr. Dana Corriel wrote on Facebook in September that the flu vaccine had arrived and encouraged patients to come to her office for a shot. Within hours, the post was flooded with thousands of comments from people opposed to vaccines. Corriel initially decided to allow the postings to continue, hoping to use the moment to educate people about the importance of immunizations.

How a writing tool became the new default way to pass notes in class.

Billy's Donuts has now gone viral thanks to a caring son's social media post. Social media has served as a facilitator for small doughnut shops to draw big crowds on multiple occasions. Last fall, a hole in the wall cafe in Seal Beach, California, began to sell out early every morning when a note to help the owners went viral on Facebook. Earlier this year, a gourmet doughnut maker had even longer lines out the door when patrons discovered he prevailed after a near-death experience.

“Ha, that’s funny!” My 21-year old sister would comment when she saw my mother’s most recent Facebook update or her latest tweet. Social media has been significant to my sister’s social life since she was 13, and she has constantly posted on Twitter and Facebook for nearly a decade. My parents had long ago made the rule that my siblings and I weren’t allowed to use social media until we turned 13, which was late, compared to many of my friends who started using Instagram, Wattpad, and Tumblr when we were 10 years old.

Or so says a new report for Britain’s government

“Bad enough to have to deal with Russian Ops and the Alt-Right, but now we have to deal with Chinabots as well.”

Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores. The technology — which is imperfect but improving rapidly — is based on algorithms that learn how to recognize human faces and the hundreds of ways in which each one is unique.

Scientists researching treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome say they face online abuse and harassment. Some are leaving the field

Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services. In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote: “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.”

Some of the country’s most influential state attorneys general are signaling they’re willing to take action against Facebook, Google and other tech giants, warning that the companies have grown too big and powerful — and that Washington has been too slow to respond. For many of these top law enforcement officials, the fear is that Silicon Valley has amassed too much personal information about Web users and harnessed it in a way that’s jeopardized people’s privacy and undermined competition, often without much oversight.

Webinars are a powerful content format for educating and engaging your audience, and their popularity is bound to increase. Educational content is the second most popular content format and marketing method used by B2B marketers.

The once-hyped social media company, known for gamifying mobile check-ins, is still alive and well as an incomprehensibly vast data empire.

It’s been a tumultuous few months for Facebook. A data breach in fall 2018 exposed information about 30 million of its users to hackers. Only a few months later, the company was also criticized for paying individuals to voluntarily install an app that collected information about their smartphone habits. Now, it’s dealing with concerns that some of the quizzes available on the platform have been used to collect data from unsuspecting users.

As online challenges go, #trashtag, which went viral on social media over the weekend, is a pretty wholesome one. Hundreds of people shared photos of themselves litter-picking in trash-strewn parks and streets on Saturday and Sunday, while calling on others to start cleaning up their communities. The idea for #trashtag has been around for several years, with one company promoting the idea back in 2015 as a way to protect threatened wilderness areas.

It’s conceivable that Mark Zuckerberg’s Wednesday blog post “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking” is a historic document not only for Facebook but for the technology industry, period. Zuckerberg outlines a vision for Facebook where content is encrypted and private. And temporary. And shared predominantly over Messenger and WhatsApp chat sessions rather than via a Facebook wall. In some ways, that sounds like . . . well, the opposite of Facebook as we’ve known it. How often has any huge, profitable enterprise declared it was going to change course so decisively?

Facebook and Instagram are having technical issues as users reported problems with the social media sites Wednesday.

Google Plus is about to go dark. Make sure you've removed links to Google Plus from all your social media, or you'll have a lot of dreaded broken links.

The people of Rue Crémieux say they need gates to lock out Instagrammers.

Facebook has a problem with more than just fake news. Add vaccine misinformation on the social network to the list. Revealed Thursday: The social network says it will reduce distribution and provide users with "authoritative information" on the topic. Facebook is following the lead of Pinterest, which has blocked all searches using terms related to vaccines or vaccinations as part of a plan to stop the spread of misinformation related to anti-vaxx posts.

Good Friday morning. I hope you’ve been enjoying Aaron’s incisive reporting from Barcelona and Clay’s insightful commentary from China. Fortune is a truly global organization. I’m going to end the week where I started, noting the tightening regulatory noose around the necks of the tech behemoths. They’ve built trillions of dollars of value in the past decade or so, more or less unencumbered by the type of scrutiny applied to other industries that reach deeply into our society’s fabric. No longer.

And I mean, geez, stuff like this with Facebook just isn’t a surprise anymore, is it? For years social media Big Brother started pestering its users to secure their account with two-factor authentication (2FA) by prompting them to enter their phone number so they could get a text with a security code login when logging into their account from a new device for the first time.

Facebook has been mired in mud for the past year, with its data-sharing and disinformation scandals and the subsequent fallout. But there is a woman in Paris whose job it is to make the platform look as appealing as possible to an industry that is all about beauty and image: Morin Oluwole, the global head of luxury for Facebook and Instagram.

A 4-year-old lab mix found a forever home within hours of Edmond Animal Services posting a picture of the dog, asking for help after he had been returned for the eighth time. "It happened!!! Ren just got adopted by these great guys who have another dog they adopted from us two years ago," Edmond Animal Services posted to Facebook. "We told them they’ll be famous now!"

The changes are meant to make good on the company's promise to promote "healthy conversation."