An online community at this scale has perverse and dangerous consequences.

Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of content attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook. A secretive operation to combat the vitriol has failed to stop it.

Anyone who tells you the recent escalation of censorship by U.S. tech giants is merely a reflection of private companies making independent decisions is either lying or dangerously ignorant. By Michael Krieger.

The European Commission is planning stricter rules for social media companies.

Facebook has taken down pages, groups and accounts it identified as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign that originated in Iran and targeted countries around the world. It also found a number of new pages connected to Russia.

The AI advances that brought you Alexa are teaching propaganda how to talk.

It's more similar to oxygen or drinking water than it is to most technology products. With over 2 billion users visiting its social network every month, Facebook has a group of people logging in that is so large, so diverse, and so geographically distributed that no single company would have dreamed of an audience this big even just a decade ago. The only company that even comes close today is Google, which has eight products with over a billion users--Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, Android, Google Play, and Google Drive. But naturally, most of those are the same users using multiple Google services.

A censored student journalist speaks out. By Ben Norton.

Facebook will soon pull a mobile VPN app called Onavo Protect from Apple’s App Store, after the iPhone maker declared it violated the store’s guidelines on data collection, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Onavo, which began as an Israeli analytics startup focused on helping users monitor their data usage, was acquired by Facebook in 2013. Its VPN provider then became a data collection tool for Facebook to monitor smartphone users’ behavior outside its core apps, helping inform Facebook’s live video strategy, competition from other social apps, and its decision to acquire companies including WhatsApp.

Social media has allowed self-proclaimed ‘AI influencers’ who do nothing more than paraphrase Elon Musk to cash in on this hype with low-quality pieces. The result is dangerous

Four years after Facebook Inc. bought WhatsApp for $22 billion, it is formally starting the messaging app on a new mission: bringing in revenue. WhatsApp on Wednesday detailed plans to sell advertisements and charge big companies that use its service to interact with customers, launching its first major revenue streams as growth at Facebook’s main app is starting to decelerate.

Incels believe that they are doomed by society’s cruel rules to never have sex. We spent time with a member of the incel community.

A hacker broke into Reddit's computer systems in June, gaining access to the email addresses of some of its users and a database of usernames from 2007.

The channel had more than 2.4 million subscribers

"What the fuck is wrong with boomers?"

The company has some of the same security problems as the other tech giants.

Vimeo has removed Alex Jones’ InfoWars from its platform for violating the company’s Terms of Service standards, a Vimeo spokesperson told Business Insider on Sunday. The videos, posted on Thursday and Friday “violated our Terms of Service prohibitions on discriminatory and hateful content,” the spokesperson said, adding that Vimeo had notified the account owner and issued a refund, as “we do not want to profit from content of this nature in any way.”

Vimeo has removed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from its platform.

Technologies and organizations should be redesigned to intermittently isolate people from each other's work for best collective performance in solving complex problems.

A St. Louis teenager posted online that he was glad to make it to his 17th birthday after all he’d been through. Just over an hour later, he was fatally shot in the head. Armond Latimore was shot outside a restaurant about 1 p.m. Saturday — his birthday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. No arrests have been made. Homicide detectives are investigating.

New details have emerged regarding the no-bid State Department contract awarded last year to SCL Group, the parent company of the now-defunct data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica. Recently obtained documents show the controversial firm, known primarily today for acquiring data on millions of Facebook users without their consent, was paid nearly $500,000 to design an influence campaign intended to thwart ISIS recruitment propaganda.

The police official acknowledged stating online that he's a person a color, even though he's white. By Daniel Connolly. (Aug. 20, 2018)

How are teens spending their time online?

Study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, tweeting about vaccines

Here is a strange little online community to puzzle at. By Devin Coldewey.

Following last week’s suspension of 284 accounts for “engaging in coordinated manipulation,” Twitter announced today that it’s kicked an additional 486 accounts off the platform for the same reason, bringing the total to 770 accounts. While many of the accounts removed last week appeared to originate from Iran, Twitter said this time that about 100 of the latest batch to be suspended claimed to be in the United States. Many of these were less than a year old and shared “divisive commentary.” These 100 accounts tweeted a total of 867 times and had 1,268 followers between them.

First published in 2015, Sarah Jeong’s book provides an accessible look at how online harassment works, how it might be categorized and understood, and why the structure of the internet and the policies surrounding it are incapable of stamping it out.

Only a day after Alex Jones was permanently banned from Twitter, the Infowars app — the final straw for Jones’ platform — has been permanently kicked off the App Store, also permanently. Apple confirmed the removal with Buzzfeed by citing the App Store guidelines, which forbids “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, or in exceptionally poor taste.” Searching for the app within the App Store right now only brings up other apps unrelated to Infowars.

The Facebook CEO can’t be trusted.

Repetition is an inevitable part of creation.

Facebook Inc.’s Instagram is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, if it were a stand-alone company, marking a 100-fold return for the app purchased in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

Instagram’s future growth depends on the developing world, so it’s built a version of its app just for them. “Instagram Lite” for Android appeared today in the Google Play App Store without any announcement from the company.

As Facebook tries to get ahead of public pressure about what the service does and doesn't track about its users, a patent application has emerged which would enable something that the service's detractors have long theorized and feared: silently triggered microphones that keep tabs on Facebook users.

Apparently sick of being criticized by everyone from US Congress to Seth Rogan for not doing enough to purge its platform of bots, trolls, and malicious foreign actors, Twitter has started liberally dropping the ban hammer on suspicious accounts, suspending more than 70 million users over the course of May and June.

Pinterest is trying to further tap its popularity as a place to plan events, this time adding ways for users to collaborate across boards that are baked directly into the app. Group boards will have their own designated feed, where users will be able to communicate with others collaborating on that board and also get updates on new member additions or added pins. There are also the other typical social structures you’d expect on an app these days, including @-mentions or liking comments.