Facebook has become "one of the world's most dangerous monopolies" and needs to be dismantled, claims an expert from a U.S.-based anti-monopoly group. "They operate on a business model that's based on deep surveillance of its users and then taking that personal information and allowing actors to target private advertising towards them," said Sarah Miller, deputy director of Open Markets Institute in Washington, which is committed to protecting democracy from corporations.

Instagram will block hashtags spreading "verifiably false" information about vaccinations. The social network already blocks hashtags that are themselves false claims, such as #vaccinescauseautism.

Facebook might have another Cambridge Analytica on its hands. In a late Friday news dump, Facebook revealed that today it filed a lawsuit alleging South Korean analytics firm Rankwave abused its developer platform’s data...

you’re dead now, dog

Facebook says it will continue to host a video of Nancy Pelosi that has been edited to give the impression that the Democratic House Speaker is drunk or unwell, in the latest incident highlighting its struggle to deal with disinformation. The viral clip shows Pelosi – who has publicly angered Donald Trump in recent days – speaking at an event, but it has been slowed down to give the impression she is slurring her words.

A Chipotle employee was scorned online for her role in what some Twitter users decided was a racist incident. Then internet sleuths discovered the full story.

Adam Koszary’s ‘absolute unit’ sheep led to a job at Tesla, but his new boss, Elon Musk, has had less social media success – with one missive landing him in court

A recently published study found that Facebook users over 65 years old were far more likely than other adults to share disinformation on social media. Researchers at both Princeton and New York University concluded that though the practice of spreading so-called fake news was rare overall, a person's likelihood of sharing it correlated more strongly with age than it did education, sex, or political views.

A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians.

How can I describe the fine of between $3 billion and $5 billion that Facebook is likely to pay to the Federal Trade Commission — which will doubtlessly be touted as its largest ever — to settle the government’s inquiry into what the social networking giant called “our platform and user data practices”? How about: It’s a parking ticket. Not a speeding ticket. Not a DUI — or a DUI(P), data under the influence of Putin. A parking ticket.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg keeps dashing any hope that the world’s largest social media platform might be a positive force in the fight against catastrophic climate change. In its latest disastrous move to fight the online epidemic of fake news, Facebook’s fact-checking effort announced last week that it was teaming up with CheckYourFact.com — an arm of the conservative, anti-science media site The Daily Caller.

When I was a kid, in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, my screen time was all about Nickelodeon. My favorite show was “You Can’t Do That on Television.” It was a kind of sketch show; the most common punchline was a bucket of green slime being dropped on characters’ heads. It was pretty dumb. It was also created by professional writers, actors, and crew, who were decently paid; many of them belonged to unions.

Internet blackouts deprive people of impartial information and crucial connections with loved ones, without delivering improved safety or stability.

Instagram said it will be testing out a new idea in Canada, in which it will remove the total number of

Would we feel less envious, shameful and competitive if Instagram didn’t tell us how many Likes a post received? That’s the idea behind Instagram now hiding Like counts from both a post’s viewers as part of an experiment in Canada.

Hundreds of millions of “dead profiles” will be added to Facebook’s network in the next few decades, a study found, raising questions about how the data of the deceased is being handled. Oxford University researchers published a paper that found the dead “may well outnumber the living” on the social media platform before the end of the century. According to their analysis, at least 4.9 billion Facebook users will die by the year 2100 if Facebook continues to grow at its current rate.

Who you are around your family is probably a little different than who you are around your significant other — and both are different than who you are alone, when you’re dancing in your underwear to Backstreet Boys. But with your blogging career, you are only your brand: when you’re writing, when you’re designing your site, and especially when you’re on social media. Social media is vital to any blogger’s success. Just as the great rivers of the world collect their strength from a bunch of creeks and streams, your social media presence is a collection of your individual channels

Facebook announced Thursday afternoon that it was banning people including Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader notorious for anti-Semitic language and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from its platforms.

Everyone wants there to be a silver bullet. A single policy solution that will “fix” Facebook, restore our privacy, and clean up the tech industry. There isn’t one. Hefty fines, civil rights audits, antitrust, data privacy legislation, shareholder activism and employee organizing can all play a role. But we don’t just need regulation, we need a revolution – a massive cultural shift in how we think about our personal information and the companies that profit by collecting it.

I’m waiting for the subway when the phone rings. On the other end of the line an angry woman is shouting at me about her Facebook account. I hang up. A few hours later, I’m walking to get some lunch when someone calls. “I forgot my Facebook password,” the man says. I sigh, and—once again—explain that I can’t help. Later, while at my desk, someone else calls up.

James Charles has lost more than a million subscribers amidst a row with fellow YouTube star Tati Westbrook. He now has 14.6m subscribers - previously the figure was 16m, according to the website Social Blade . It comes in a week where the 19-year-old has denied using his fame and money to try and manipulate someone's sexuality. Meanwhile his row with Westbrook centres around him promoting a rival product to one she'd created.

Mass panic is the reason all of your Facebook groups just went secret.

Twitter’s leadership knows that it’s fundamentally broken, and its latest attempt to fix itself shows how daunting of a task that will be.

Many Facebook investors are furious at Mark Zuckerberg, but can't do anything about it. Investors in other companies will soon feel their pain.

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

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

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

Or so says a new report for Britain’s government

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

Who will join the eggstagram olympics next?

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.

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