Unless sex trafficking is something you have a specific interest in, you might not be familiar with a bill that was has been making its way through Congress, known as the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, or SESTA. The bill has already been approved by the House, and on Wednesday was overwhelmingly approved by the […]

It might not have registered for most people trying to keep up with the maelstrom of news this week about the Facebook data leak—the one in which the shadowy, Trump-linked data company Cambridge Analytica got personal details on more than 50 million users—but a number of critics noticed one of the The New York Times‘s […]

As the mushroom cloud continued to spread over the weekend from Friday evening’s nuclear blast—the news that Facebook provided personal data on more than 50 million users to a Trump-linked data company called Cambridge Analytica—one consistent theme amid the chaos was the increasingly defensive argument from senior Facebook executives that a) What happened wasn’t technically […]

One of the defining tenets of Facebook’s corporate philosophy is to connect people around the world, both to each other and to issues that matter to them. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the social network’s mission is “to give people the power to share and to make the world more open and connected.” […]

One of the risks when governments try to curb what they see as offensive speech is that other kinds of speech are caught in the same net. One of the most recent examples comes from Spain, where a vague anti-terrorism law has been used to charge and even imprison musicians and other artists. In a new […]

Google is planning to highlight content from newspapers with paywalls for users who are paying subscribers, according to a report from Bloomberg on Tuesday, March 14. So when users search for articles on a topic, results from sites they subscribe to will show up higher than results from regular websites. Google also plans to share […]

When the political-action group known as Project Veritas came out with hidden-camera videos of a number of Twitter employees talking about the company’s practices last year, one of the mysteries was how the organization—infamous for its supposed “investigative” pieces on groups like Planned Parenthood—managed to record the videos. According to Kashmir Hill, in a piece […]

Apple announced on March 12 that it has acquired Texture for an undisclosed sum. Often called the “Netflix of magazines,” Texture gives readers access to over 200 popular magazines through its app and website for a single monthly fee. It was originally called Next Issue Media when it launched in 2012, and had raised $130 […]

The European Union released the final report from its High Level Expert Group on fake news, entitled “A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Disinformation,” on March 12. Several of the experts involved in fact-checking and tracking disinformation, including Claire Wardle of First Draft and Alexios Mantzarlis of the International Fact-Checking Network, summed up the main points of […]

Joshua Geltzer, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, writes in Wired on March 11 that the Russian trolls who tried to manipulate the 2016 election didn’t abuse Facebook or Twitter, they simply used those platforms in the way that […]

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in an essay published in The New York Times on March 10 about experiments she performed on YouTube during the 2016 election, where she noticed that no matter what kind of political content she searched for, the recommended videos were always more extreme and inflammatory, whether politically or socially. This is a vicious […]

NewsWhip, an analytics company that measures social-media activity, looked at its data and came up with a list of news reporters who get the most engagement on Facebook in February, and number one was Ryan Shattuck, of the satirical news site The Onion. Number 2 was Jonah Urich, who works for a left-wing site called […]

Most of the attention around fake news has focused on Facebook and YouTube, but other apps and services can also play a role in spreading misinformation, as Wired points out in a March 9 piece on the use of Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp in Brazil. Use of the app is apparently complicating the country’s attempts […]

Renee DiResta, a researcher with New Knowledge and a Mozilla fellow specializing in misinformation, argues that by using Facebook to spread fake news during the 2016 election, the “Russian troll factory” known as the Internet Research Agency was duplicating a strategy initially developed by ISIS, which used digital platforms and social-media methods to spread its […]

The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook to connect with right-wing supporters has been widely credited with helping them win the 2016 election (along with the activities of some Russian trolls) and now another conservative politician is thanking social media for his victory. Italy’s new political star, Matteo Salvini of the far-right Lega party, gave credit […]