Meta announced on Thursday that it had removed thousands of Facebook accounts based in China that were impersonating Americans debating political issues in the United States. The company warned that the campaign presaged coordinated international efforts to influence the 2024 presidential election. The network of fake accounts — 4,789 in all — used names and […]
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As the Israel-Hamas war flooded social media with violent content, false information and a seemingly limitless swell of opinions, lawmakers and users have accused platforms like TikTok and Facebook of promoting biased posts. Tech giants have denied the charges. TikTok, accused of elevating pro-Palestinian content, blamed “unsound analysis” of hashtag data. Some Instagram and Facebook […]
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Over the past few years, hundreds of families and school districts around the country have sued big tech companies on the grounds that the hypnotic properties of social media popular with children have left too many of them unwell. Citing the promotion of the “corpse bride” diet, for example, and other practices around dangerous forms […]
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Some of the antisemitic and anti-Islam posts have been shared and liked hundreds of thousands of times, even though they appear to violate the rules of social media platforms, many of which ban hate speech. The content has been most prominent on X, according to the Anti-Defamation League and other researchers. In an analysis by […]
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Natasha Singer contributed reporting. The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle […]
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Meta spent years figuring out how to handle political advertising across Facebook and Instagram. It put systems into place and developed policies for what types of political ads were and were not allowed on its platforms. But that was before the rise of consumer artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Meta introduced a new policy to grapple […]
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When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion nearly a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg made a promise: The Facebook chief said he wouldn’t meddle often with the messaging app so as not to mess with a good thing. Mr. Zuckerberg stuck to that philosophy as WhatsApp amassed more than two billion users globally — until 2019, […]
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The conflict between Israel and Hamas is fast becoming a world war online. Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States. Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have also […]
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The Supreme Court worked hard in a pair of arguments on Tuesday to find a clear constitutional line separating elected officials’ purely private social media accounts from ones that reflect government actions and are subject to the First Amendment. After three hours, though, it was not clear that a majority of the justices had settled […]
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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. kevin roose I’m Kevin Roose, tech columnist for “The New York Times.” casey newton I’m Casey Newton from “Platformer.” […]
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Why the Case Matters It’s unusual for so many states to come together to sue a tech giant for consumer harms. The coordination shows states are prioritizing the issue of children and online safety and combining legal resources to fight Meta, just as states have previously done for cases against Big Tobacco and Big Pharma […]
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Campbell Brown, Facebook’s top news executive, left the company this month. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram’s Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years […]
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Shortly after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, friends and relatives of Gali Shlezinger Idan, who lived in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, received frantic messages to check her Facebook page. What they found shocked them. Hamas members were using Ms. Idan’s Facebook account to livestream themselves holding her and her family hostage. During […]
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In a WhatsApp text conversation this week, we asked Jane Austen — yes, the 19th-century British author — how she felt about Mr. Darcy, a character from one of her most famous works, “Pride and Prejudice.” After a few seconds, Ms. Austen responded. “Ah, Mr. Darcy. Everyone remembers him as one of my characters,” she […]
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Myuri Thiruna, a freelance photographer in Toronto, used to post frequently on Instagram and discuss photography with other users. But she said she had stopped two years ago, feeling “drained” by the demands of social media and the pursuit of followers and trends. Then in July, Ms. Thiruna discovered Can of Soup, a new invitation-only […]
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Last November, the company behind Facebook released a chatbot called Galactica. After a torrent of complaints that the bot made up historical events and spewed other nonsense, Meta removed it from the internet. Two weeks later, the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT. It was a worldwide sensation. Both bots were powered […]
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When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next. Backed by fans on social […]
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And then there are some ideas farther afield. A start-up called MyndVR is using virtual reality to provide a sense of liberation to older people. Your body may be unable to travel, but through V.R., you might cross off destinations on your bucket list. The company argues that V.R. could also be therapeutic — that […]
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One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. The absurd hat-phone, a particularly uncool version of the future, […]
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