But dramatic, wholesale bans of famous people, while sometimes justified, don’t address the everyday concerns affecting the bulk of platform users. Content moderation remains the industry’s great unsolved problem. “Have you tried to moderate 15 million people?” Mark Weinstein, the founder of the social network MeWe, asked in an interview with OneZero. Weinstein discussed the […]
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If we want to take seriously the relationship between the global media ecosystem and the fate of democracy, we must think of Facebook as a major—but hardly the only—contributing factor in a torrent of stimuli that flow by us and through us. This torrent is like a giant Facebook News Feed blaring from every speaker […]
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The result was—is—a “homework economy” where work emails announce themselves to be answered at home, on the weekend, and in the evening. Had these futurists paid more attention to the women in their lives (if there were any), they may have been less mistaken. Remote work took a path similar to housework: By the middle […]
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“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” said a software engineer when he left the company in the summer. “I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” lamented a data scientist who policed political misinformation campaigns around the world for Facebook until earlier this year. Another data scientist, in a farewell […]
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Boosie Badazz has pissed off a number of celebrities this year. Back in April, he ruffled the feathers of Jay-Z and Dwayne Wade after making transphobic comments about Wade’s daughter. Now, it looks like Boosie is having a quarrel with Mark Zuckerberg — and he’s willing to take it to court. Bossie’s Intsagram was deactivated […]
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Deepfake audio technology is becoming incredibly convincing, so much so that Jay-Z apparently took legal action against an AI-powered impersonation of him this year. Eminem is the latest rapper to receive the deepfake treatment, and in a new digitally fabricated song, he goes after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The video was created by YouTube channel […]
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Photo: Alex Wong (Getty Images) Hallelujah! Trump could soon be booted off of Twitter as well as out of the White House. Advertisement At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the policy exceptions allowing Trump to incite violence, proliferate racism, and promote white supremacy on his […]
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Facebook is under fire once again for decisions regarding content shared on the massive social media network, this time after Steve Bannon’s inflammatory comments that saw his profiles removed from other sites. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced to defend the company’s decision not to ban Bannon from the network, both the public and privately […]
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(Reuters) — A U.S. Senate hearing to reform an internet law and hold tech companies accountable for how they moderate content quickly turned into a political scuffle as lawmakers not only went after the companies but also attacked each other. Lawmakers are split on ways to hold Big Tech accountable under Section 230 of the […]
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Twitter and Facebook knew this was coming. For the last four years, they have ostensibly been preparing for foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. Pressed by lawmakers, executives from both companies insisted that they had learned their lesson. “In 2016, we were not prepared for the coordinated information operations we now regularly face,” wrote […]
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Facebook has been criticized for many things, but one complaint that’s stuck above most of them is this: They’ve allowed a hotbed of disinformation about elections to fester, to the consternation of many. But now they’re springing into action. According to The New York Times, it’s going to indefinitely prohibit “all political and issue-based advertising,” […]
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On Monday, Trump declared victory in his battle with the coronavirus. By Tuesday, he had moved on, fighting the invisible enemy he apparently blames for keeping his (false) Covid-19 tweets from the public. “REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” he wrote, meaning Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, in part, defines what kinds of user-generated content […]
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Selena Gomez has often used her platform to advocate for change. A recent example came earlier this year, when she let black voices like Killer Mike take over her Instagram account to teach her followers about activism. Now Selena is calling out Facebook executives, asking that they fight against the spread of misinformation and racism […]
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Facebook recently began really cracking down on the amount of misinformation being spread on their service, at least when it came to posts about the coronavirus pandemic. They’ve even punished the most powerful person in the world. On Wednesday, the social media site completely removed a post made by noted non-MLB guest pitcher Donald J. […]
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Gary Reback is perhaps best known as the lawyer who helped convince the U.S. Department of Justice to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the 1990s. He watched the majority of the House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook […]
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At the “Online Platforms and Market Power” virtual antitrust hearing today, the House Judiciary Committee questioned Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai over Webex. But they weren’t all questioned equally. Most of the questions were directed at Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Pichai — each of […]
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