LONDON — The governing Conservative Party in Britain was criticized by Twitter on Wednesday for “attempts to mislead people” after it temporarily changed the name of one of its accounts on the social media site to “factcheckUK.” The name change was made during the first election debate on Tuesday between the Conservative leader, Prime Minister […]
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Social media’s impact on politics has come under increased scrutiny, but a preelection live TV debate between U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and opposition party leader Jeremy Corbyn revealed the extent to which political entities are openly weaponizing social networks to mislead the public. It’s no secret that social media has been used for dubious […]
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Five episodes in, Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen series on HBO remains one of the more inventive comic book adaptations — not to mention adaptations at large — in recent memory. As great as the Lost and The Leftovers alum’s work with the show’s phenomenal writing staff has been, though, it would be impossible to neglect the […]
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Twitter announced the details of its new political advertising policy on Friday, and once it goes into effect this month, politicians won’t be able to run false ads on Twitter. But they also won’t be able to run ads that correct the spread of misinformation. Oil and gas companies will be able to continue promoting […]
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WASHINGTON — Heading into Friday’s impeachment hearing, the Republican strategy for dealing with Marie L. Yovanovitch was simple: treat the ousted ambassador to Ukraine with respect during her testimony on Friday and avoid any appearance of bullying a veteran diplomat who had been vilified and driven from her post. President Trump blew up the plan. […]
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After Wednesday’s opening impeachment hearings, there were complaints, in some pundit analysis, that the sober testimony of two U.S. diplomats was insufficiently whiz-bang. One write-up from NBC News, seeming to channel a talent scout from the 1930s, said the hearings lacked “pizazz.” Obviously, you will find the word “pizazz” nowhere in the impeachment section of […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — The Alzheimer’s Association, a health care advocacy group, recently spent more than $200,000 on an ad campaign on Twitter. The campaign had a singular purpose: To persuade people to ask Congress for larger investments in medical research for the disease. Now the nonprofit is worried about whether those messages will still fly. […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — A week ago, YouTube and Facebook said they would block people from identifying the government official thought to be the whistle-blower who set in motion an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. It hasn’t worked out so well. A name believed by some to be the whistle-blower has been shared thousands of times […]
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When the full cast of The Mandalorian was first announced, all anyone could focus on was the fact that film director and Disney World aficionado Werner Herzog was listed among the names. And sure enough, his grizzled visage popped up in most of the teasers and trailers Lucasfilm and Disney put out to promote the […]
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Alex Trebek is a famously cool customer, whether it’s capably moving through answers and questions on Jeopardy! or giving the word “genre” a delightfully accurate French pronunciation. He’s also heroically kept it together while undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer, which may force him to leave the show he’s hosted since 1984. But there was one […]
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Two years ago, I owned a bar with over 300 different gins — one of the largest collections of juniper-flavored spirits at any establishment in the United States. None of those gins was designed by a computer, a fact that my bartenders would likely have explained was for the best: A gin’s non-juniper botanicals are […]
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Twitter is proposing a handful of new features designed to help its users spot “synthetic” or “manipulated” media, including deep fake videos. The social networking giant last month announced plans to implement a new policy around media assets that have been altered in a way to mislead the public, and today heralds the first draft […]
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“What’s a king to a God? What’s a God to a nonbeliever who don’t believe in anything? Will he make it out alive? Alright, alright, no church in the wild.” Frank Ocean probably wasn’t talking about “Google” when he crooned about the wild on Watch the Throne, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. Advertisement […]
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A U.S. anti-vaccination website that was removed from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube earlier this year has found a new home for its content: Brazil. U.S. website Natural News accounted for almost one-third of all the misinformation found on social media and other websites targeting people in Brazil, according to a new study from the Brazilian […]
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A few hours after polls closed in Kentucky last Tuesday, a Twitter user writing under the handle @Overlordkraken1 posted a message to his 19 followers saying he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots.” It was clear that the Kentucky governor’s race was going to be excruciatingly close, and that the Republican incumbent, […]
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Are you so poor that all you have is money? That was the question on my mind when I saw two pieces of tech news this week having to do with Saudi Arabia. Or, more on point, news about the country’s de facto leader and Twitter investor, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This is the […]
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Twitter lets you follow users where you can get updates based on their tweets. However, not everyone posts things that you might be interested in, in which it would then be easier to try and sort news and topics through hashtags. However, the good news is that Twitter will be making some changes on that […]
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — In Saudi Arabia, where a relatively closed culture leaves citizens few public forums to discuss news and politics, Twitter has become a kind of town square, the place where citizens meet to swap information and debate the latest issues. Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy has not banned the site, but it has taken […]
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The climate crisis is a heavily partisan issue in US politics. Thought it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, most Democrats believe the fossil fuel industry needs to be heavily-checked and nearly all Republicans accept money from oil companies. There are Democrats who take money from big oil and Republican climate-activists, but those are exceptions. Whether you […]
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Europe’s Competition Commissioner said that while she remained optimistic about the role of technology in society, its biggest companies must do more to curb their abusive behavior or face greater regulation. However, she was reluctant to back calls for breaking them up out of fear for the unintended consequences such a move could cause. “From […]
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Days after a decorated Army lieutenant colonel offered damaging testimony about President Trump’s conduct on a July phone call with Ukraine’s leader, Mr. Trump stood on the South Lawn and issued a vague but ominous warning. “You’ll be seeing very soon what comes out,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday, referring to the officer, Lt. Col. […]
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Social media platforms like Twitter are rife with all kinds of user information, some of which is shared publicly, and some of which is private. If private, then accessing it would be pretty hard unless you’re a Twitter employee, which is what the Saudi Arabia government was counting on when they recruited a couple of […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — The Justice Department charged two former Twitter employees on Wednesday with exploiting their access to the company’s internal systems to help Saudi Arabia, raising questions about the security of technology companies as they grapple with scrutiny for spreading disinformation and influencing public opinion. In its complaint, the Justice Department charged Ahmad Abouammo […]
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