Facebook will lift its ban on political ads on Thursday, ending a self-imposed prohibition that began immediately after the November 2020 general election and remained active for months. Politico reports: Facebook informed top political advertisers of its decision by phone and email on Wednesday, according to sources with knowledge of the announcement. The social media giant banned political and social issue-related…
Tag: Social Media
How Worried Should You Be About Those Tom Cruise Deepfakes?
Are the TikTok deepfake videos of Tom Cruise doing magic and playing golf a threat to global democracy? Not exactly. “[T]he reality is that they took a lot of time, technical expertise, and the skilled performance of a real actor,” reports VICE News. “Rather than predicting a dark future of disinformation for the masses, they’re simply another example of what can…
Facebook, TikTok Least Trusted By Americans, Google Most Trusted, Says Survey
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Forty percent of Americans don’t trust Facebook and TikTok and Google appears to be winning the trust wars, according to a survey from SeoClarity. SeoClarity surveyed 1,057 American residents to gauge trust in tech companies and found a majority of US citizens think social media companies need more regulation. The findings are notable…
China Charges Ahead With a National Digital Currency
The electronic Chinese yuan is now being tested in cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. No other major power is as far along with a homegrown digital currency. From a report: Annabelle Huang recently won a government lottery to try China’s latest economics experiment: a national digital currency. After joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Ms. Huang,…
Did ‘Tens of Thousands’ of Bot Accounts Hype GameStop’s Stock and Dogecoin?
Reuters reports: Bots on major social media platforms have been hyping up GameStop Corp and other “meme” stocks, according to an analysis by Massachusetts-based cyber security company PiiQ Media, suggesting organized economic or foreign actors may have played a role in the Reddit-driven trading frenzy… it is unclear how influential they were in the overall saga… PiiQ said it identified very…
How Facebook Silenced an Enemy of Turkey To Prevent a Hit To the Company’s Business
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from ProPublica: As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request,…
Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000
In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times. On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling digital goods. In the…
Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter Face New Rules in India
India is establishing new rules to govern internet firms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter, [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] a fresh challenge for the American giants in a huge market that is key to their global expansion. From a report: The new guidelines, unveiled Thursday, say that in order to counter the rise of problematic content online…
Apache Software Foundation Ousts TinkerPop Creator
Frosty P writes: The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has removed Marko Rodriguez from the TinkerPop project he co-founded because his provocative Twitter posts were said to have violated the ASF Code of Conduct. “I was removed from the project I started 11 years ago for ‘publishing offensive humor that borders on hate speech,'” Rodriguez explained in an email to The Register….
A Digital Firewall in Myanmar, Built With Guns and Wire Cutters
The Myanmar soldiers descended before dawn on Feb. 1, bearing rifles and wire cutters. At gunpoint, they ordered technicians at telecom operators to switch off the internet. For good measure, the soldiers snipped wires without knowing what they were severing, according to an eyewitness and a person briefed on the events. The New York Times: The data center raids in Yangon…