Misinformation is rampant on social media, and a new study has shed some light on why. Researchers from Yale University and the University of Southern California argue that basically, some people develop a habit for sharing things on social media—whether they’re true or not. Although “individual deficits in critical reasoning and partisan bias” are commonly cited as reasons that people…
With nearly 3 billion daily users to its name, Facebook is buzzing with activity—particularly if several hundred of those people happen to be friends with you. Between wedding photos of friends-of-friends-of-friends, angry articles from your political uncle, and all-caps updates from the girl you haven’t seen since middle school, your News Feed can get cluttered with information you couldn’t care…
By design, it’s very easy to publish to social media from just about any location and any device connected to the internet, so there are going to be times you wish you could undo a post. Maybe you wish you hadn’t said what you said, shared a photo without permission, or simply made an embarrassing typo. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook…
Meta announced yesterday that it is pursuing legal action against a data scraping-for-hire firm called Voyager Labs for allegedly “improperly” amassing Facebook and Instagram users’ publicly available information, which it then sold to organizations including the Los Angeles Police Department, Meta says. As The Verge and other outlets note, the LAPD then utilized the data trove to compile profiles of…
This week, Meta was fined €390 million ($410 million) by the European Union for illegally forcing users to accept personalized ads or stop using its services. It now has three months to outline how it will change its practices to comply with EU law. The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) came into force in 2018 and since then, they’ve been…
In 2020, John Mills’ house in Sonoma County, California was in the path of the Walbridge Fire. After evacuating, he began scouring the internet for all the updates he could find about the blaze, only to find himself refreshing the same outdated maps and watching the same soundbites on the news over and over. The lack of information fueled his…
This article was originally featured on Undark. WITHIN DAYS of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, several social media companies took steps to reduce the circulation of Russian state-backed media and anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Meta (formerly Facebook), for example, said it took down about 40 accounts, part of a larger network that had already spread across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Russian social media. The accounts used…
Today Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced that it is partnering with NVIDIA to build a supercomputer to power their artificial intelligence research. They call the new machine the RCS, which stands for the AI Research SuperCluster. The supercomputer will be completed later this year, and the company said in a press release that they expect it to “be the fastest…
There’s a lot to catch up on during this year’s Thanksgiving meal, and it’s not all related to the pandemic, either. Despite global computer chip shortages and shipping issues, the US has made progress on a few other pressing tech issues. Changes to Facebook and some of its more concerning practices, increased governmental funding for services like cybersecurity and transportation,…
In the novel-turned-movie Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, the protagonist escapes to an online realm aptly called OASIS. Instrumental to the OASIS experience is his haptic (relating to sense of touch) bodysuit, which enables him to move through and interact with the virtual world with his body. He can even activate tactile sensations to feel every gut punch, or…