Paid-for blue checks on social media network X deceive users and are abused by malicious actors, the European Union said today, threatening the Elon Musk–owned platform with millions of dollars in fines unless the company makes changes. Enabling any account to pay for a verification breaches the EU’s Digital Services …
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In 2004, a month before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, another social media site landed on the internet with a splash of hot pink. If you were online in the mid-2000s, you might remember Orkut, with its lurid logo, fingernail-sized profile pictures, and text-heavy, pastel-blue feeds. …
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When European Commission vice president Věra Jourová met with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan in California last week, they fell to talking about the long-running conspiracy theory that the moon landings were fake. YouTube has faced calls from some users and advocacy groups to remove videos that question the historic missions. …
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In a couple of short years, the Integrity Institute, a think tank founded by former Facebook employees, has become an influential voice on how to make social media safer. Its research on issues like election misinformation and online bullying have influenced European Union regulators and US lawmakers, and have become …
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The prominent far-right social network Gab has launched almost 100 chatbots—ranging from AI versions of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski—several of which question the reality of the Holocaust. Gab launched a new platform, called Gab AI, specifically for its chatbots last month, and has quickly …
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OpenAI’s ChatGPT became a phenomenon thanks to its wide-ranging abilities, such as drafting college essays, writing working computer programs, and digging up information from across the web. Now the company aims to further widen the range of tricks up ChatGPT’s sleeve by making it possible for anyone to build a …
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ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Cory Doctorow, a writer, internet activist, and author of The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. As the US government takes Google to court in an antitrust case this week, Doctorow …
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VC investor Marc Andreessen once lamented the ambiguity surrounding platforms, writing, “Whenever anyone uses the word ‘platform,’ ask ‘can it be programmed?’ … If not, it’s not a platform, and you can safely ignore whoever’s talking.” Andreessen’s desire to align on a singular, shared definition of the term is understandable. …
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