X has banned the account of a prominent critic after he published data that he claims exposed the site’s embrace of the far-right after Elon Musk’s takeover last year. Travis Brown, a software developer based in Berlin, alleges his account was first suspended on July 1 this year, several months …
Read More »How Telegram Became a Terrifying Weapon in the Israel-Hamas War
At around 8 am local time the morning of October 7, Haaretz’s cyber and disinformation reporter, Omer Benjakob, was woken by his wife at their home in the historic port city of Jaffa. Something was happening in southern Israel, she said, but Benjakob shrugged it off, presuming “another round of …
Read More »Greece’s New Political Star Is a TikTok Creation
On the night that Greece’s biggest left-wing party voted for its new leader, all anyone could talk about was pizza. At stake was the future of the Syriza party, which had run Greece at the head of a coalition government from 2015 to 2019. As the votes came in on …
Read More »Inside Elon Musk’s First Election Crisis—a Day After He ‘Freed’ the Bird
The day after Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter, the company’s Seattle office held a Halloween party for employees and their children. Rebecca Scott Thein dressed in bright green to play an alien to her daughter’s Buzz Lightyear. Thein, whose job at Twitter (now X) was to help …
Read More »The UK’s Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law
Jeremy Wright was the first of five UK ministers charged with pushing through the British government’s landmark legislation on regulating the internet, the Online Safety Bill. The current UK government likes to brand its initiatives as “world-beating,” but for a brief period in 2019 that might have been right. Back …
Read More »TikTok Streamers Are Staging ‘Israel vs. Palestine’ Live Matches to Cash In on Virtual Gifts
TikTokkers are using a little-known livestreaming feature to cash in on the huge interest in the Israel-Hamas war despite having no links to the crisis. TikTok, meanwhile, is taking up to 50 percent of the earnings. In the days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, TikTok creators have been …
Read More »Elon Musk Mocked Ukraine, and Russian Trolls Went Wild
Since Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter (now X) last year, the billionaire has been determined to wipe out bots and spammy accounts. Things haven’t gone smoothly. Amid the chaos, in recent weeks Russian trolls have jumped on one of Musk’s own posts and used it to push pro-Kremlin …
Read More »The 5 Instagram Features That US States Say Ruin Teens’ Mental Health
In 2019, Instagram’s top executive, Adam Mosseri, went on TV to describe how the Meta-owned social media app was “rethinking the whole experience” to prioritize the “well-being” of users above all else. Today, a bipartisan group of attorneys general representing 42 US states alleged in a series of lawsuits that …
Read More »The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest
Github secured its status as a programmer's best friend by combining tools for managing software with collaboration features that create a kind of social network for the code-literate. Its success has seen it pick up a less welcome feature of social platforms: a black market in fake engagement. An ecosystem …
Read More »The Hamas Threat of Hostage Execution Videos Looms Large Over Social Media
For the past decade, social media platforms have struggled to stop the spread of extremist violence livestreamed on their platforms. Now they face a much different problem: This time, they know what’s coming. In the days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the group’s military wing said it would …
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