Social Networking

YouTube executives have been unable or unwilling to rein in toxic content because it could reduce engagement on their platform, according to a report that maintained the company has spent years chasing one goal: engagement. The problem YouTube now faces is how to create an effective mechanism to han...

Instagram has introduced Checkout on Instagram -- an in-app purchasing tool -- as a closed beta for consumers in the United States. Among the 20 participating brands are Adidas, Nike, Burberry, Dior, Huda Beauty, Prada and Michael Kors. "Users in the U.S. can buy from a majority of these brands star...

Jigsaw, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has released Tune, an experimental Chrome extension that lets users hide comments its algorithms identify as toxic. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and the Chrome OS. Tune builds on the same machine learning models that power Jigsaw's...

Facebook has undermined privacy on its network by exposing mobile phone numbers provided to secure user accounts through two-factor authentication. That's because anyone can use the numbers to look up a user's account. One doesn't even have to be a Facebook member to do so. Moreover, there's no way ...

Google has unveiled its game plan for fighting disinformation on its search, news, YouTube and advertising platforms in a 30-page document. "Providing useful and trusted information at the scale that the Internet has reached is enormously complex and an important responsibility," noted Google Vice P...

Apple plans to launch a subscription news service at an event next month. The service has been described as "Netflix for news," because it would let customers access an unlimited amount of content from publishers for a single monthly fee. It will be based on a reworked version of Texture, the media ...

Musing about Facebook's first 15 years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg positioned it as a David confronting a Goliath composed of hierarchical institutions. Facebook gives the masses a voice, he wrote. It brings communities together and provides businesses with low-cost outreach. Progress has been made in addr...

Apple has blocked a Facebook app that paid users for total access to all network data passing through their mobile phones. Facebook had been paying users $20 a month for root network access to their phones. Facebook was on-boarding users of its Research program, which included teenagers, through App...

INSIGHTS

What’s Wrong With the Social Media Model

The social media model has come under increased scrutiny following revelations of data misuse and news of executives reneging on some security commitments. People expecting to change the situation will need to address how social media works. This means changing not just the business model, which des...

Facebook has begun rolling out a new feature that's bound to charm the political activists among its users. Called "Community Actions," it lets Facebook members create an action page where they can describe what they'd like done, and set up a button that like-minded members can click to show their s...

Women are abused on Twitter every 30 seconds, and minority women are harassed more often, according to Amnesty International. Volunteers for Troll Patrol, a crowdsourcing project set up by Amnesty International to process large-scale data about online abuse, sorted through 288,000 tweets sent to 778...

Firework this week released a collection of shows consisting of 12 episodes that will run just 15 seconds each. The first, "Fireside Chat featuring Molly Tarlov," debuted Tuesday. Three more followed on Wednesday, and another is scheduled for release on Dec. 28. Users can download the episodes via t...

The personal data of some 100 million people who have used Quora, a popular question-and-answer website, has been compromised, the company disclosed. "We recently discovered that some user data was compromised as a result of unauthorized access to one of our systems by a malicious third party," wrot...

Facebook at one time considered charging companies for access to its user data, according to a report based on three pages of unredacted material from a document showing portions of some internal Facebook emails, mainly from 2012 to 2014. The documents are linked to a lawsuit, Six4Three LLC v. Faceb...

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