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Category: Social media

The gleeful cruelty of the White House X account. Welcome to the 4chan administration

The gleeful cruelty of the White House X account. Welcome to the 4chan administration

Charlie Warzel writes: On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot. The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this…

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Outside America, Musk’s X is a foreign influence threat

Outside America, Musk’s X is a foreign influence threat

Tom Uren writes: We have consistently argued for TikTok to be banned in the U.S. as it could be a powerful tool for the Chinese government to interfere with American political discourse. For U.S. allies, a similar argument now applies to X. Commentators in Canada and the United Kingdom have already floated the idea of banning X. Meanwhile, in France, prosecutors have announced they’ve opened an investigation into X over alleged algorithmic bias. The investigation was launched after the prosecutor’s office received complaints about X’s interference in French democratic debate….

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Mark Zuckerberg wants ‘all the good, bad and ugly’ on display except when it’s about him

Mark Zuckerberg wants ‘all the good, bad and ugly’ on display except when it’s about him

Meta’s Joel Kaplan announced in January, “Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression.” Steven Levy writes: It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR…

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Elon Musk’s entire empire mapped by Wired magazine

Elon Musk’s entire empire mapped by Wired magazine

  There’s barely a place left on Earth outside the gravitational pull of Elon Musk’s empire. How far does Elon’s clout really stretch—and what conflicts of interest are emerging as he wields the power of the federal government? WIRED pulled the data and mapped out the key places that shape Elon’s Empire.

Ukraine: The past, present, and future of Russian disinformation

Ukraine: The past, present, and future of Russian disinformation

Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren write: On the morning of Nov. 7, 2024, the pro-Russian X account @OCanonist posted a video of men in Ukrainian military uniforms shooting and setting ablaze a mannequin wearing a Trump 2024 T-shirt and red hat. With it, @OCanonist shared the message, “It’s time to defund this degenerate country.” Over the course of the following day, the post was shared more than 26,000 times and viewed by 12.4 million users. From X, the video exploded…

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Musk operatives granted access to confidential info about X’s competitors

Musk operatives granted access to confidential info about X’s competitors

Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum write: With Elon Musk’s social media platform X poised to launch a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment services, Musk’s associates have been granted access to confidential information about X’s competitors, an official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) told Musk Watch. Staffers at the United States Department of Government Efficiency Service, or DOGE, a White House body led by Musk, embedded themselves at the CFPB late last week. Politico reported on Saturday that Office…

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Gambling firms secretly sharing users’ data with Facebook which it uses to promote gambling

Gambling firms secretly sharing users’ data with Facebook which it uses to promote gambling

The Observer reports: Gambling companies are covertly tracking visitors to their websites and sending their data to Facebook’s parent company without consent in an apparent breach of data protection laws. The information is then being used by Facebook’s owner, Meta, to profile people as gamblers and flood them with ads for casinos and betting sites, the Observer can reveal. A hidden tracking tool embedded in dozens of UK gambling websites has been extracting visitors’ data – including details of the…

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Musk applies his Twitter destruction playbook on the U.S. government and it’s even more dangerous

Musk applies his Twitter destruction playbook on the U.S. government and it’s even more dangerous

Mike Masnick writes: Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when…

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Elon Musk is deliberately ‘strengthening those who are weakening Europe’

Elon Musk is deliberately ‘strengthening those who are weakening Europe’

Anne Applebaum writes: Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet…

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How youth pop culture has embraced Trump

How youth pop culture has embraced Trump

Brock Colyar writes: [T]he youngest, most online members of Trump’s party have acquired his knack for turning the culture wars into something as entertaining as reality TV. Attention is power. One honoree of the night [at the Power 30 Awards, held at Sax nightclub in Washington DC, the night before the inauguration] was DuRousseau, whose TikTok is full of sometimes transphobic rants for a target audience he describes as “Beverly Hills conservatives.” “When you look back, this was the first…

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How the roots of Musk and Thiel’s ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa

How the roots of Musk and Thiel’s ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa

Chris McGreal reports: When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison. But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight. In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic…

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Head of Jewish Council for Public Affairs says Musk will spur violence with his ‘Nazi salute’

Head of Jewish Council for Public Affairs says Musk will spur violence with his ‘Nazi salute’

The Guardian reports: The head of a prominent US Jewish civil rights body said Elon Musk’s repeated fascist-style salute during Donald Trump’s inauguration could act as a spur for violent extremists. “The salute itself should be enough to warrant condemnation and attention,” said Amy Spitalnick, adding that so should “the ways extremists see an action like this and take it as license for their own violent extremism”. Spitalnick is chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a progressive…

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TikTok short video use linked to lower academic performance in children, research finds

TikTok short video use linked to lower academic performance in children, research finds

PsyPost reports: Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently published a study in PLOS ONE examining the effects of short video usage on elementary school students’ academic performance in China. The study found a negative relationship between short video usage and academic performance, mediated by reduced attention spans. The findings highlight the potential influence of digital media on young learners. Short video platforms such as TikTok and Kwai have become a significant part of young people’s lives, including elementary…

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Trump launches meme coin. Rakes in over $25 billion in value overnight

Trump launches meme coin. Rakes in over $25 billion in value overnight

Politico reports: President-elect Donald Trump late Friday launched a cryptocurrency token that exploded in value overnight, potentially increasing his net worth by tens of billions of dollars on paper just days before he is set to be sworn in as president. Trump launched the so-called memecoin — a digital token with no intrinsic real-world value that is traded on a digital ledger technology called blockchain — with posts on his social media site and X after 9 p.m., prompting the…

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How Zuckerberg, in obeisance to his overlord, secretly conspired to make Meta even more MAGA-friendly

How Zuckerberg, in obeisance to his overlord, secretly conspired to make Meta even more MAGA-friendly

The New York Times reports: Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small. Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy. Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg…

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Zuckerberg says most companies need more ‘masculine energy’

Zuckerberg says most companies need more ‘masculine energy’

Who's actually surprised that this little asshole was basically just a fascist incel hiding in plain sight? not me. Remember that Facebook was originally just a website created by a sexually frustrated Zuckerberg to rate the bangability levels of female students at his college. [image or embed] — ❄️Hugo the pink snow cat❄️ (@hugothepinkcat.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 2:13 PM Bloomberg News reports: Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of “culturally neutered” companies that have sought to distance themselves from “masculine…

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