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Category: Social media

Meta ordered to pay almost $1 billion over social media harm to children

Meta ordered to pay almost $1 billion over social media harm to children

  Fortune reports: A New Mexico court has ordered Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial. Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in a ruling late Thursday that the bulk of the money — $420 million — will be used for treatment services for young people. The rest will go toward awareness and prevention, screening services and other costs over the next…

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ICE built a $258 million social media surveillance machine to monitor its online critics

ICE built a $258 million social media surveillance machine to monitor its online critics

Gadget Review reports: A critical Reddit comment about immigration enforcement can, four months later, bring plainclothes agents to a poster’s door carrying a printout of the post — a scenario no longer hypothetical. According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE has built a funded, contractor-powered surveillance operation that monitors social media around the clock — not just for credible violence, but for speech that challenges the agency’s mission. Since early 2025, DHS has fired off hundreds of administrative subpoenas to…

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From a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains her shift on Russia’s war

From a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains her shift on Russia’s war

The Associated Press reports: Laura Loomer became infamous for spreading conspiracy theories online. Now, as she travels across Ukraine to see the damage inflicted by Russia in its yearslong war, she wants to admit that she fell for some falsehoods of her own. A close ally of President Donald Trump, Loomer has completely reversed her longtime criticism of Ukraine and is urging fellow conservatives to be wary of Moscow’s propaganda, which she blames for duping large swaths of the American…

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War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

Charlie Warzel writes: If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in…

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France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

The Guardian reports: France’s parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first EU country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. “France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers,” Macron said in a video posted on social…

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Trump’s ex-campaign manager is running an Israeli influence operation targeting the MAGA base

Trump’s ex-campaign manager is running an Israeli influence operation targeting the MAGA base

Time reports: After the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire deal on June 17, a senior U.S. official was monitoring the online reaction when they noticed something surprising. President Donald Trump’s aides had expected his supporters to celebrate the agreement. Instead, online influencers in Trump’s MAGA movement were excoriating it on social media. One shared an Israeli op-ed titled, “You Could Have Been the Greatest President of All—But You Failed.” Several posted the same video of Qatar’s prime minister…

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Trump blatantly tries to manipulate markets by selling fast access Truth Social to Wall Street firms

Trump blatantly tries to manipulate markets by selling fast access Truth Social to Wall Street firms

The New Republic reports: The thin veil that has historically clouded government corruption is in the trash—under the current Trump administration, blatant ethical misconduct is in. Truth Social executives announced Thursday that the company would sell Wall Street firms premier access to Donald Trump’s market-rattling online posts, granting traders an advantage over the general public with regard to anticipating stock market fluctuations due to the president’s social media habits. The product, marketed as “Truth API,” apparently aims to make fast…

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The Democratic influencer who helped bring down Graham Platner and former Rep. Eric Swalwell

The Democratic influencer who helped bring down Graham Platner and former Rep. Eric Swalwell

The Wall Street Journal reports: Behind the stunning downfall of two Democratic politicians this midterm cycle is a 29-year-old lawyer and progressive social media influencer. Cheyenne Hunt played a key role in surfacing serious accusations of assault and sexual misconduct against Maine Democrat Graham Platner and former Rep. Eric Swalwell, the California Democrat who was also a leading candidate for governor. Both men have denied the allegations. Platner ended his Senate campaign on Wednesday and Swalwell suspended his gubernatorial campaign…

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Experiments reveal the psychological cost of insulting political rhetoric

Experiments reveal the psychological cost of insulting political rhetoric

PsyPost reports: Politicians frequently use aggressive, blaming language to mobilize voters and attack opponents. Recent psychological experiments reveal that exposure to this specific style of communication causes people to feel their core values are under attack, regardless of their own political affiliation. The findings, published in Current Psychology, show that polarizing rhetoric can directly degrade a person’s willingness to grant freedom of speech to political rivals. Political communication has increasingly fractured into hostile territory over the last several years. Across…

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Zuckerberg looks for new way to profit from addiction: a prediction markets app

Zuckerberg looks for new way to profit from addiction: a prediction markets app

The New York Times reports: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has urged his lieutenants to explore partnerships with the popular prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi as his company builds a similar app, three employees with knowledge of the matter said. The app that Meta is creating, called Arena, could allow people to make bets on practically anything, aiming to capitalize on how prediction markets have become an increasingly big business. Internally, Meta’s executives have said Arena is different from Polymarket…

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Elon Musk’s race war just took a darker turn. It’s time for a global response

Elon Musk’s race war just took a darker turn. It’s time for a global response

Toby Buckle and Greg Sargent write: If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceX’s initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogul’s mind was elsewhere—a white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening. In numerous social media postings,…

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Trita Parsi: So they tried to deport me…

Trita Parsi: So they tried to deport me…

Trita Parsi writes: I have fought the neocons and warmongers in Washington for more than 25 years. Throughout, they have tried to silence, discredit, slander, and cancel me. Only recently, however, have they tried to deport me. At least, that appears to have been the aim of a hit piece in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which claimed that Marco Rubio’s State Department was “investigating” me for allegedly seeking to “undermine the U.S.”—presumably because of my opposition to war with…

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Elon Musk condemned for effort to ‘whip up unrest’ in UK after Belfast knife attack

Elon Musk condemned for effort to ‘whip up unrest’ in UK after Belfast knife attack

HuffPost reports: Elon Musk has been accused of trying to “whip up unrest” in the UK in the wake of the Belfast knife attack. A 30-year-old Sudanese man who was granted a five-year visa to remain the in UK in 2023 has been charged with attempted murder and is due to appear in court later today. Violence erupted on the streets of Belfast on Tuesday night, while immigrant families were burned out of their homes. Politicians have condemned the “outright…

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Andrew Tate’s manosphere empire of abuse

Andrew Tate’s manosphere empire of abuse

Heidi Blake writes: Just north of Bucharest is a neat development of red-gabled houses known as American Village. It is an unlikely place to be the center of an international criminal intrigue, but on its western border is a sprawling compound, patrolled by armed guards, that belongs to the British American influencer Andrew Tate and his younger brother, Tristan. The Tates moved to Romania a decade ago to build an online-pornography empire, and American Village was where they kept their…

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TikTok disproportionately served anti-Democratic videos during the 2024 election, study finds

TikTok disproportionately served anti-Democratic videos during the 2024 election, study finds

PsyPost reports: A recent study provides evidence that TikTok’s recommendation system tends to expose users to more conservative and anti-Democrat political content than liberal material. This ideological imbalance occurs regardless of a user’s initial political interests, suggesting that automation plays a significant role in modern information access. The research was published in the scientific journal Nature. Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi’s AI and Society Lab conducted the new research to explore how automated internet systems shape what political…

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Listening to Joe Rogan was a stronger predictor of a Trump vote than watching Fox News

Listening to Joe Rogan was a stronger predictor of a Trump vote than watching Fox News

PsyPost reports: The popular program “The Joe Rogan Experience” has gradually transformed from a comedy podcast into a highly influential platform with real-world political weight. A pair of new studies reveals that listenership of the show strongly predicts voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, even after accounting for past voting habits. These results were published as a recent preprint in APSA Preprints. The media landscape has fractured over the past two decades in the shadow of the…

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