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Category: Social media

Facebook has known for a year and a half that Instagram is bad for teens despite claiming otherwise – here are the harms researchers have been documenting for years

Facebook has known for a year and a half that Instagram is bad for teens despite claiming otherwise – here are the harms researchers have been documenting for years

Instagram’s emphasis on filtered photos of bodies harms girls’ self-image. Thomas Barwick/DigitalVision via Getty Images By Christia Spears Brown, University of Kentucky Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram – the social media platform most used by adolescents – is harmful to teen girls’ body image and well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as usual, according to a Sept. 14, 2021, Wall Street Journal report. Facebook’s policy of pursuing profits…

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Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows

MIT Technology Review reports: In the run up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm….

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Facebook employees flag drug cartels and human traffickers. The company’s response is weak, documents show

Facebook employees flag drug cartels and human traffickers. The company’s response is weak, documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: In January, a former cop turned Facebook Inc. investigator posted an all-staff memo on the company’s internal message board. It began “Happy 2021 to everyone!!” and then proceeded to detail a new set of what he called “learnings.” The biggest one: A Mexican drug cartel was using Facebook to recruit, train and pay hit men. The behavior was shocking and in clear violation of Facebook’s rules. But the company didn’t stop the cartel from posting…

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Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead

Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead

The Wall Street Journal reports: In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it. He pointed to the success of a BuzzFeed post titled “21 Things That Almost All White People are Guilty of Saying,” which received 13,000 shares and 16,000 comments on Facebook, many from…

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Facebook says its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that’s exempt

Facebook says its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that’s exempt

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The program, known…

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Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

The New York Times reports: More than three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook trumpeted a plan to share data with researchers about how people interacted with posts and links on the social network, so that the academics could study misinformation on the site. Researchers have used the data for the past two years for numerous studies examining the spread of false and misleading information. But the information shared by Facebook had a major flaw, according to internal emails and…

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How the NYPD is using post-9/11 tools on everyday New Yorkers

How the NYPD is using post-9/11 tools on everyday New Yorkers

The New York Times reports: It was an unusual forearm tattoo that the police said led them to Luis Reyes, a 35-year-old man who was accused of stealing packages from a Manhattan building’s mailroom in 2019. But the truth was more complicated: Mr. Reyes had first been identified by the New York Police Department’s powerful facial recognition software as it analyzed surveillance video of the crime. His guilty plea earlier this year was not solely the result of keen-eyed detectives…

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How a small town silenced a neo-Nazi hate campaign

How a small town silenced a neo-Nazi hate campaign

The New York Times reports from Whitefish, Montana: Richard B. Spencer, the most infamous summer resident in this town, once boasted that he stood at the vanguard of a white nationalist movement emboldened by President Donald J. Trump. Things have changed. “I have bumped into him, and he runs — that’s actually a really good feeling,” said Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent targeted in an antisemitic hate campaign that Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi…

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Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election, study says

Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election, study says

The Washington Post reports: A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources. The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on…

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Social media mobs are strangling free speech

Social media mobs are strangling free speech

Anne Applebaum writes: Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries, from the Argentine junta to Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao empowered students to create revolutionary committees to attack and swiftly remove professors. In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to…

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Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines against COVID-19 are the safest – and fastest – way to prevent the spread of variants. Luis Alvarez/ DigitalVision via Getty Images By Andrew Read, Penn State Takeaways A 2015 paper on a chicken virus showed vaccines could enable more deadly variants to spread – in chickens. But that outcome is rare. Only a minority of human and animal vaccines have affected the evolution of a virus. In most of those cases, evolution didn’t increase the severity of the…

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The right-wing Americans who admire the Taliban

The right-wing Americans who admire the Taliban

Michelle Goldberg writes: As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan in August, a Gen Z alt-right group ran a Twitter account devoted to celebrating their progress. Tweets in Pashto juxtaposed two laughing Taliban fighters with pictures meant to represent American effeminacy. Another said, the words auto-translated into English, “Liberalism did not fail in Afghanistan because it was Afghanistan, it failed because it was not true. It failed America, Europe and the world see it.” The account, now suspended, was just one…

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Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Peter G. Lurie writes: In striking testimony before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in December 2020, Pierre Kory, a critical care physician who formerly worked for the University of Wisconsin Health University Hospital, described the “immense potency” of ivermectin, characterizing it as effectively a “miracle drug.” “All studies are positive,” he testified, “with considerable magnitude benefits, with the vast majority reaching strong statistical significance.” Unfortunately, and not for the first time in the Covid-19 pandemic, the…

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Why the media is worse for Biden than Trump

Why the media is worse for Biden than Trump

Jonathan Chait writes: Over the last week, the media has hammered Joe Biden with relentlessly critical coverage of his pullout from Afghanistan, resulting in noticeable drops in his approval ratings. Put aside for a moment whether this reflects failures by Biden or biases by the media. One conclusion we can draw is that this sort of dynamic is a regular feature of Democratic presidencies, and — as the Trump administration showed — a near impossibility during Republican ones. But wait,…

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New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

The Guardian reports: To overseas eyes, going into national lockdown over a single case should have been a hard sell, even for an extraordinarily popular prime minister such as Jacinda Ardern. But a disastrous outbreak of the Delta variant in Sydney has helped galvanise New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” – and across the country, the government’s tough strategy on Covid-19 has enjoyed widespread popular support. On Tuesday, New Zealand was plunged into a national, level 4 lockdown – the…

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Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

The New York Times reports: In late July, Andrew Torba, the chief executive of the alternative social network Gab, claimed without evidence that members of the U.S. military who refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus would face a court-martial. His post on Gab amassed 10,000 likes and shares. Two weeks earlier, the unfounded claim that at least 45,000 deaths had resulted from Covid-19 vaccines circulated online. Posts with the claim collected nearly 17,000 views on Bitchute, an alternative video…

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