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Category: Social media

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound

Wired reports: According to plans viewed by WIRED and a source familiar with the development, the partially completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total. It is centered around two mansions with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field (57,000 square feet), which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial-sized kitchen. In a nearby wooded area, a web of 11 disk-shaped treehouses are planned,…

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Trump’s meme team serves as a shadow online ad agency

Trump’s meme team serves as a shadow online ad agency

The New York Times reports: The video, called “Let’s Get Ready to Bumble,” is a slick mash-up of President Biden’s verbal slip-ups and his stumbles set to a thumping 1990s dance track. And when it was played on a big screen at Trump rallies late last year, it consistently drew laughs and jeers from the crowd. But Donald J. Trump thought he could improve it. So the former president asked an adviser to pass along a few notes to one…

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Elon Musk has boosted the ‘pizzagate’ conspiracy theory five times in the last two weeks

Elon Musk has boosted the ‘pizzagate’ conspiracy theory five times in the last two weeks

NBC News reports: Elon Musk continued to boost a debunked conspiracy theory Tuesday, posting and later deleting a meme on X that referred to a fringe, far-right claim that sought to connect members of the Democratic Party with child abuse. Musk wrote “does seem at least a little suspicious” alongside a meme drawing from the TV show “The Office,” which included fake dialogue superimposed on images of a character arguing that “Pizzagate is real,” a reference to a conspiracy theory…

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At Meta, millions of underage users were an ‘open secret,’ states say

At Meta, millions of underage users were an ‘open secret,’ states say

The New York Times reports: Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it “disabled only a fraction” of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states. Instead, the social media giant “routinely continued to collect” children’s personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal…

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Far-right conspiracy theorists accused a 22-year-old Jewish man of being a neo-Nazi. Then Elon Musk got involved

Far-right conspiracy theorists accused a 22-year-old Jewish man of being a neo-Nazi. Then Elon Musk got involved

CNN reports: Ben Brody says his life was going fine. He had just finished college, stayed out of trouble, and was prepping for law school. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Elon Musk used his considerable social media clout to amplify an online mob’s misguided rants accusing the 22-year-old from California of being an undercover agent in a neo-Nazi group. The claim, Brody told CNN, was as bizarre as it was baseless. But the fact he bore a vague resemblance to…

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Advertisers flee X as outcry over Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic post grows

Advertisers flee X as outcry over Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic post grows

The New York Times reports: The blowback over Elon Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X gathered steam on Friday, as several major advertisers on his social media platform cut off their spending after his comments. Disney said it was pausing spending on X, as did Lionsgate, the entertainment and film distribution company. Apple, which spends tens of millions of dollars a year on X, also suspended advertising on the platform, a person with knowledge of the situation…

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Another day, another antisemitic conspiracy theory for Elon Musk and X

Another day, another antisemitic conspiracy theory for Elon Musk and X

Vanity Fair reports: The wealthiest man in the world is spreading the same antisemitic conspiracy theory a mass shooter in 2018 referenced to justify the slaughter of 11 worshippers at a Pennsylvania synagogue. On Wednesday, Elon Musk endorsed a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, accusing Jewish communities of “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post went on to claim that “Western…

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Israel’s comically bad disinformation effort proves they’re losing the PR war

Israel’s comically bad disinformation effort proves they’re losing the PR war

The Daily Beast reports: Israel’s official Arabic account affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a selfie video of a Palestinian nurse condemning Hamas for taking over al-Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip on Nov. 11. But some things about the video didn’t add up. Everything about it smacked of high school theater—from the botched accent that sounded like it was straight out of an Israeli soap opera to the perfectly scripted IDF talking points rolling off her tongue….

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Trump’s Truth Social has lost $73 million since its launch, faces potential shutdown

Trump’s Truth Social has lost $73 million since its launch, faces potential shutdown

CNBC News reports: Truth Social, the brain child of former President Donald Trump, is hemorrhaging cash. The alternative social media platform has lost $73 million in the less than two years since it launched, according to a new filing from Digital World Acquisition Corporation, or DWAC, the special purpose acquisition company aiming to take Trump Media and Technology Group, or TMTG, public. In its first fiscal year ending Dec. 2022, TMTG, Truth Social’s parent company, lost over $50 million on…

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In a worldwide war of words, Russia, China and Iran back Hamas

In a worldwide war of words, Russia, China and Iran back Hamas

The New York Times reports: The conflict between Israel and Hamas is fast becoming a world war online. Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States. Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have also joined the fight online, along with extremist groups, like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, that were previously at odds…

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Accounts Musk recommended on X are connected to a teen and a U.S. soldier

Accounts Musk recommended on X are connected to a teen and a U.S. soldier

The Washington Post reports: A social media account recommended by Elon Musk for its coverage of the Israel-Gaza war with a long history of antisemitic posts is connected to a southwest London teenager, according to research and a text exchange with the account. The @WarMonitors account on X, formerly Twitter, is one of two that drew hundreds of thousands of new followers the weekend that the Palestinian militant group Hamas rampaged into Israel after Musk recommended them. The second account…

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Seven influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find

Seven influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find

NBC News reports: A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the…

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Instagram sorry for adding ‘terrorist’ to some Palestinian user bios

Instagram sorry for adding ‘terrorist’ to some Palestinian user bios

BBC News reports: Meta has apologised for adding “terrorist” to the biographies of some Instagram users describing themselves as Palestinian. Meta said it fixed a problem “that briefly caused inappropriate Arabic translations” in some of its products. “We sincerely apologise that this happened,” it told the BBC. The platform has also faced accusations of suppressing content voicing support for Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza conflict. Some users say they have been “shadow banned” on Instagram over pro-Palestinian posts. This is when…

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Flood of false information and partisan narratives obscures efforts to find out who’s responsible for explosion at Gaza hospital

Flood of false information and partisan narratives obscures efforts to find out who’s responsible for explosion at Gaza hospital

Wired reports: Yesterday evening around 7 pm local time, an explosion rocked the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. Within minutes, information about what had happened was distorted by partisan narratives, disinformation, and a rush to be first to post about the blast. Add in mainstream media outlets parroting official statements without verifying their veracity, and the result was a chaotic information environment in which no one was sure what had happened or how. “There’s just been this massive sort…

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Man who spread misinformation on Trump’s behalf sentenced to seven months in prison

Man who spread misinformation on Trump’s behalf sentenced to seven months in prison

The New York Times reports: A digital-age dirty-trickster who used Twitter posts that looked like Hillary Clinton ads to spread false information before the 2016 presidential election was sentenced on Tuesday to seven months in prison. During a trial last spring, prosecutors presented evidence that the man, Douglass Mackey, had joined private Twitter groups where participants reveled in using lies and deceit on behalf of Donald J. Trump, carrying out what one participant termed “the deep psyops of meme war.”…

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