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Academics, journalists, and First Amendment lawyers are rallying behind New York University researchers in a showdown with Facebook over its demand that they halt the collection of data showing who is being micro-targeted by political ads on the world’s dominant social media platform. The researchers say the disputed tool is vital to understanding how Facebook

We usually only hear about the negative aspects of social media, but there are good deeds being done by ordinary people online daily. Social media platforms and crowdfunding have benefited more people than you might expect. In this article we list some of the positive social media stories likely to brighten your day. And these heartwarming

The US Senate Judiciary Committee said on Friday the chief executives of Twitter and Facebook will testify before the panel on November 17 over their decision to block stories that made claims about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son. The Judiciary committee voted on Thursday to subpoena the two CEOs. The executives will testify on allegations of

WhatsApp now allows you to mute a chat forever with the new ‘Always’ option in chat settings. WhatsApp had been testing this feature in the beta version and now it is widely rolling out to the stable version. The developers took to Twitter and shared the development with an image of an iPhone with this

Fraudsters from Albania to Vietnam are posting about US politics and the upcoming presidential election to build fake audiences, maximise clicks and make money online, Facebook said on Wednesday. In a new report about so-called “inauthentic behaviour” on its platform, Facebook said the November 3 election had become a common lure to trick users into visiting

Facebook moderators were reportedly pressured by their employer Genpact to return to office despite safety concerns over the ongoing coronavirus-induced pandemic. Genpact, a third-party contracting firm that handles Facebook’s moderation operations, has reportedly been asking its employees to return to its offices in Hyderabad as early as July. Genpact claimed that most parts of Facebook’s

Microsoft Teams will soon be getting an AI-based noise suppression feature that will automatically remove unwanted background noise during meetings. This will be an update to the existing noise suppression feature – users will now have control over how much noise suppression they want. There will be a new ‘high’ setting users can opt for

Japan will join forces with the United States and Europe to take on any market abuses by the four Big Tech companies, the new head of its antitrust watchdog said on Monday, a sign Tokyo will join global efforts to regulate digital platform operators. Kazuyuki Furuya, chairman of Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC), also said

OnePlus phones will no longer come with pre-installed Facebook-owned apps and services, as per a report. OnePlus had received criticism when it started pre-installing Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other Facebook services on its phones a few months ago. A spokesperson for the company confirmed that starting from the recently launched OnePlus 8T, the phones will

Twitter on Friday confirmed it reversed its decision to block links to a New York Post article about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, despite reaffirming the ban late on Thursday. Republicans who had decried Twitter’s earlier actions posted the story freely on the site. “You can now share the bombshell story Big Tech didn’t

Facebook’s Instagram has agreed measures to crack down on hidden advertising by so-called influencers on its photo and video platform, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Friday. Influencers with thousands of followers can earn large fees from companies to promotes a product on Instagram. In what the CMA described as an important behaviour

Twitter suffered from cybersecurity shortfalls that enabled a “simple” hack attributed to a Florida teenager to take over the accounts of several of the world’s most famous people in July, according to a report released on Wednesday. The report by New York’s Department of Financial Services recommended that the largest social media companies be deemed

Mozilla has released Firefox version 81.0.2 for various platforms. This release fixes an incompatibility issue with Twitter that led to the micro-blogging site not loading for several Firefox users. Loading Twitter on Firefox let to a blank or error page for users. Calling this a ‘known temporary issue,’ Mozilla said that it has been fixed

Facebook said on Monday it was updating its hate speech policy to ban any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust. The move comes two years after Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2018 interview with tech website Recode said that while he found Holocaust denial deeply offensive, he did not think Facebook

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance demanded Sunday that tech companies insert “backdoors” in encrypted apps to allow law enforcement agencies the access they say they need to police online criminality. The top justice officials of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand said in a statement that the growth of end-to-end encrypted apps that

Pakistan’s telecom regulator blocked TikTok on Friday for failing to filter out “immoral and indecent” content, another blow to the social media app that has come under increasing scrutiny as its popularity has surged across the globe. The ban comes in view of “complaints from different segments of the society against immoral and indecent content

Twitter said on Friday it will remove tweets calling for people to interfere with the U.S. election process or implementation of election results, including through violence, as the company also announced more restrictions to slow the spread of misinformation. Twitter said in a blog post that, from next week, users will get a prompt pointing

The US government said in a court filing on Thursday it was appealing a judge’s ruling that prevented it from prohibiting new downloads of the Chinese-owned short video-sharing app TikTok. The Justice Department said it appealed the order to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. In late September, a US judge temporarily blocked

Hoping for a sequel to The Social Network? The ball is now in director David Fincher’s court. The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin — who won an Oscar for his script — has said that he would love to pen a sequel to the movie about Facebook, as long as Fincher returns in the director’s

A US judge said on Tuesday he would hold a November 4 hearing on whether to allow the US government to bar transactions with TikTok, a move that the Chinese-owned short video-sharing app has warned would effectively ban its use in the United States. US District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington issued a preliminary injunction on

The CEOs of technology giants Facebook, Google and Twitter are expected to testify for an October 28 Senate hearing on tech companies’ control over hate speech and misinformation on their platforms. The Senate Commerce Committee voted last week to authorise subpoenas for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Google and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to force

Twitter users are flooding the #ProudBoys hashtag on social media with images of LGBTQI+ pride, displacing posts made by neo-Nazis and white supremacists using the tag. Proud Boys, a far-right group founded in 2016, calls itself a “white chauvinist” organisation but is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group was

The chief executives of Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet-owned Google have agreed to voluntarily testify at a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on Oct. 28 about a key law protecting internet companies. Facebook and Twitter confirmed on Friday that their CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, respectively, will appear, while a source said that Google’s

TikTok must become a “US based company controlled by US investors” or will be banned in the United States, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday. Mnuchin’s comments come amid uncertainty over a US-brokered deal to reorganise ownership of the popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app which US officials have called a national security risk. Mnuchin said the

WhatsApp is enabling multiple features for Android beta users to tinker with. This includes a useful ‘Always Mute’ feature, a new Storage Usage UI and its tools, and another feature called Media Guidelines. The instant messaging platform has released WhatsApp 2.20.201.10 beta for Android and it also has been discovered that video and voice call

Telegram has introduced a slew of features, including Search Filters, Anonymous Group Admins, Channel Comments and more in its recent update. Search Filters will allow users to find memes on Telegram Cloud. The Anonymous Admins will keep the name and identity of the admins hidden in the list of group members. They just have to

Twitter defended letting the service, Dataminr, tap into the flow of public tweets to send alerts to police or other government agencies about plans for protests or civil disobedience, such as those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. “Twitter prohibits the use of our developer services for surveillance purposes. Period,” a spokesman for the San

The US judge who stopped a ban on TikTok downloads from kicking in on Monday said that President Donald Trump likely overstepped the law with the attempted move. TikTok had showed that the actions against it “likely exceed the lawful bounds” of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) that was cited to support the

A federal judge on Sunday postponed a Trump administration order that would have banned the popular video sharing app TikTok from US smartphone app stores around midnight. A more comprehensive ban remains scheduled for November, about a week after the presidential election. The judge, Carl Nichols of the US District Court for the District of

Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said on Friday the social media platform plans to expand its labelling of state-affiliated accounts worldwide, even as he defended its policy of allowing leaders of countries like Iran and China to use Twitter. During the virtual Oslo Freedom Forum, hosted by New York-based nonprofit the Human Rights Foundation, Dorsey