When you sign up for Facebook on your phone, the app isn’t just giving you the latest updates and photos from your friends and family. In the background, it’s utilizing the phone’s gyroscope to detect subtle movements that come from breathing. It’s measuring how quickly you tap on the screen, and even looking at what angle the phone is being held. […]

The company also relies on AI to automatically tell if an account is fake based on how many accounts are on one device, as well as its activities after it’s created. Facebook’s AI will label an account as a bot if it signs up and is able to send more than 100 friend requests within a minute, he said.

One of the group’s biggest tasks, Ms. Alter said, is persuading candidates to campaign heavily on social media, rather than relying solely on TV ads and printed mailers. Many Democrats running in 2018 are spending a much smaller percentage of their ad budgets on digital ads than their rivals, sometimes as little as 10 percent versus more than 40 percent for Republicans, according to two political consultants with ties to multiple campaigns.

Tech for Campaigns has advised Democrats in about 60 races since it started, including Justin Nelson, who is running for attorney general in Texas, and Rob Quist, who was narrowly defeated in a special congressional election in Montana last year. The group plans to work with 200 campaigns by the end of the year, with a special focus on helping state-level candidates like Ms. Eskamani, who typically do not have the budgets to hire dedicated digital teams.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Phillip Lohaus put it, “We tend to think of our cyberdefenses as physical barricades, barring access from would-be perpetrators, and of information campaigns as retrograde and ineffective. In other words, we continue to focus on the walls of the castle, while our enemies are devising methods to poison the air.” When lawmakers and business leaders discuss “cyber attacks,” they’re generally thinking of network intrusions and exfiltration of data — for example, password phishing, malware, DDOS attacks, and other types of exploits or sabotage that target specific devices or networks. Information warfare, by contrast, is an attack on cognitive infrastructure, on people themselves, on society, and on systems of information and belief. Its targets are diffuse and widespread. There are best practices and frameworks for tackling and preventing cybersecurity attacks: identification and management of vulnerable infrastructure, building a defensive environment around that infrastructure, detecting and analyzing all anomalous events on the network, responding to actual attacks, improving those defensive measures, and recovering from successful attacks. There isn’t much out there for dealing with information warfare, and that gap is leaving democratic societies vulnerable.

Majorities of whites, blacks and Hispanics all believe social media play a very or somewhat important role in getting elected officials to pay attention to issues, creating sustained movements for social change, or influencing policy decisions. But there are some differences in the intensity of their views. Most notably, 36% of blacks and 27% Hispanics say social media are very important for getting elected officials to pay attention to issues, compared with 19% of whites. Blacks and Hispanics are also more likely than whites to describe social media as very important for influencing policy decisions and creating sustained movements for social change.

The New York Times tracked the accounts of more than 3,000 of the most popular celebrities, politicians and world leaders to see who lost the greatest number of followers. It’s important to note that just because an account’s follower count dropped doesn’t mean the user bought fake followers. Suspicious accounts are known to follow some of the most popular accounts to make them look more authentic.

I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world.

I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not a romance—it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.

The creator of r/KotakuInAction, a GamerGate subreddit, is speaking up about creating what he calls “one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated Reddit.” User David-me briefly locked the subreddit, explaining in a lengthy post that the forum has become filled with racism and sexism. “I did this,” he wrote. “Now I am undoing it. This abomination should have always been aborted.” KotakuInAction has since returned, however, thanks to a Reddit administrator.

The social network is awash with groups devoted to freely sharing pirated Hollywood movies with hundreds of thousands of users, Business Insider has found.

With names like “Full HD English Movie” and “Free full movies 2018,” these Facebook groups make no attempt to hide their purpose or to conceal catalogs brimming with the latest blockbusters like “Ant Man and the Wasp” and “A Quiet Place.” Business Insider found them by simply searching for “free movies” on Facebook. 

Facebook has hired one of Google’s chip developers, Shahriar Rabii, to help the social network in its ongoing effort to design its own silicon, according to a report from Bloomberg. Facebook hopped on the chip-developing bandwagon earlier this year, when they started to build a team that could design custom chips to power server and consumer hardware.

Ultimately, coverage decisions come down to the question of how important and influential these communities truly are when left to their own devices. Since Trump took office, the pro-Trump media has been adept at injecting its talking points into the internet and watching as they’re picked up by more mainstream conservative press like Fox News. Would these narratives and memes and hashtags still reach them reliably if mainstream reporters ignored them? The question is the same with the the alt-right and white nationalist communities. Would the groups have felt empowered enough to march in the streets with torches in Charlottesville last August if they’d not had mainstream media coverage? Or was their brazen attitude shaped by the vibrant and supportive online communities they’ve built?

Another fundamental — and unanswered — question about both the pro-Trump online media apparatus and the alt-right is just how big those groups really are. The underbelly of the pro-Trump media as well as the alt-right is largely anonymous; any of its players operate in the shadows. Add in automated astroturfing campaigns, bots, potential manipulation by foreign actors masquerading as Americans, and shady Twitter chat rooms and you’ve got a largely unmeasurable murky mess. So: are the pro-Trump media and alt-right factions just small networks unwittingly inflated ? Or are they truly robust and reflective of a once dormant community of anger and hate on the anonymous internet?

Why downranking and quarantine? Because banning would only stoke conspiratorial curiosity about these inaccurate outlets. Trolls will use the bans as a badge of honor, saying, “Facebook deleted us because it knows what we say is true.”

They’ll claim they’ve been unfairly removed from the proxy for public discourse that exists because of the size of Facebook’s private platform.

Belcher isn’t a porn star or spam account sharing unsolicited photographs of his penis—he’s part of the thriving community of nudists on Twitter who have flocked to the platform after most others have made a policy of censoring or banning images of naked bodies. Nudists on Facebook have had their profiles suspended after failing to properly crop or censor their photos. On Instagram, they’ve been penalized for showing female nipples or too much pubic hair. Tumblr allows NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content, but nudists say the platform is so overrun with spam that it’s unusable.

Meanwhile, two of the very things that have made Twitter toxic for many people—its maximalist commitment to free speech and its lack of enforcement of real names—have also, strangely, made it the best place to be a nudist on the internet.