Facebook's stock price collapses along with user growth

Two videos contained hate speech against Muslims, and a third contained hate speech against transgender people, sources said. A fourth showed Jones mocking a child who was pushed to the ground by an adult man, under the headline “How to prevent liberalism.” All four of the videos are currently posted on Infowars.

Facebook said in a statement that it deactivated 196 pages and 87 accounts in Brazil for their part in “a coordinated network that hid behind fake Facebook accounts and misled people about the nature and origin of its content, all for the purpose of sowing division and spreading misinformation.”

While the about-face does not definitively end Facebook’s chances of establishing the company, it makes success very unlikely, the person said. The decision to take down the approval, the person added, came after a disagreement between officials in Zhejiang and the national internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, which was angry that it had not been consulted more closely.

- Treat victims of mass shootings and other tragedies as a protected group, such that attacks on them are specifically against Facebook policy.

- Provide affected people with access to Facebook staff who will remove hateful and harassing posts against victims immediately. 

This doesn’t mean the internet was irrelevant to the 2016 campaign, Shapiro told me. “The question is not whether the internet is having any impact on politics—it surely is—but whether it deserves the top billing it often gets in discussions about the election,” he said.

For several months in 2017 Alex, whose name has been changed, alleges he was one of more than 20 people inside a secretive cyber army that pumped out messages from fake social media accounts to support then Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as “Ahok”, as he fought for re-election.

“They told us you should have five Facebook accounts, five Twitter accounts and one Instagram,” he told the Guardian. “And they told us to keep it secret. They said it was ‘war time’ and we had to guard the battleground and not tell anyone about where we worked.”

Twitter has implemented a new method for combating cryptocurrency scammers: it now automatically locks unverified accounts that change their display name to Elon Musk. If you have a non-verified account that is not associated with a phone number, changing your display name to that of the SpaceX and Tesla CEO will result in an immediate lock out. Twitter will then ask you to pass a CAPTCHA test, as well as provide a phone number, to regain access.

Running from the authorities may be a nightmare for many, but it’s a fairly normal day for Law, a 21-year-old who has gained 1.4 million subscribers and 150 million-plus views for his YouTube channel “Ally Law” since he started uploading videos three years ago. What began as a tame assortment of clips of him running on rooftops in Southampton has grown into a full-fledged business and lifestyle that centers on sneaking into venues and filming the activities that lay within, whether it’s just a gorgeous view from a half-built skyscraper or bouncing at a trampoline park all night long. Law’s filmed himself scaling cranes in Dubai, towers in Hong Kong, even the Sagrada Familia church in Spain, among many other locales. All that trespassing has come with consequences, too: He’s been given bans from a number of British cities, landmarks and theme parks, as well as an alleged £150,000 in court fines from lawsuits over trespassing, which is a civil matter in U.K. law.

“In the past, [Snap] has mostly focused on new shows or programming that was exclusive to Discover,” said Rob Fishman, co-founder of Brat, which later this year will syndicate a new season of its teen series “Boss Cheer” on Snapchat Discover in addition to YouTube. “Now, they are more open to thinking about bringing in shows that have aired elsewhere, but that they can build an audience against on Snapchat.”

YouTube is expanding its virtual reality app to support Samsung’s Gear VR devices, and it’s also adding a new feature that lets users watch a video together and chat. If you own a Gear VR device, you’ll be able to download the app from the Oculus Store beginning this week, Google announced today in a blog post.

It’s a feature that would let Facebook Groups host shared video streaming sessions, with everyone in the group being able to see/comment on the same videos at the same time. Take the Facebook Live concept and swap in a queue of pre-selected videos to make a sort of ad hoc video channel, and that’s a Watch Party.

Still, in the end we will all be left with a paradox. Even if they’re working with outsiders to create these policies, the more these companies do to moderate what happens on their sites, the more important their own policies become to the global discourse.

A lot of people are worried that Mark Zuckerberg is already too powerful. The danger is that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The solution, for everyone involved and everyone not yet involved, seems to be scaling back on social media. The rewards of openness–access that runs both ways between talent and fans, a window into the creative process–can only exist in a marketplace in which context is understood and appreciated. That Twitter strips away context, that it rips jokes and statements out of time and presents them as individual links that make a botched witticism seem as potent and nasty as a destructive piece of politicized hate, is part of its value proposition. And it’s trained all of us, but especially power users on the right, to see a flattened world, where sensibility and meaning matter less than how offended one can purport to be. If more and more creators walk away from Twitter and similar platforms, it’ll be a potent demonstration of how the promise of the social web — openness and accessibility — cannot jibe with the artist’s need to work things out. 

G.P. didn’t understand the problem. “We’re never making statements,” she said. Meaning, they’re never asserting anything like a fact. They’re just asking unconventional sources some interesting questions. (Loehnen told me, “We’re just asking questions.”) But what is “making a statement”? Some would argue — her former partners at Condé Nast, for sure — that it is giving an unfiltered platform to quackery or witchery. O.K., O.K., but what is quackery? What is witchery? Is it claims that have been observed but not the subject of double-blind, peer-reviewed studies? Yes? Right. O.K., G.P. would say, then what is science, and is it all-encompassing and altruistic and without error and always acting in the interests of humanity?