How Facebook is fighting fake news with local news

Brazil’s electoral authorities are moving to tackle the problem. Luiz Fux, incoming president of the country’s electoral tribunal, will create a task force comprised of various authorities to combat the proliferation of fake news and draft a bill to curb the practice, local media reported. A law Congress approved last year also aims to fine internet users who publish content aimed at influencing the election under a false identity.

In-depth interviews and ethnographic observations reveal that the mechanisms of this digital activism gap are organizational resources, along with individual disparities in access, skills, empowerment and time. These factors create high costs of online participation for working-class groups. Rather than reduced costs equalizing online participation, substantial costs contribute to digital activism inequality.

Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the Head of the Russian Republic of Ingushetia said in an interview with RIA Novosti that he does “not like Instagram in the slightest”, but this “must be done nevertheless”. He is reportedly the one making all the posts on social networks.

Yevkurov said he used social media to tell everyone about the republic’s achievements and traditions, to convey the national flavor and to ensure that more people know about the republic. The Ingush head also said he might create accounts in other networks as well, since it is important to “keep abreast of the times”. At present, “80 percent of people around the world read news and get information via social networks,” he added.

In October 2017, as Congress probed Russia’s suspected manipulation of Twitter’s platform, the company pledged to within weeks establish an “industry-leading transparency center” that would provide visibility into political and issues-based ads. More than two months later, the center is nowhere to be found.

Twitter announced the center as it was preparing to testify before Congress following revelations that Kremlin-linked trolls used its platform in an attempt to sow discord in American politics. The initiative would offer important visibility into what ads run on Twitter, and when, regardless of the ads’ intended targets.

Twitter told BuzzFeed News that the creation of the transparency center is still in progress. But a spokesperson declined to comment on when it might debut and why it’s been delayed.

But while the Signal and Threema flaws they found were relatively harmless, the researchers unearthed far more significant gaps in WhatsApp’s security: They say that anyone who controls WhatsApp’s servers could effortlessly insert new people into an otherwise private group, even without the permission of the administrator who ostensibly controls access to that conversation.

“The confidentiality of the group is broken as soon as the uninvited member can obtain all the new messages and read them,” says Paul Rösler, one of the Ruhr University researchers who co-authored a paper on the group messaging vulnerabilities. “If I hear there’s end-to-end encryption for both groups and two-party communications, that means adding of new members should be protected against. And if not, the value of encryption is very little.”

The company announced today that it will not move forward with a planned YouTube Red movie that Paul was supposed to star in. The Thinning: New World Order was supposed to be the sequel to Paul’s 2016 YouTube Red movie, The Thinning. A YouTube representative also confirmed to Polygon he is removed from Google’s top tier preferred ad program.

“In light of recent events, we have decided to remove Logan Paul’s channels from Google Preferred,” a YouTube representative said. Additionally, we will not feature Logan in season 4 of ‘Foursome’ and his new Originals are on hold.

The products don’t matter to the system, nor do they matter to Ganon. The whole idea of retail gets inverted in his videos. What he actually sells in his stores is secondary to how he does it. It’s as if he squirts hot dogs on his ketchup and mustard.

What Ganon does is pick suppliers he’ll never know to ship products he’ll never touch. All his effort goes into creating ads to capture prospective customers, and then optimizing a digital environment that encourages them to buy whatever piece of crap he’s put in front of them.

And he is not alone.

In this special HQ Troll Edition, hear Rogowsky ask no questions and instead answer his trolls and fans’ most pressing questions, like whether he’s their daddy. 

This provides the leagues opportunities to swindle the tech companies for a while longer, an example being the rights to stream Thursday Night Football, which a series of tech companies from Yahoo to Twitter to Amazon have (probably) overpaid for the last few seasons. As Patrick Stewart said in L.A. Story, “You think with a statement like this you can have the duck?!” The chef says, “He can have the chicken!” Thursday Night Football is zee chicken of the NFL broadcast portfolio, but the restaurant is still called L'Idiot.

This happened for tech companies when they tried to add film and television to their portfolio, too. They routinely paid fortunes for the rights to back seasons of shows that are no longer relevant anymore. When I was at Hulu, I could only shake my head when I heard the asking price for all the back seasons of Seinfeld. Years later, long after I’d left, Hulu paid multiples of that. The cultural decay curve for content in this age of abundance is accelerating by the day, and there is no equivalent of botox to ward it off.

Given market feedback, however, such temporary arbitrage never lasts long. The days of the NFL strong-arming its partners to overpay for the most meager of rights are coming to an end. The thing about setting up a moat around your content is that the moment your cultural value crosses its peak, the moat becomes a set of prison bars. The flywheel loop can turn just as furiously counter-clockwise as clockwise.

Snapchat has been incredibly impactful on culture. From impermanent content to vertical video, popularizing augmented reality and bringing on the age of visual communication, Speigel’s ideas have redefined the way we share. Unfortunately, Snapchat hasn’t been able to capture much of the monetary benefits of those inventions as they get cloned elsewhere.

The popularity of Snapchat messaging amongst western teenagers means it won’t disappear overnight. But it may be time for it and the world to face the fact that Snapchat could be world-changing product without ever becoming a world-dominating business.

As first reported by People yesterday, actress Meghan Markle has axed her personal Instagram and Twitter accounts ahead of her planned wedding to Prince Harry later this year. The move puts her in line with the rest of Britain’s royal family, whose social media presence is limited to tidy official group accounts. But here’s a lifehack Big Like doesn’t want you to know: Even filthy commoners like us can quit this shit for good.

We all know Twitter is a platform filled with abuse, harassment, and other modern nightmares, but it seems the people at the top are finally listening to our desperate pleas for change. Behold, Twitter posted actual evidence of its commitment to change today as part of a safety rollout: known Mario antagonizer Waluigi has been Dealt With.