Kevin Systrom very nearly tells the truth

Facebook instituted a global ban on false information about when and where to vote in 2016, but Monday’s move goes further, including posts about exaggerated identification requirements, or statements about conditions at polling sites that might deter people from showing up to vote, such as hours-long waits or violence.

Facebook executives are also debating whether to follow Twitter Inc’s recent policy change to ban posts linking to hacked material, Gleicher told Reuters in an interview.

While Facebook took down the official accounts of senior Myanmar military leaders in August, the breadth and details of the propaganda campaign — which was hidden behind fake names and sham accounts — went undetected. The campaign, described by five people who asked for anonymity because they feared for their safety, included hundreds of military personnel who created troll accounts and news and celebrity pages on Facebook and then flooded them with incendiary comments and posts timed for peak viewership.

Working in shifts out of bases clustered in foothills near the capital, Naypyidaw, officers were also tasked with collecting intelligence on popular accounts and criticizing posts unfavorable to the military, the people said. So secretive were the operations that all but top leaders had to check their phones at the door.

The contract is massive in scope and shrouded in secrecy, which makes it nearly impossible to know what we as workers would be building. At an industry day for JEDI, DoD Chief Management Officer John H. Gibson II explained the program’s impact, saying, “We need to be very clear. This program is truly about increasing the lethality of our department.”

Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of “empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,” not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. 

The dashboard looks for trends in hateful activity through a sample of 1,000 Twitter accounts that the groups say show “hateful content directed against protected groups.” According to the project methodology, researchers selected 40 accounts that showed hateful conduct, and then algorithmically generated a larger dataset of related accounts.

By crunching data from the Twitter accounts, the groups say, researchers can take the pulse of online hate in real time, then relay information on trending topics and sources of discussion. As of Monday afternoon, trending hashtags included both the innocuous, like #midterms2018, and the troubling, like references to the conspiracy #qanon. Top keyword terms seemed to focus on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA ancestry test. The top source referenced in the tweets was YouTube.

Thirty-nine of the 75 fascist activists we studied credit the Internet with their red-pilling. YouTube seems to be the single most frequently discussed website. The specific videos credited, however, span a multitude of creators, from British YouTuber Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) to Infowars founder Alex Jones.

Only 47 percent of Americans are somewhat confident they can identify social media bots from real humans. In contrast, most Americans surveyed in a study about fake news were confident they could identify false stories.

The Pew study is an uncommon look at what the average person thinks about these automated accounts that plague social media platforms. After surveying over 4,500 adults in the US, Pew found that most people actually don’t know much about bots. Two-thirds of Americans have at least heard of social media bots, but only 16 percent say they’ve heard a lot about them, while 34 percent say they’ve never heard of them at all. The knowledgeable tend to be younger, and men are more likely than women (by 22 percentage points) to say they’ve heard of bots. Since the survey results are self-reported, there’s a chance people are overstating or understating their knowledge of bots.

“I intend to use the sauna on the weekends, and I always forget.”

Hundreds of LinkedIn engineers were left with the question, “How did that just happen?” That site issue was the worst I’ve ever seen at LinkedIn in my 3-and-a-half years at the company. No one was able to reach any url that had linkedin.com in it for 1 hour and 12 minutes, resulting in many of our millions of users unable to reach the site. After a few hours of investigation, we realized what the root cause of the issue was: me.

This week, the company held its inaugural developer conference, to try to entice third-party creators, and to introduce the gear to a wider audience. In many ways, this is the final stage of the product’s public debut. In 2015, Abovitz told Wired, “When we launch it, it is going to be huge.” After spending two days at LEAPcon, I feel it is my duty—in the name of instilling a modicum of sanity into an age where a company that has never actually sold a product to a consumer can be worth a billion dollars more than the entire GDP of Fiji—to inform you that it is not.

How’s Houseparty doing? Rubin acknowledged that the company is growing more slowly than other social networks at their peak. But the unchecked growth of social networks has had serious consequences around the world, he said. “We have millions of people come every day and have fun conversations with people they care about and have a good time,” Rubin said. “Shouldn’t we just continue to build?”

Houseparty’s initial growth was sufficient to spook Facebook, which built a clone called Bonfire that it began testing in the Netherlands in September 2017. But more than a year later, it has yet to launch in the United States. An upside of Houseparty’s relatively slow growth is that giants are less likely to come after it.

Translating the essence of who you are into a digestible product is a strange way to live, especially when you’re a young adult and your sense of self is in flux. It was never my main intention to peddle my personality for a living, but in the era of social media, the personal brand reigns supreme; self-commodification was an inevitable outcome for a young writer like myself—extremely online, comfortable with confessing her most deranged impulses to a large audience, and looking for affirmation and love.

Translating the ups and downs of my existence into my personal brand was a way of life for me. The more I viewed my life as something to be consumed by other people, capitalizing on all the pain and pleasure and resentment and fear that come along with being alive, the more compulsively I posted. My way of being online was always unsustainable, and each time I couldn’t sustain it any longer, I shed my skin, and evolved into a slightly more adept version of myself.