The Facebook experiment that's rocking Serbia [The Interface]

Promising to remove verification badges from accounts that violate Twitter’s rules will likely create a thicket of tricky editorial decisions for a company that has historically prided itself on free speech. It remains to be seen how Twitter navigates the verification battles to come — and whether de-verifying accounts has any effect on reducing harassment and abuse on the platform.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.

One of the accounts run from the Kremlin-linked operation attempted to stir anti-Islamic sentiment during the Westminster Bridge terror attack in March in a bogus post claiming a Muslim woman ignored victims – a claim that was highlighted by mainstream media outlets including Mail Online and the Sun.

Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who backed Donald Trump’s presidential run, gave $300,000 to a political campaign of Josh Hawley, the Missouri attorney general who opened an antitrust investigation into Google this week.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was surprised at the extent of the opioid crisis. But Facebook is filled with illegal opioid ads.

It’s trivially easy to find sexual comments on videos of children exercising, going for a day at the beach, or trying the ice bucket challenge. Often these videos are uploaded by the children themselves. Google requires that YouTube users are either 18 years old, or at least 13, with a parent or guardian’s permission. In practice, those age restrictions are not always enforced.

Most concerning are the instances where commenters reach out for direct contact. One, posted on another gymnastics video of a young girl, offered a phone number to text. The comment was posted about 10 months ago. Below the video were other predatory comments. Others chimed in to denounce those commenters, and cited the work of a YouTube personality who had made some of the original claims about predatory commenters on the platform. The video had almost 1.5 million views, and it’s not difficult to find other, similar videos with hundreds of thousands of views, in several languages

In Lies, you first upload your contacts, and then take a Tinder-style profile quiz where you swipe yes or no about questions about yourself. Then you’re given tbh-style four-choice questions about friends with the goal of correctly guessing which tribia tidbit about them is true. The statements range from “I’ve gone skinny dipping” to “I’m afraid of crowds” to “I’ve kissed someone on the first date”.

When friends answer questions about you, you get notified. “This game ends friendships” it declares, as you might learn who doesn’t really know you or thinks the worst about you.

Snap’s pivot is more than a necessary business move. It’s an indictment of our current tech landscape, and a warning sign for other start-ups hoping to take on the largest internet companies on their own terms. If a wildly creative company with an app used by 178 million people every day can still be crushed by Facebook, how is anyone supposed to succeed?

“Eventually, when you’re filtered out all of what Filloux calls biases, you’ve filtered out all of the tools readers and publications already use to determine the quality of a news story. You’ve undone all the institutional work.

To me, this suggests something that might be unsettling: we don’t actually know what premium content is.”

The Social Edge founder and COO Jay Kuo wrote in a Medium post in May that one publisher working with Takei generally yields more than 2 million views per post. Mic saw an average of 1 million page views for posts shared on Takei’s Facebook page, and paid 1 cent per page view, Tase said. 

As of Tuesday, Slate, Upworthy, GOOD, Futurism, Refinery29 and Mic have made arrangements to no longer have their articles and videos shared on Takei’s Facebook page, the companies confirmed.