influence

Last year when Facebook FB -6.77% blocked news in Australia in response to potential legislation making platforms pay publishers for content, it also took down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services and charities. It publicly called the resulting chaos “inadvertent.”Internally, the pre-emptive strike was hailed as a strategic masterstroke. Facebook documents and testimony filed to U.S. and Australian authorities by whistleblowers allege that…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Our language is changing constantly. Researchers of the University of Vienna found that, over centuries, frequently occurring speech sound patterns get even more frequent. The reason for this development is that our brain can perceive, process and learn frequent, and thus prototypical sound patterns more easily than less frequent ones. The results of the study were published in the journal…

The rapid rise of the Twitter account Accidentally Based surprised even the person who created it. One of many so-called gimmick accounts, Accidentally Based was started as a left-wing response to conservative meme accounts that the creator noticed tended to grow quickly. Just a month after making Accidentally Based, the account had 100,000 followers, the owner estimates, and was getting retweeted by Twitter users with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. What began as an experiment soon proved to be a…